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Attachment Reconsidered pp 115–139Cite as

Palgrave Macmillan

“It Takes a Village to Raise a Child”: Attachment Theory and Multiple Child Care in Alor, Indonesia, and in North India

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Part of the Culture, Mind, and Society book series (CMAS)

Abstract

The African proverb, “It takes a village to raise a child,”1 expresses an underlying truth. Most societies around the world do not expect mothers, or parents, to rear children alone. Mothers and their young children are usually enmeshed in larger kinship groups and communities that help with child care and other tasks. Dating at least back to Margaret Mead’s (1974) 1928 groundbreaking study of adolescence in Samoa, sociocultural anthropologists have been documenting multiple child care and discussing some of its probable effects upon children’s emotional bonds with their caretakers and other people. The bias toward exclusive mothering that has dominated much of Western psychology—including John Bowlby’s (1969) theory of attachment—has been evident to anthropologists for a long time.

Keywords

  • Child Care
  • Attachment Theory
  • Young Sibling
  • Household Chore
  • Joint Family

These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

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Authors
  1. Susan C. Seymour
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    © 2013 Naomi Quinn and Jeannette Marie Mageo

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    Seymour, S.C. (2013). “It Takes a Village to Raise a Child”: Attachment Theory and Multiple Child Care in Alor, Indonesia, and in North India. In: Quinn, N., Mageo, J.M. (eds) Attachment Reconsidered. Culture, Mind, and Society. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137386724_5

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