Nandita Chaudhary & Heidi Keller:
Universal child-care laws undermine cultural diversitySunday Guardian, 6 January 2018
"Every community has its own cultural ethos, and its own specific models of care-giving. The universal ideas of child care prescribed by Attachment Theory have little practical relevance outside the West."Dr Nandita Chaudhary taught in the University of Delhi for more than three decades;
Dr Heidi Keller is Professor Emeritus at Osnabrück University, Germany, and Director of Nevet at Hebrew University, Jerusalem, Israel
"Attachment Theory has gained much popularity in the “scientific” study of childhood and has impacted child policy, parenting and education the world over. We argue that it is a major flaw of Attachment Theory not to take into account the historical and cultural diversity in beliefs and practices related to children’s care.
Families all over the world value children and try to do their best for them, yet the expression of care and love is different in different cultures. This is necessary, because care practices are delicately adapted to the ecological conditions and social history of any given community.""Children for their part display an acute ability to adjust to different conditions and thrive under very diverse settings. Attachment Theory fails to accept this variability. It promotes the normative view that a baby must form an attachment with the constant presence of the mother, who is advised to dedicate her full attention and time to loving and caring for her baby in order for it to develop well.""Although Attachment Theory is obviously promoting ideas about parenting and child development that are in stark contrast to what the majority of the world’s population thinks and believes, it has become extremely powerful on account of the moral and cultural claims of being the best way to bring up children. Once it was adopted by international NGOs, the theory became the basis of intervention programmes worldwide.
Children’s development is considered as isolated from social context in documents like the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. This is predicated upon the notion of the individual as separate from society and human or child development as separate from culture. When we accept these as “universal principles”, there is an overestimation of the role of science based on a Western philosophy of individualism. When such rules are accepted as binding, local cultural practices are undermined. Global policy presents a globalised view of childhood without acknowledging that it is conceptualised only in Euro-American ideology. We need to keep a critical vigilance on any policy that impacts the cultural lives of others to ensure that ethical boundaries are not being crossed."