Infant Caretaking Styles

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In different countries and cities, infant caretaking styles can differ widely due to varying cultures and values. For example, the study done by Morelli, Rogoff, Oppenheim and Goldsmith in 1992 revealed differences in the infant sleeping practices between Mayan parents and U.S. parents from Utah. While more Mayan parents preferred to let their infants sleep on their bed to develop a close mother-infant bond, more U.S. parents preferred to keep their infants on a separate bed and to let them sleep alone as soon as possible in order to allow their child to become independent (Morelli et al., 1992). The purpose of this study is to examine the caretaking practices of a current parent through an interview and to compare and contrast the parent’s …show more content…

Sara believed that it was important for the infant to establish a sense of security by sleeping in the same room as the parents early on, so that in the future when the child becomes old enough to sleep in a different room, the child will feel secure and be calm even when she is alone by knowing that her parents are just in the other room. One way to understand the link between Sara’s sleeping arrangements and her goal of making the infant feel more secure is to consider Erik Erikson’s psychosocial stages of development (Erikson, 1963) The first stage of Erikson’s (1963) theory is trust versus mistrust, during which babies come to trust that their caregivers and other people will meet their physical and emotional needs or start to mistrust that the parents and other people will not take care of them. Sara hoped that by sleeping near her infant so that she could let her child see her when the child goes to sleep or wakes up in the middle of the night, the infant could feel more safe, or “trust,” that the infant’s needs would be tended to whenever necessary. The “trust” would then impact the child’s future development and especially when the time comes for the child to move to a separate room. The child, having received reliable …show more content…

Through these actions, she likely had the same mindset as the typical U.S. parents studied by Morelli et al. Morelli et al. argued that Mayan families did not have bedtime routines or used transitional objects because the infants usually fall asleep with the same people that they interact with during the day, whereas U.S. families used bedtime routines and transitional objects to get their children to fall asleep because the children are typically alone when they go to bed. Though Taiwan and the U.S. have different cultures, one aspect of the two cultures that are similar is that in both cultures the parents wish for their children to have autonomy. In a study of Taiwanese children’s autonomy, d'Ailly asserts that, like children in the U.S., Taiwanese children are encouraged by parents or teachers to establish autonomy. Most U.S. and Taiwanese parents value autonomy and independence, and thus through their use of bedtime routines and transitional objects, they hope their child can become accustomed to falling asleep with few family members nearby to help the child become more independent when the child has to sleep alone in the future. Sara gave her infant the towel and pacifier so that the infant would slowly learn to

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