the RIGHT WAY to raise a child

No Big Deal, but This Researcher's Theory Explains Everything About How Americans Parent

By Nicholas Day, Slate (from April 10, 2013)

"Every society has what it intuitively believes to be the right way to raise a child, what Harkness calls parental ethnotheories. (It is your mother-in-law, enlarged to the size of a country.) These are the choices we make without realizing that we're making choices. Not surprisingly, it is almost impossible to see your own parental ethnotheory: As I write in BabyMeets World, when you're under water, you can't tell that you're wet.

But ethnotheories are distinct enough, at least to an outsider, that they are apparent in the smallest details. If you look just at the words parents use to describe their children, you can almost always predict where you are in the world. In other words, your most personal observations of your child are actually cultural constructions."

Thanks to Rhonda Durham from ISAS for sending this along.