Culture and infancy: a critical examination

Abstract

Over 90% of infants born in the world live in low-income countries, but most scholarly knowledge about infancy is produced in wealthy countries. More knowledge is consequently needed about infancy throughout the world. There are logistical and cultural difficulties associated with gaining this information, but in this paper I focus on the broader ideological context of knowledge production about infancy world-wide. Using a recently published volume, A World of Babies: Imagined Childcare Guides for Seven Societies (DeLoache and Gottlieb 2000) as an exemplar, I will show that the representation of infancy as an ideology-free or even romanticised zone may do little to forward our understanding of infancy and culture.