Parenting, Culture, and Context: Reflections on Excavating Culture
Abstract
Parenting is the first and likely most important mechanism through which culture is reproduced. Children do not enter the world with any specific sense of culture, they become members of a culture through interactions with their parents and other significant others in their environment. A quick example from language learning illustrates this well. When it comes to language, a child, regardless of ethnic background, is born a “citizen of the world,” perfectly capable of learning any language on the planet with appropriate accent and intonation. A White baby, born to parents in Brooklyn, is as capable of speaking Mandarin Chinese as is a Chinese baby born in Shanghai. Yet, by the end of the first year of life, they are already losing their ability to fully attend to sounds from languages other than those that were part of their environment (Kuhl, 2000 ). And the language their parents speak to them makes all the difference. Parenting serves to inculcate culture from the moment a child is born right until their life's end. As a Cuban girl, born in Havana, my mother had my ears pierced the day I was born; by the time I was baptized at six