REBOOTED MINDSET

EPISODE#47 - Exploring Traditional Societies: A New Perspective on Parenting and Child Development

• ALIDA HERNANDEZ • Season 2 • Episode 47

Share episode

Send us a text

Diving deep into the realm of global parenting, we're thrilled to share with you our enlightening discussion with Cornelius Grove. An author and ethnologist, Cornelius opens a new window into the fascinating realities of child-rearing in five traditional societies without schools. Remember, it's not just about schooling; it's about moulding the future, and these societies offer a unique perspective on it.

Ever wondered why children in traditional Indian societies are more adept at household chores? We explore this and more as Cornelius leads us through the intricacies of child development in these societies. We touch upon the crucial role of mothers, and the physical environment, as well as the indispensable role of extended families. Moving away from the norms of modern societies, we delve deep into the shared responsibilities of traditional families in teaching morals and manners to children.

As we navigate our way through the complexities of parenting, we unearth the concept of Learning By Observation and Pitching In (LOPI). A rather effective technique in traditional societies, LOPI is a stark contrast to the individualistic values of modern societies. And here's the crux - even as we shift towards individualistic values, family farms in traditional societies continue to offer rich learning opportunities. So, as we close this episode, it's time to question - what can we, as modern parents, learn from these traditional societies to aid our children's growth in this rapidly changing world? This episode promises to stir thought, incite curiosity and perhaps, even inspire a change in perspective. Tune in!

Amazon link: https://www.amazon.com/Other-Children-Learn-Cornelius-Grove/dp/147587118X

How Other Children Learn: What Five Traditional Societies Tell Us about Parenting and Children’s Learning
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group
ISBN-10: ‎ 147587118X
ISBN-13: ‎ 978-1475871180
Available from Amazon.com and BN.com
***
Website:www.rebootedthepodcast.com

iTunes Link:https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/rebooted-the-podcast/id1619179104?

Other Relevant Links:Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/rebootedthepodcast
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/rebootedthepodcast/
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@RebootedthePodcast/
Spotify:  https://open.spotify.com/show/0VwEsci3xznMZe88lES3BQ
Buzzsprout:  https://www.buzzsprout.com/?referrer_id=1865479
Want to create live streams like this? Check out StreamYard: https://streamyard.com/pal/d/54467768.

All rights reserved. Copyrights (c) Nuestro Magazine Corp. aka Rebooted Mindset

**Note: We have rebranded "Rebooted the Podcast" changed to "Rebooted Mindset"


Buzzsprout - Let's get your podcast launched!
Start for FREE

Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you.

Speaker 1:

Hi, welcome to Rebooted Mindset, formerly Rebooted the Podcast. I'm your host, alita Hernandez. Come join me every Wednesday and Sunday afternoon at 2.30 pm Eastern time to hear real-life conversations with experts around the world on how we can heal our body, mind, soul and spirit. So let's get talking. Hi everybody, alita Hernandez here Rebooted the Podcast, and Simon O'Tellis C will be aired on Western Magazine as well. I am here today with another fabulous guest, cornelius Grove, an educator and author of an Authority of Parenting Children Across Cultures. So it just sparked my interest, seeing that I'm bicultural. Somebody told me that the other day, you know, because I'm Puerto Rican first-generation, born in New York, and we're also Americans, so we're not multicultural but bicultural. So there's differences on, you know, raising children and everything like that. So I'm curious on your take on this.

Speaker 2:

Well, hello, alita. I'm glad to be here today. Thank you, I'm talking to you from Brooklyn, new York.

Speaker 1:

Yeah.

Speaker 2:

Where are you?

Speaker 1:

I'm in Fort Lodoto, florida, right now.

Speaker 2:

Oh boy, I bet it's hot down there.

Speaker 1:

Oh, yes, it is.

Speaker 2:

It's also hot up here.

Speaker 1:

It's hot everywhere. Yeah, I'm originally from New York. I left in 1987 from New York, so I've been gone for a long time.

Speaker 2:

It's a great place to be, I think, New York. That's just my opinion.

Speaker 1:

Right. We all say that when we move to the left, oh Okay.

Speaker 2:

So I was just turning up the volume so I could hear you a little bit better.

Speaker 1:

Oh, okay, no problem. So you're an educator, I see, and you have been teaching high school.

Speaker 2:

How far are we going back? I taught high school in the mid-1960s.

Speaker 1:

Oh, wow.

Speaker 2:

I haven't taught high school since then. I've done some university teaching at Columbia University and at the New School University. They're both here in New York and at Beijing Foreign Studies University, which is in, of course, beijing, china. You said that I'm an educator and I am an educator. I don't disavow that at all. My doctorate is in education. But these days I prefer to say that it's more accurate to say that I am an ethnologist.

Speaker 2:

Now, it's easy to get ethnologist mixed up with ethologists. There's just one letter difference. An ethologist is a scholar who studies animals. Okay, I'm very pro-animal, but that's not what I am. An ethnologist is a scholar who compares and contrasts cultures, and that's basically what I have been doing as an author and as a scholar for well over 10, 12 years now.

Speaker 2:

My previous two books, all of my recent books, are published by Roman and Littlefield. My previous two books very squarely compared the cultures of East Asia, that's, china, japan, taiwan, korea, hong Kong and so forth, with American culture with respect to children's learning in school. Well, it's not that those two books are closely related to each other. I call them sister books. Those are not the books we're here to talk about today, but I'm ready to talk about them anytime. So both of those books were very, very squarely about what goes on in classrooms and how that might be how our experience here in the United States might be improved in terms of how well our students learn in school classrooms and how well they retain what they do learn.

Speaker 2:

But for this book that we're here to talk about today and that's this book here I decided I wanted to take a break from looking at school classrooms by the way, I'm working on my fifth book now and I'm right back into school classrooms but so my break lasted there about three years. I wanted to see what was going on with children and parents in societies in which there are no schools or in which schools are just beginning to be introduced, and so that's what this book is about. We're looking at children about. Just about everything goes gone with children in these five traditional societies, other than that they go to school, because either just a few of them go to school or there aren't even any schools anywhere nearby.

Speaker 2:

And they couldn't possibly go to school.

Speaker 1:

And you believe that that it's 2013 and there's still places that have no schools?

Speaker 2:

Quite a few. So maybe I should tell you the five societies that I looked at. Now let me just say that. So the question arises well, how did you decide which traditional societies to look at? Yes, I don't know if I actually said these are I looked at.

Speaker 2:

So I looked at what's generally known as traditional societies, also sometimes known as indigenous societies. Okay, 40, 50 years ago we probably wouldn't have blushed to refer to them as primitive, or at least one or two of them. But we don't do that anymore because that has overtones that really aren't accurate and that are prejudicial in some ways. So we don't use that word anymore. Traditional is a much more respectful term, and indigenous, of course, has a specific meaning that they were always there. I've been there for not just decades, but hundreds, maybe even thousands of years. So the five traditional society that I looked at oh, I was going to say how I chose them.

Speaker 2:

Well, first of all, I want to be clear that I did not go to these societies myself and visit them and have a look. I didn't have to do that because anthropologists have already done that. In particular, I'm interested in a field of anthropology that's generally known as the anthropology of childhood, so I had to choose societies that were traditional or indigenous, on the one hand, and also in which anthropologists of childhood had gone and lived there and done their research, which is generally known as participant observation. That means that they basically show up and move in and they live there and they get involved and they make friends and they learn how to do. You know, one of the most difficult things, certainly from my perspective, is they learn the language. Sometimes they're able to learn these languages to fluency before they get there, but other times no. So that's a huge thing, at least from my language challenge brain. I have great respect for that Do?

Speaker 1:

you speak one language only.

Speaker 2:

Well, I've studied. I did my doctoral dissertation. I did a great deal of it in Portuguese. In those days, which is quite a few years ago now, my wife and I had lived in Portugal and we had studied Portuguese, and so I was able to do quite a bit of the interviewing, although this was all in the United States, in Massachusetts, where there are a lot of Portuguese people.

Speaker 2:

I was able to interview students and parents and schools administrators and teachers when they prefer to speak Portuguese. I was able to interview them in Portuguese and those interviews were sometimes quite long. But when it came time for those interviews to be transcribed because I had recorded them, that was really beyond me. I hired a real and actual, truly bilingual person to do the transfer. I also have spoken a little Chinese. I've also spoken a little Spanish, oh, and it took three years of German in college. So I'm not unfamiliar with languages, but right now I have to say right now I'm monolingual. But I think if I moved back to Portugal or Brazil, I'd begin picking it up pretty quickly.

Speaker 1:

Right, the immersion when you immerse yourself in the language. That's the only way you don't have any choice Exactly.

Speaker 2:

You want to get your breakfast. You got to ask for it. So I had to find, anyway, I had to find five societies in which anthropologists of childhood specifically of childhood had been there, lived there and come back when I say lived there, sometimes for more than a year, and then come back and written about it in books and in journal articles. And I had to be sure that the five societies that I wanted to deal with in this book, that I had sufficient information, not just one anthropologist, I had to have several. All right, I didn't want to rely entirely on one, so the so, and, as good fortune had it, I found five, and each one is on a different continent.

Speaker 2:

So the first one I want to mention and is, you know, the first of the five chapters is the Aukka hunter-gatherers of Central Africa. These are hunter-gatherers. This is pretty seriously traditional. No schools anywhere. They live in the forests of Africa and you know, you might say the jungle, and it's a very, very different life than what you or I, or probably anybody listening to this program, have ever lived. Certainly applies to me. I mean, I was a boy scout, but that has nothing.

Speaker 1:

It has nothing on them, that's for sure. They're out there with the little little outfits and the spears right and they're out there like well, when they go hunting they have some spears.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, that's true.

Speaker 2:

And so the second society was the Ketchuas of the high Andes in Peru, and the picture on the cover of the book is of three Ketchua girls. That was taken by an anthropologist who spent many, many, many months with the Ketchua. They live at an altitude of 12,000 to 16,000 feet, and things are pretty barren up there, you know. So they got to worry about getting breakfast, lunch and dinner as well. So where does that come from? The third one that I want to mention is be more familiar to at least a name to most of your listeners, I would think and that's the Navajos of our own Southwest. A great deal of anthropological attention has been paid to the Navajos. The fourth one is the village Arabs of the Levant. Now, I know that not all of your listeners are going to immediately know what I mean about when I say the Levant. The Levant refers to, if you can imagine in your mind's eye where Israel and Palestine and Lebanon and Syria are. Well, that's basically the Levant, the eastern end of the Mediterranean. And now the people? In that case, they were living in houses in small villages, but they were the heirs of the Bedouin nomads. The Bedouin nomads are another fascinating group and I really had hoped excuse me that I could find enough anthropological studies of children among the Bedouin nomads that I could make the nomads themselves the subject of this chapter, but that was not possible. However, these people that I did look at, who have been studied quite often, are the heirs of the nomads and they maintain many of their traditions.

Speaker 2:

And the fifth group is the Hindu villagers of India. Now, india is a very, very multicultural place. When we hear about India in the news, we are hearing mostly about big things. They do a lot of work in computers and plenty of India is highly urbanized. But there certainly are parts of India, many parts of India, where people are still living a traditional lifestyle. They are not living in urban areas by any means. They're in small towns out far from the urban centers and they have been very heavily studied by anthropologists. The children and the parents have all been very heavily studied. So those are the five societies that I looked at.

Speaker 1:

So what were you looking for? These different societies, these five societies you were trying to find out a difference in between how they're learning versus American learning? Is that?

Speaker 2:

Well, I just said, look here's. Here are five societies in which the children either don't go to school at all. Their parents, the older people in these societies almost 100% have never been in a classroom as a student. So you have a society that still remains largely illiterate. That is beginning to change. We all tend to think that's a good thing, but after you look at five societies like I did, you begin to say, well, this is a very mixed thing. Literacy is good in some ways and in other ways we have to think about it.

Speaker 2:

Anyway, I wanted to see what was going on. I'm not sure I went in with a. Yes, I was under contract with a publisher who published a great deal for educators, and I am an educator, and so I wanted to look at education. But here's the interesting thing Education, the real meaning of education, does not mean schooling.

Speaker 2:

Education is a much, much broader term. That means child socialization, child children growing up. How do children growing up become adults? Think of all the things that they need to be able to do, learn how to do as they get older and older and older all kinds of social norms and values and expectations that people have in a traditional society. It's extremely important that they are able to contribute, to contribute their labor and their knowledge and their expertise to simply having enough food on the table, day after day, month after month, season after season. I think this is one of the things that really impressed me about traditional societies, and that is so, so different from our society. We just nip out to the supermarket, pick up what we need, come back home, it's in the fridge, it's in the pantry, we're done. I mean, we have to prepare it.

Speaker 1:

Right. But we have a lot of convenience. We have so much convenience.

Speaker 2:

And when you get into traditional societies, like I did in order to write this book, I just so impressed with the incredible comfort and convenience that we have in our society.

Speaker 1:

So I tell you. So I was raised. In the summer I was in Puerto Rico. My grandparents were living there. So as a little child after my parents got divorced, I would spend three months of the year there. I lived in New York City and then I spent my summers in the country, in Puerto Rico. So talk about two different ends of culture. So first started going there. It was rough because I'm a city girl right, I'm a city girl. I have supermarket, I have. So now I'm in the country.

Speaker 1:

So now I learned. So I learned a lot of things since I was alone during the day with my grandmother. She had a farm. I used to feed the chickens, I used to take care of the, to get the eggs from the chickens in the morning, go pick up fruit from all the trees that we had. And even till this day it has molded me who I am, because I walk around South Florida and it's mango season. I'm picking mangoes off the trees and coconuts. I'm coming home with a backpack. You know I look what I got like. I went foraging in the forest, you know.

Speaker 2:

Well, this, this is a great example. This is a great example because one of the thing that really stands out about children in traditional cultures is that even at a very young age, they begin to assist and support the family in getting the food it's needing, storing the food it's needing and in other ways, helping to take responsibility for the survival and even the thriving of the family. And that is such an important thing to look at and understand that I devoted an entire chapter to it. You know American parents, I would imagine I've read accounts from other cultures too, like one sticks in my mind, from Italy, for example, another highly industrialized, technological culture. Parents have a lot of trouble getting their children to pitch in to assist around the house. Well, you know what Traditional parents don't. Now, why is that? So I, I, you would have asked me this eventually, but the question arises well, what can we, what can we? Look at these traditional societies and copy and bring into our society, and my answer is generally nothing. There's much more to say about nothing, but there is one thing that, and the reason there's nothing is because the circumstances in which they live are so utterly different from ours, and the not, not just the physical. You know what they look at when they look out the door of their house, but even the way the families are structured, and this is something that you might be able to relate to as well in your own experience. So what, what? What happens with the children as a generalization and I emphasize to you and to your listeners that I'm very aware that I'm speaking in generalizations and not every single traditional society is exactly like this Nevertheless, you look at a lot of traditional societies and I've read, as I was getting ready to write this book, I read many other things that were about societies other than these five, and I read things that anthropologists had written in general about traditional societies, and you can generalize to a considerable extent.

Speaker 2:

What happened as a generalization is that when a child is born and until it's weaned, it receives incredibly intense attention from its mother. The father isn't usually involved so much there are exceptions to that but the mother, you know the child is pretty much with the mother, 24, seven, nursing on demand, etc. Etc. But when nursing is over, something happens which just doesn't happen in our society. At that point, the parent's attitude is it's not my job to raise this child, not up to me. Well, okay, who is it then? The answer is this Another very common is that the child is given to the next oldest sibling.

Speaker 2:

The next oldest sibling girls preferred or a cousin is responsible for the child, not just sort of responsible, while the parent runs off to the supermarket, not as a babysitter, but as the 24 seven responsible party for this child's welfare we're talking about, if they have diapers, changing diapers, cleaning bottoms, putting down for naps or you know, just whatever. Whatever's going on, and whatever's going on isn't necessarily like what's going on in our society. The other thing that happens and these two things can happen together is that the child becomes a member of the children's group of the small town or settlement or camp where this family and some other families live, and the children form a group, a mixed age, mixed sex group that has the run of the area. Are they supervised by your? Many of your listeners will want to know. Well, they have the run of the area.

Speaker 2:

What happens here to the adults? Do the adults take turns? You know looking out for these people, and sure they're safe? No, they don't worry about them. Well, what about? These aren't? What about if the kid picks up a knife or gets too close to the fire. It's not the adults concern. The children have to learn this on their own. Maybe their sibling, you know, gives them some advice, or maybe they just learn. I mean, there's accounts in the literature of children, you know, 14, 15 months old using quite a large knife to get some food off a branch, or something like that.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I've seen that on YouTube. I've seen all the cultures that the children are Like. There's one online that is a little Asian boy and he's cooking and he must be three years old or four and he's see him cooking on the block and he's I mean, he did a whole meal.

Speaker 2:

Yeah.

Speaker 1:

Like adults, don't know how to cook.

Speaker 2:

Well, the adults know how to cook, but they. This is one of the ways in which he is contributing to the welfare of the family, and contributing in very meaningful ways, in ways that are useful, in ways that take the burden off the adults. Here's the really interesting thing about, here's the really interesting difference and I didn't discover this, but I certainly saw examples of it in you know, as I was learning about these five societies. In American society and other highly industrialized western societies, the benefits flow from the parents to the children. We give children things, we give them toys, we give them protection, we give them a place to live, we give them a room of their own. If we're one of the cultures which we think, children have to have a room of their own, by the way, that's rather unusual when you look at all cultures.

Speaker 2:

So the practical benefits flow from the parents to the children. The children are on the receiving end. The parents are putting out time, energy, money and anxiety to see that this child grows up content and happy and has a good childhood, and so forth and so on. Give, give, give, give, give. It's just the reverse. In traditional societies, the benefits flow from the children to the parents. Why is this? Because to raise their own food and do everything that needs to be done to ensure the security and the sustenance of the family and maybe even a little bit more than just sustenance everybody's labor is needed. Every able-bodied person needs to contribute to this, beginning as soon as a child is able to title forward. So what in the world can a child do when they're just just after they've learned to walk? They may not even be weaned yet, because they do Right.

Speaker 1:

Yeah.

Speaker 2:

A child family is getting up in the morning. Somebody is building a fire. We got to have wood for the fire, right? That toddler is capable of going over there and picking up some twigs that are laying on the ground and bringing them for the fire. Responsibility number one Aged grandparent not able to get about so much anymore. He looks thirsty. A very small child is capable of getting a cup of some kind, putting water in it and taking it to grandpa.

Speaker 1:

That's true.

Speaker 2:

Right, we're talking about very young children and, yes, they take so one of my favorite stories. I really treasure this story, even though it wasn't it didn't happen to me, but I read about it and I know the anthropologist who told this story. So this is the anthropologist that look at the Ketchua Highlanders in Peru. And when she first got there she was politely brought into a hut and the family was the parents, I guess, and maybe the grandparents or whoever was there was busy doing some things so that she could be properly welcomed. I guess they were, I don't know. They were making tea or I don't really know what they were doing, but they were busy and there was a three year old girl. The three year old girl, without any prompting, went and got two cups, filled them with water, came back to the anthropologist, handed her one cup and welcomed her. When people drink together like that, they have, you know, there's a ritual saying that they share, and she said that ritual saying and, three years old, she took responsibility for welcoming the guest properly at age three.

Speaker 1:

We need to teach our American kids to do that, please, yeah.

Speaker 2:

Well, you know what? We're so busy giving them things and making sure they have fun.

Speaker 1:

We don't teach them? Huh, we don't. We're not teaching, we're just giving. See, like my family, we were raised from the Spanish side of it, right, so we're raised both English and Spanish, but we always had things to do. We were responsible for our own bed, or responsible for our clothes, or make sure your shoes are clean. You know, we just started with responsibilities.

Speaker 1:

I've been cooking since I was 11 years old. I've been cooking. I learned how to cook for my grandmother and now I cook for my mother, Right? So you know, this is the traditions, like you're saying, traditions that we had, that we, generation over generation, even though they assimilated, right, because they came from the island to New York, but, and they assimilated, but there was still family traditions that they taught us. So, you know, and I taught my kids how to clean, like they cleaned their own bathroom, they know how to make their bed, you know just different things. So I used to tell them all the time, because I was, I was, I was married for a period of time and then I, then I was, I had raised them single, as a single mother.

Speaker 1:

You know, their father was involved, but still, I was home with two kids by myself. It wasn't easy, so it was like everybody has to pitch in. I'm like you go clean this bathroom, you go do that. I showed them how to do it. They're like okay, mommy, you know, and they would help me, I'm going to clean the dining room table. So I engaged them in life.

Speaker 2:

Well, you, you and your own experience as a child and as a single parent have have picked up on some of the things that I like to point out from my reading and writing this book, and that's sort of what my chapter on responsibility is about, and that is, you know, if you want your. So here's what I, here's what happens, I think, in many of American families. They're giving, giving the, giving their children things and experiences and making sure they have fun and making sure they're well fed and worrying about them and protecting them. And this is pretty much 24, seven, unless they get a babysitter for a little while. And then the child is growing up and things get even busier. Maybe there's another child, maybe the you know, one of the parents or both of the parents has more demanding job, which is great because they bring in more money, blah, blah, blah, and things get kind of frantic in the household. And so you have this 13 year old kid and the parents thinking, oh, how am I going to all these things that need to do? Oh, you know what she could help out here. She could take out the garbage, she could, you know, put the dishes away.

Speaker 2:

And what many parents find out about at that point is the child doesn't want to do it. Well, why they don't have any experience, they've just continually been given things. Here's the thing about traditional parents for traditional families, not just parents. Traditional families need children. They need them. American parents love children and so do traditional parents. Traditional parents need children in practical, real life ways. American parents don't. But we just give, give, give. And another thing that traditional parents need is when they get older and they begin to come, become infirm and not be able to contribute so much they need the children to take care of them.

Speaker 1:

Exactly.

Speaker 2:

Well, we've institutionalized that in our society, haven't we? We would go off to yeah, we don't want to. I mean, we don't want to trouble our children, we want to. Well a lot of children.

Speaker 1:

A lot of children don't even want to take care of their parents. So another example my grandmother. We took care of grandma. She died at home at 90. And right now my mother's 85,. My aunt is 83, they both have memory issues. During 2020, we all I moved in with them at the house. We have enough room. We all live together and I have a business do this the podcast and I still take care of my mother and my aunt.

Speaker 2:

That's great. So so your, your lifestyle is closer to your sort of you know, your, your, your your sort of an amalgam of modern industrial, technological society and you definitely have elements of traditional values and traditional family structure. Yeah, you know one of the big, big differences between American, typical American families and you're, you are not necessarily so typical.

Speaker 2:

One of the big differences is that in traditional families and indigenous families, these are what are known as extended families, and the way you've been talking, I would say that you also, your family, is much more like an extended family, meaning that there are several generations. So in a typical traditional family, extended family, you have children, you have parents, you have aunts, uncles, cousins all over the place. They tend to have a lot of children. Hey, they need them, they have a lot of them and their grandparents, as long as they survive, and this is a unit. And so, whereas we live when I I don't know, we have to be careful because you're, you're in, you're in both.

Speaker 1:

That's why I have a mix I have. That's why I said I'm bicultural.

Speaker 2:

Yeah.

Speaker 1:

Even though I was born in New York city, I'm an American right.

Speaker 2:

And.

Speaker 1:

I was raised with American traditions, things like that, and our family was very. It was very important for my grandmother to make sure that the traditions from the family kept going to generation to generation. So, like I kept the cooking, I do Puerto Rican, authentic Puerto Rican cooking. I do my grandmother's recipes. I've altered them to make them. Sometimes I make vegan stuff now, you know, but I still have the same spices and so I've changed them up to make them healthier now. But so I've adapted that, but I still do that.

Speaker 1:

And my son, who's 23, works as a general manager at a restaurant and he's cooking also, and I saw him the other day and I said, oh, he goes. Oh, my, I cook in the back when we have to, when the lion is busy, and I'm like look at him going, wow, I didn't so my influence in him, because he would cook with me when he was little. He goes Mama, how do I make that? How do I make rice and beans? How do I do this? So he would watch me in the kitchen and I would help him. I would help. Okay, you can bring the chicken cutlets or you can do this. So they would always help me in that. So I just kept bringing that culture, the stuff that grandma taught me, because I was braised with both grandparents.

Speaker 2:

So, alita, you just in passing, you brought up another very important point about the thing that really made a big impression on me in this book, and this has been a matter of great interest to anthropologists as well. So the question is how do traditional children learn? No schools, so how do they learn? I just said the parents, as a generalization. The parents think it's not my responsibility to raise them. They give them to an older sibling, send them to be with the children's group. Is this considered to be a dereliction of parental duty? No, this is how these societies do things. But so well, how are the children so?

Speaker 2:

Oh, one thing I should just caveat here is that one thing that traditional parents do take responsibility for is manners and morals. This they care about. Now the kids are also. Probably. The children are probably also getting it from the other children. But this is particularly important because you know and I would imagine in your own experience this is true you know the older people get a lot of respect and we have to show them respect. Well, how do you do that? You know, sometimes this involves some ritual behaviors, things that you really need to say, and you know, I know, in some traditional families the older people eat first and then everybody else eats. You know, there's all kinds of raised.

Speaker 1:

We were always we, you know, like I used to say, when we used to go somewhere, we had the little discussion before we left the house. So it was grandma would say, okay, we're going to so and so's house. You know the rules you behave, you know no screaming, you know polite. So usually we would come and they're like, oh, your kids are so well behaved. I'm like, yeah, because they taught us that we respect somebody else's house. You don't touch anything that's not yours. I don't expect the people of the house like certain guidelines and I did that to my kids as well. I would tell my kids to do this or do not do that, and so on.

Speaker 2:

Well, traditional parents, just as in your experience, do tend to care a lot about their children learning manners and morals, but beyond that, as a big generalization, they don't pay very much attention. They don't protect them, they don't give them stuff, they don't. Kids have the run of the camp with the other children all all day long, do they do they take turns looking out for them and being sure that Tiger isn't going to pounce on them from the forest? No, they don't. The children, the children, take care of themselves.

Speaker 1:

It's like. It's like growing up in New York. When we grew up, you know, like in the 70s in New York, as you know a whole different generation we used to go to the park. We used to get scraped up and get all roughed up because you're playing in the asphalt and everything, and our parents didn't go with us to the park. We used to go to the park with our friends, but other parents knew the kids Like everybody knew everybody in the neighborhood. So if Johnny did something wrong, you know, mary's parents would scold Johnny and then go to your house and tell him I scolded him because he did this. Okay, and then they would scold him again. You know what I mean? I was saying like there was a you know everybody kind of took care of everybody.

Speaker 2:

So so I was. I was picking up on something that you said just in passing and you said, I believe, referring to your son, that he watched you cooking. This is the answer to how other children learn they watch, they observe. Then they try to do it themselves, privately or in groups of two or three, whatever it is, and this has been of great interest to scholars because this is how they learn, and it's actually been given a name. There's a scholar out in one of the universities in California that's taken a particular interest in this and she's come up with an acronym, lopi, that stands for learning by observation and pitching in, and traditional children learn an enormous amount, really pretty much everything they need to know. And so I can imagine people saying and I mean, I was a parent, my kids are all grown up and gone now, but, you know, lost my train of thought there.

Speaker 1:

So learning the LOPI? You were talking about the LOPI, about pitching in and how they do.

Speaker 2:

Anyway, I forgot where I was going with that, sorry, sorry, anyway. But the things they have to learn, which are myriad. We're not just talking about a few things how to boil an egg or how to bring a tweak for the fire. The things they have to learn are many. They require taking responsibility, but kids in every culture are able to learn this way, and they do learn this way Now. So what is the big difference?

Speaker 2:

The big difference is that we, our ancestors, began to change and we find ourselves now living in a highly industrialized, technological society, and the only way for children to survive in this society is by becoming literate, by becoming numerate, by learning the things that you need to know. These are academic things, these are technical things. You learn them in school. This kind of knowledge is not necessary in traditional societies. So the kids learn everything they need to know by LOPI learning, by observation and pitching in, and you can also think about trial and error.

Speaker 2:

But when they finally get around to trying to pitch in, they're generally welcomed, even though they're kind of bumbling and don't get things right, because, hey, they are needed. They are needed Now and again. You're really an example of this, I often say in almost all the interviews I give about this book I say you know, in American society, american middle class society, doesn't live that way anymore. But in the United States and in other developed countries as well, there is one type of family which in many ways is living a traditional lifestyle in which the children have these kinds of opportunities to watch, to learn, to pitch in, to take responsibility, to contribute, and I am talking about family farms that raise animals, and I think this is your experience.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, because that still goes on, like in the islands in Puerto Rico. It's not as much as it used to be, but there's still families still have farms and animals and livestock, basically, or just produce or food growing, which I love, so there's still some of that going on.

Speaker 2:

So in our society and in other Western European societies, you know, it's often said that these societies are highly individualistic. In other words, the fundamental value structure of the society puts emphasis on the individual and what they want and their aspirations and what they need. And I've gotten so aware of this that I hear commercials on the radio, I hear commercials on television sometimes, and they're just so heavily pitched to the individual. We take care of your needs, we understand you. Our hospital gets to know you or our bank gets to know you, just so we can do exactly what you want and need for your future. This is heavy, heavy value system of individualism.

Speaker 2:

But in a traditional society and in a extended family, that value system often is known as communitarian and the ethos of that kind of society, the value structure, is not what I want, is what I need. It's what I want is what we need. It's all about we and the real focus of that we is on the extended family. Now it's also on the community, maybe the larger polity, but the family, the extended family, is the thing. What I want is what we need.

Speaker 1:

That's unfortunate, because now I believe, at least my opinion, that our traditional families, that family has broken because a lot of people don't have grandparents around or people are having children later in life. But you're broken the tradition of having your grandparents and uncles. By the time you have a child they're already past. So I tell people I have my grandparents. They're like, oh, you're so lucky, I never met my grandparents. I actually met my great grandmother.

Speaker 2:

Oh, wow, and you remember that, and I remember that.

Speaker 1:

Yes. I was about seven or eight years old and I remember going to her house in Puerto Rico and, yeah, I can see her vividly, you know.

Speaker 2:

How old was she at the time?

Speaker 1:

I don't know. I probably. I mean she was up there. She was older. Well, I'm sure, I don't know, if she was in her 80s, maybe younger, because the people had children younger back then. So I don't, she could have been only 15 years older than my grandmother. You know what I mean. So I don't know. I know she had Alzheimer's or some kind of dementia, because she then recognized every day she would go who are you, who are you? And she's like I'm your daughter, I don't know you. You know like, and I would be like I'm your great-granddaughter, you know. So I remember those things too, but I'm just watching the time because I have another interview coming out soon, so I don't want to, but this has been an incredible conversation. Just quickly, because I have like five minutes left here. So, with all this research and this book, do you think that there's something we can do in our society today to help our children and our parents?

Speaker 2:

I think what reading my book, certainly researching and writing my book, but also, I certainly hope, reading my book, with the single exception of what we were talking about responsibility, where I think that, in order to have children who are willing and able to take responsibility, these parents need to start really young asking thing of children, asking them to do things, asking them to contribute. This is your experience growing up and, as I hear you explain, it's your children's experience growing up as well. Beyond that, I'm very loath to say yes, there's other things we can copy, because the circumstances, the physical, the ecological, the value systems in which they live, are so unlike ours. But what this does, I think one of the most important realizations I came up with, is that we really undervalue children. Children are able to do things, they are able to take responsibility, they are able to be a part of the group and make their contributions, even in major ways. I mean the catcher at age eight or nine, a child will be sent with the herd to the fields for the entire day. You know what that herd is to that family? That's their entire wealth in the care of a child –Bro Saturn 10. So I think it says to us do we need to?

Speaker 2:

Well, one of the things that I came up with and I think this might actually be original with me is I came up with this little saying middle class American parents parent as much as possible. Traditional parents parent as little as possible because the children take much more responsibility for themselves, they're contributing, and in so many ways. It's not that we can copy, but we can look at these things and say, wow, I mean, I put so much time and effort and we spend so much money and anxiety on parents and taking 24-7 responsibility for these children. Maybe we don't actually have to do all of this. Maybe there's some middle ground in here. I think what my book does is getting people to pause and say, well, let's step back and kind of look at the whole thing that's going on here and maybe we can't be just like them. That's out, except maybe for the responsibility bit. But we can rethink.

Speaker 1:

Re-evaluate.

Speaker 2:

Exactly.

Speaker 1:

And enable, and let your children enable themselves, that they have the capability. Like you're saying, a child has a brain and they're educated the same thing. I mean people train their dogs to do tricks and do things, so I mean your children are capable here. Johnny, take a glass of water, put it in the sink, let's clean up. I used to do that with my kids. Come on, we're cleaning up the room and they're like what do we do? I said, okay, honey, you take this, throw that garbage. You put it in the garbage, this toy goes in the shelf. So I would do things with them because you need to teach them how to do it.

Speaker 1:

You can't just say, johnny, go clean the bathroom. I don't know what to do, yeah.

Speaker 2:

And there has been actual research on this with modern children. They're willing and able to do this. It makes them part of the group.

Speaker 1:

Oh wait, I got another person coming in. I got to stop.

Speaker 2:

Okay.

Speaker 1:

All right.

Speaker 2:

Well, I hope your readers will remember how other children learn, and the book actually has a website howotherchildrenlearninfo. How otherchildrenlearninfo.

Speaker 1:

So I will put that all when I upload the podcast and all your information, I have your website and everything about the book. Okay, let me know where I I really need to read the time and it was an awesome conversation and we'll get in touch again so we can talk more. I love all this.

Speaker 2:

Yes, it's so interesting. Thank you so much, Elita.

Speaker 1:

All right, thank you so much. Bye-bye.

Speaker 2:

Thank you.

Speaker 1:

Come celebrate your event and create new memories at Studio 33 right here in Fort Lauderdale, off the exit 32 commercial boulevard. Call us today so you can schedule an appointment and see the location as an intimate setting for your private event. Call us at 954-530-7193. Again, 954-530-7193. Also, our website is studio33f. As in frankllcom, you can find us on all social media at Studio 33 FLL as well. Again, call us today for your appointment and come see our venue. We are filling up fast.

People on this episode

Head Shot

Alida Hernandez

Host