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Applied Developmental Science

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Why understanding culture is essential for supporting children and families

Sara Harkness & Charles M. Super

To cite this article: Sara Harkness & Charles M. Super (2020): Why understanding culture is essential for supporting children and families, Applied Developmental Science, DOI: 10.1080/10888691.2020.1789354

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/10888691.2020.1789354

Published online: 17 Jul 2020.

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Why understanding culture is essential for supporting children and families

Sara Harkness and Charles M. Super

University of Connecticut

ABSTRACT Understanding culture is essential for understanding child development, and thus for designing and evaluating interventions to improve children’s physical and mental health. We outline seven key aspects of culture, and then review the Developmental Niche, a theor- etical framework created to highlight the dynamics of cultural influence on development and to guide assessment of the child’s cultural surround. Within this framework, Parental Ethnotheories are an especially important part of the psychology of caretakers, as they influ- ence parental behavior both directly and through parents’ choices of settings and customs of care. Two examples to illustrate the usefulness of this perspective are provided. One demonstrates the cost of ignoring culture in a large-scale intervention to combat poverty in the United States; the other outlines successful use of the Developmental Niche framework in an intervention to improve infant health in Bangladesh. Together, these examples illumin- ate the seven aspects of culture reviewed in the introduction.

There is nothing so useful as a good theory. Lewin’s oft-cited dictum (Lewin, 1951, p. 169)

seems like a simple observation, yet it brings together two elements that in practice rarely meet. Theory is the domain of academics, an attempt to capture some basic aspect of order in the way we think about real- ity. Although good theories build the foundation for further theoretical discoveries, the theories, and their usefulness, rarely cross the boundary to practice in daily life. Yet in daily life as in scientific thinking, good theories are essential for successful functioning. In the study of culture and children’s development, a useful theory is one that not only increases our under- standing, but also helps us to support children and families in a variety of contexts. In this paper, we review one such theory that has been widely used in academics, with particular attention to its usefulness for policies and interventions to promote children’s healthy development.

A brief history of “culture” in anthropology

A consideration of the usefulness of “culture” in child- ren’s development must of course begin by addressing the concept of culture itself. Historically, recognition of “culture” as something other than art, music, or even good manners coincided with British colonial

encounters with exotic places that had previously been mostly unknown to the wider “civilized” world. Thus, Sir Edward Burnett Tylor – often considered the founder of cultural anthropolzogy – defined culture in his two-volume opus Primitive Culture as “that com- plex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society” (Tylor, 1877, vol. 1 p. 1). More recently, globalization and increased ethnic diversity within societies have made it impossible to ignore the cultural dimensions of ideas and practices that underlie all behavior – including those that are usually taken for granted as normal within the cultural communities to which many researchers belong. Definitions of culture that include everything, however, end up explaining very little, and anthropological thinking about culture has evolved over time toward understanding aspects of culture as they apply to a variety of specific topics. In relation to child development, anthropologists gener- ally agree on seven features of culture (LeVine, 1984):

1. Culture is shared among members of a community: in LeVine’s words (1984, p. 68), “culture represents a consensus on a wide variety of meanings among members of an interacting community.”

CONTACT Sara Harkness [email protected] University of Connecticut, Storrs, CT 06269, USA ! 2020 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC

APPLIED DEVELOPMENTAL SCIENCE https://doi.org/10.1080/10888691.2020.1789354

Always read the abstract to get an overview of the full article

The authors approach is to

make sure that cultural theories have application!

Very important to

translate academic knowledge

into practice!

2. Culture organizes meanings and actions across widely diverse domains within a community. As LeVine states (1984, p. 72), “Nothing is more characteristic of contemporary anthropologists than the conviction that the customs they study are connected and comprehensible only as parts of a larger organization – of beliefs, norms, val- ues, or social actions.” John and Beatrice Whiting, similarly, wrote that cultural systems of beliefs, values, and behaviors are “not only … internally integrated, but each type of custom is systematic- ally related to the others. [They] form in combin- ation a blueprint for action that has been called the custom complex” (Whiting & Whiting, 1960, p. 921).

3. Cultural beliefs exist in a variety of forms, from those that are encoded in law or ceremony to those that are implicit, taken-for-granted ideas about the right and natural way to do something. This aspect of culture is particularly important for the study of children’s culturally structured envi- ronments, because it is the combination of the normative and descriptive, “the fusion of what is and [what] ought to be in a single vision … [that] gives distinctive cultural ideologies their singular psychological power” (LeVine, 1984, p. 78).

4. All cultures are unique, but none are totally differ- ent from all others. Rather, cultural communities tend to share some characteristics with other com- munities, including their geographic neighbors, due in part to common historical roots and the diffusion of ideas and technologies. Thus, for example, the sub-Saharan region of Africa is char- acterized by many similar customs and beliefs related to children, along with important intra- regional differences. Similarities among cultures are also related to common ecological demands and subsistence systems: simple agricultural societies, for example, have been shown to socialize children more strongly toward obedience, in contrast to hunting-and-gathering societies that encourage autonomy in their children (Barry et al., 1959).

5. Cultural constellations of beliefs and values are resilient in the face of historical and ecological change. For example, the Dutch custom of putting babies outside for naps, even in cold weather, was documented in the 1960s by Rebelsky (1967); in the 1990s, we found Dutch parents carrying out the same custom, with the same rationale (Super et al., 1996). Studies of immigrant families gener- ally find strong continuity in beliefs and practices, in addition to a variety of accommodations to the

new surrounding culture (Moscardino et al., 2006; Raghavan et al., 2010; Rice, 2000).

6. Culture has historically been conceptualized by anthropologists as external environment – the “way of life” of a community, including laws, institutions, and artifacts; and more recently as “something inside the head” for members of a cultural community (Handwerker, 2002). Current understandings of culture generally include both as necessary complements to each other. This apparent paradox can be understood in compari- son to language and the speech community: in both cases, there is a constant process of commu- nication and transaction between the individual participant and the social environment.

7. Culture is not a larger version of personality. Although members of a cultural community share a common set of (often implicit) ideas about things such as the nature of the child, the proper way to interact with other family members, and perceptions of the self, every cultural community necessarily includes a wide variety of individually differing peo- ple. Further, the organization of individual differen- ces is one feature of cultures (Wallace, 1961).

In summary, anything that is “cultural” is by defin- ition shared, not unique to an individual person, although individuals can (and usually do) embody their own version. Such customs, beliefs, or their expression in the material culture of a people are further con- nected to other aspects of their “cultural place” (Weisner, 1997, p. 178) in a way that makes sense – at least to its members – and thus they are resilient in the face of historical or contemporary pressures. For this reason, culture change does not generally entail the simple replacement of one set of ideas or practices by another, but rather includes an active process of renegotiation and integration (de Haan et al., 2020; Raghavan et al., 2010). Finally, although the thinking and behavior of individuals is inevitably culturally framed, every cultural place is populated with a variety of individuals with their own specific temperaments, personalities, life histories, and other attributes that enable them to interact with and contribute to – rather than simply replicate – the complex whole.

Anthropological theories of culture, as applied to the study of children’s development, differ from pre- vailing practice in psychological research in that anthropologists insist upon collecting cultural infor- mation as well as psychological information from individual study participants. Although more general background factors such as regional differences, socio-

2 S. HARKNESS AND C. M. SUPER

Consider if you had thought of all these aspects of culture before reading this!

Though psychological research has gotten better about considering culture - and their are plenty of cultural

psychology researchers

economic contrasts, or philosophical heritage are acknowledged, researchers from the anthropological tradition typically do not consider such information sufficient to explain individual patterns of beliefs, behavior, and development. Further, post hoc explana- tions of group differences that refer to ostensibly uni- versal frameworks such as individualism versus collectivism tend not to fare well in light of other per- spectives that might better be called upon to under- stand a particular pattern of findings.

Synergistic theories of culture and child development: the Developmental Niche and Parental Ethnotheories

Although anthropological theories offer a variety of explanations for cultural differences in parenting and child development (Barry et al., 1959; LeVine et al., 1994; Whiting & Edwards, 1988; Whiting & Whiting, 1975; Whiting & Child, 1953), they rarely explore exactly how children learn to be members of their cultures. From a developmental perspective, however, culture is relevant only as it is experienced by the growing child. Several related, synergistic models of culture and child develop- ment have been formulated in order to address this gap. With slightly different emphases on the individual, the family, or the biosocial nature of development, each of these models suggests a way to acknowledge both the environment’s organization as a system and the immedi- acy of that organization for the individual child. Weisner’s ecocultural model emphasizes the mundane routines of daily life, taking place in specific activity set- tings and formulated through the larger cultural ecology, as primary influences on psychosocial development (Weisner, 1997, 2002). The biocultural model developed by Worthman (2003, 2010) focuses on the “developmental microniche,” which represents the actual experience of the child in relation to the child’s personal characteristics and capacities. The developmental micro- niche is the primary site of behavioral and biological vul- nerability, adaptation, and resilience. In what follows, we will describe our own theoretical contributions – the Developmental Niche and the further elaboration of Parental Ethnotheories – and review several examples of how these frameworks have been, could have been, or could in the future be applied to challenges facing chil- dren and families in a variety of contexts.

The Developmental Niche

The Developmental Niche is a theoretical framework for the integration of concepts and findings from

multiple disciplines concerned with the development of children in cultural context (Harkness & Super, 1994; Super & Harkness, 1986, 1999). We originally devel- oped this construct in order to deal with both variabil- ity and thematicity evident in the multiple studies that we carried out on child development and family life in a Kipsigis village of Kenya in the 1970s (Harkness & Super, 1985; Super, 1976). Two overarching principles reflect the influences of cultural anthropology (e.g. Whiting & Whiting, 1975) and developmental psych- ology (e.g. Bell, 1968): First, that a child’s environment is organized in a non-arbitrary manner as part of a cul- tural system; and second, that the child’s own dispos- ition, including a particular constellation of attributes, temperament, skills, and potentials, affects the process of development.

At the center of the developmental niche (see Figure 1) is the individual child. In one sense the niche can be described only for a single child in one cultural place, with his or her particular set of inherited charac- teristics (Super & Harkness, 1994). Nevertheless, the framework is equally useful for deriving a generalized description of recurring patterns characteristic of par- ticular cultural communities. Surrounding the child are the three major subsystems of the developmental niche: (1) Physical and social settings of the child’s daily life; (2) Customs and practices of care; and (3) The psych- ology of the caretakers. The physical and social settings in which the child lives provide a scaffold upon which daily life is constructed, including where, with whom, and in what activities the child is engaged. Culturally regulated customs and practices of childcare are par- ticularly meaningful activities that are repeated over time and embedded in the settings of the child’s life. Many such customs or habits are so commonly used by members of the community and so thoroughly inte- grated into the larger culture that individuals need not particularly rationalize them. To members of the cul- ture, they seem obvious and natural solutions to every- day problems, developmental requirements, or social needs; their cultural nature becomes evident only when viewed from an outsider’s perspective or when chal- lenged in practice. Often these customs express deeply held beliefs and related emotions about the nature of the child and about the proper functions of a good par- ent. Finally, the psychology of the caretakers includes both the personal characteristics and the cultural beliefs (or ethnotheories) of parents and others (e.g. teachers or health care providers).

The three subsystems of the developmental niche – settings, customs, and caretaker psychology – share the common function of mediating the child’s

APPLIED DEVELOPMENTAL SCIENCE 3

Here the authors explain some other theories and start to explain their

own

Here is where they

explain what the developme ntal niche

is

developmental experience within the larger culture. Three “corollaries” of this basic framework specify further how it works in children’s lives. First, the three components of the developmental niche operate together with powerful though often incomplete coordination as a system. In an internally stable cul- tural environment, customs of care express or “instantiate” parental ethnotheories about the child, and they are further supported by the physical and social settings of daily life. Of course, the environ- ments of children and their families are rarely com- pletely consistent, but looking across the three subsystems of the niche tends to make evident cul- tural themes that are found in multiple domains. “Contemporary redundancy” (Super & Harkness, 2002) – when themes are repeated through a variety of experiences during the same developmental period – creates “messages” (Mead, 1972) which contribute to the child’s emerging model of the world. In add- ition, “thematic elaboration” (Super & Harkness, 2002) – when the repetition and cultivation of core systems of meaning take place across developmental periods – can embed the stuff of culture even more deeply into the psyche (Super & Harkness, 1997). There are many extended examples of such “cultural complexes (Whiting & Whiting, 1960) in the literature on culture and development (e.g. Hess & Azuma, 1990; Menon & Shweder, 1994; Rogoff et al., 1993; Shwalb & Shwalb, 1996; Super et al., 2020).

The second corollary of the Developmental Niche framework recognizes external sources of change, which may initially affect one subsystem more than the others. For example, rapid economic and political

change in China, including the introduction of the one-child policy, quickly led to changes in the settings of children’s daily lives, as large families were replaced by very small ones. This in turn has been associated with changes in customs and practices of care, and with parental psychology (Strom et al., 1995; Zhu, 2010). The “Snugli,” a novel cloth child-carrier inspired by the inventor’s time in Africa (Moore, n.d.), quickly became popular and eventually “customary” in the US after being introduced in 1966. Along with imitators and successors, it has significantly altered the physical and interactive experience of millions of American infants, as they now traveled in a vertical position rather than horizontal in a baby carriage (Little et al., 2019). Change that directly affects one subsystem of the niche can have a cascade of effects on the other subsystems, as the whole system “works” to reestablish equilibrium. This second corollary accounts in part for the qualification “incomplete” in the first one, regard- ing coordination. The developmental niche is an “open system” in the formal sense (van Bertalanffy, 1968), as opposed to being isolated and self-contained. An open system can be influenced by objects, activities, or ideas from outside its boundaries. Subsystems may be slow, however, in accommodating to a new element absorbed elsewhere in the Niche. A mother may enroll her infant in daycare to pursue needed employment despite her ambivalent beliefs about the effect on her child’s emo- tional development; it may take considerable time for her beliefs and her other behaviors to become consist- ent with the practice. The issue of integration across the Niche becomes greatly more complicated for immi- grant parents, as they discover a myriad new beliefs and

Figure 1. The Developmental Niche.

4 S. HARKNESS AND C. M. SUPER

Bronfenbrenner’s ecological systems theory also offers a similar model - this one shows cultural influence at every level not just on the outer

level

These are great examples of

cultural changes impacting

children’s lives

circumstances in their adopted country, which may or may not be consistent with the beliefs and customs they bring with them (de Haan et al., 2020; Raghavan et al., 2010). The complexity of accommodation by all relevant parts of the Niche determines how rapidly the whole system approaches a point of equilibrium.

Finally, the third corollary of the Developmental Niche framework reiterates the developmental principle that the child at the center of the niche plays an active role in its construction and change over time. A temperamental disposition toward shyness or boldness, for example, will lead to different social reputations and involvement in different kinds of peer groups although the nature of those differences will depend on the culture. In another example, parents may adapt customs of care to young children who show a developmental delay, and the inter- active parent–child relationships may consequently develop along particular paths as the child matures (Keogh et al., 2000).

Parental ethnotheories

In much of our more recent research, we have focused on parents’ thinking about themselves, their children, and their families, especially as their ideas are shared with others in any given cultural community. We refer to these constellations of ideas as “parental eth- notheories” to indicate both their cultural nature and their systematic relatedness to other ideas and practi- ces. Parental ethnotheories are cultural models of parenting and child development (Harkness & Super, 1996) held by parents and others who care for chil- dren (the model can also be extended to older indi- viduals who receive care from others). Like customs of care, parental ethnotheories are often implicit, taken-for-granted ideas, and they have strong motiv- ational properties (D’Andrade, 1992). Parents’ beliefs – especially those that are shared with a community in a given time and place – are powerful influences on the two other subsystems of the developmental niche. That is, within the constraints imposed by the wider environment, parents make choices about the best ways to take care of their children, and these choices tend to follow culturally recognizable patterns. As we have written elsewhere, parental ethnotheories thus function “as the nexus through which elements of the larger culture are filtered, and as an important source of parenting practices and the organization of daily life for children and families” (Harkness & Super, 2006, p. 62).

Parental ethnotheories can be represented by a heuristic model in which beliefs are organized in a

hierarchical order (Harkness & Super, 2006) and linked indirectly although powerfully to behavior (see Figure 2). At the top of the hierarchy are the most general, implicit ideas about the nature of the child, parenting, and the family. Below this triad are ideas about specific developmental domains, such as infant sleep or social development. These ideas are closely tied to ideas about specific appropriate practices, and further to imagined child or family outcomes. These ideas are translated into behavior only as mediated by factors such as characteristics of the child, situational variables, and competing cultural models and their related practices. The final results can be seen in actual parental practices or behaviors, and in actual child and family outcomes.

This heuristic model has the benefit of pointing out two stages where interventions can be targeted – spe- cific beliefs and actual practices – while also highlight- ing their connections to other components. Typically, interventions to change parenting behavior are aimed at practices, often without awareness of the parents’ ideas that are the foundation of their practices in the first place. Alternatively, interventions may try to edu- cate parents about specific aspects of development, without sufficient attention to linked beliefs or actual implementation of new practices that might follow. Furthermore, even the most sincere efforts at inter- vention may fail to account for situational factors that interfere with parents’ ability to put their best ideas into optimal practice. Finally, some interventions to help families at risk of child abuse or neglect also implicitly devalue parents’ customary practices of care – thus affecting the emotional component of the psychology of the caretakers.

Applications of the Developmental Niche and parental ethnotheories to interventions for children and families

As a theoretical framework, the Developmental Niche and the concept of parental ethnotheories have been widely cited and applied in a multitude of research projects. Less recognized, however is the potential use- fulness of this framework for interventions to support children and families, reflecting the general chasm between the worlds of academic research and of pro- gram development. Two large-scale efforts, however, may serve as examples. In both cases, consideration of the child’s culturally structured developmental niche, parental ethnotheories, and the use of mixed methods – a core feature of the framework (Harkness et al.,

APPLIED DEVELOPMENTAL SCIENCE 5

Children actively

contribute to their own development

important definition of this section

This is so important. Sometimes to make

change you must target

individual beliefs and attitudes AS WELL AS the

behaviors

This section puts the theory into

practice

2005; Super & Harkness, 1999) – proved crucial for understanding the results.

Limitations of a classic randomized control trial: Moving to Opportunity

As we have described elsewhere (Harkness & Super, 2015), the Moving to Opportunity (MTO) project – started in 1994 under President Clinton – was an experimental Federal program to move single mothers out of public housing in inner cities and into more affluent areas in the suburbs. The hope was that these young families would thrive in a more favorable environment where both job prospects and a good education would be easier to access. Unfortunately, however, a follow-up study (Kessler et al., 2014) found mixed results: although the move appeared to be beneficial for girl children, it was associated with negative results for boys, who were more depressed,

had more conduct problems, and were more likely to suffer from post-traumatic stress syndrome than did boys in the control group, who were not relocated. In a National Public Radio interview (Greene, 2014), Ronald Kessler, one of the researchers evaluating the program, offered an explanation for this apparently paradoxical result, after noting that the Randomized Control Trial (RCT) design of the study was not meant to explain the reasons for particular effects, but rather just whether any effects occurred. As he put it:

… we were fortunate that we had field workers go into the neighborhoods, observe what was going on; and they have some insights into why they think these differences [between results for girls and boys] exist.” As he further explained, the field workers noticed that “little girls were embraced by the neighborhoods and seemed to have better interpersonal skills, whereas the boys somehow were thought to be a threat by the community, so they were pushed away and in fact in some cases, had

Figure 2. Parental ethnotheories.

6 S. HARKNESS AND C. M. SUPER

Figures like these are

very useful summaries

This is an example of an intervention that didn’t consider culture in its design and ended up being less successful than

it could

The results: Think about why an intervention like this might benefit girls, but not boys!

worse things happen to them.” Kessler concluded that “the kinds of qualitative evidence that our research team came up with” suggested that the boys “couldn’t make a really good adjustment,” but again cautioned, “We just don’t know because it wasn’t one of the things we had prepared ourselves for at the beginning.

Kessler’s statement sums up a core limitation of traditional randomized control trial evaluations: they are set up to discover whether a treatment (or interven- tion) has an effect, not why or how the effect is accom- plished. For testing the effects of a particular medication on health outcomes, this approach makes some sense (although finding “pure” cases to compare is sometimes easier said than done). For more complex social interventions, however, the utility of the findings depends on understanding the context of the interven- tion, including how it affects the developmental niches of children and their parents. Unfortunately, such information is often left out of “rigorous” scientific research such as randomized control trials, with the rationale that it is not essential and would greatly increase costs. The result is that conclusions about the meaning of the results are left largely to speculation, with no guidance on how the program in question might be modified to produce better results or, at a minimum, how it might avoid doing harm to the par- ticipating families and their children.

Anecdotal reports by field workers are not an adequate substitute for the systematic collection and analysis of qualitative data such as interviews or ethnographic observations. In the case of the MTO intervention, however, other subsequent, separately funded studies using mixed methods did uncover some plausible explanations for why girls who were moved to lower poverty communities fared better on average than their peers in the control group, whereas the opposite was true for boys. As Briggs et al. (2010) report, a key change for the girls was freedom from fear of sexual harassment, coercion, and rape, which were endemic in the public housing communities they left. Even so, their mothers continued to expect daughters to stay closer to the protection of home than they expected of their sons. Based on extensive interviews with families who moved (and stayed) in low-poverty neighborhoods, compared to those who did not move or who moved back, these authors report, “Nearly all of the experimental-group girls still living in low-poverty areas, as well as their mothers, described feeling confident that they are safe from these risks, while most living in high-poverty areas described living with pervasive harassment” (p. 96). In contrast, boys in the experimental group were less closely monitored by their mothers, who expected them

to explore and even “act up” (p. 103). They tended to maintain “risky ties” to their old neighborhoods, includ- ing with family members and friends involved in criminal activities. Peer group acceptance in the new low-poverty neighborhoods also differed by gender, as boys were sometimes regarded by other youth as threats, while girls more readily made friends in their new sur- roundings. As Briggs et al. (2010) summarize,

Regardless of where they lived, they [boys] were facing pressures to fight, deal drugs, and join gangs. Avoiding these threats required extraordinary effort on the part of both the boys and their parents, and it often meant that the youth spent much of their time indoors, isolated from potentially bad influences (p. 103).

Applying the framework of the Developmental Niche, it is clear that the differences between boys’ and girls’ physical and social settings and routines of daily life, their mothers’ ethnotheories, and how they were perceived by others in their new surroundings, contributed to their differing outcomes. Further, the low rate of acceptance of the MTO program by those families who were randomly selected, and the fact that the great majority soon moved back to neighborhoods more similar to their old ones, suggests that the “opportunities” of the new suburban setting were counter-balanced by qualities that the mothers them- selves did not find a comfortable fit with their own customs of care and parental ethnotheories, among other problems. In summary, the MTO program, by omitting consideration of how the children’s develop- mental niches would be affected by changes in the larger environment (the second corollary of the niche framework), failed to capture key determinants of both its successes and failures.

Using the Developmental Niche: the Bangladesh project to reduce childhood diarrhea

Like MTO, the Bangladesh project designed by Zeitlin et al. (1990) to address a serious and prevalent child health problem, was set up as a randomized control trial. Five contiguous villages in lowland Bangladesh were chosen for the intervention, while another site with similar ecological and health indicators was des- ignated as the control. In contrast to the MTO evalu- ation, however, cultural considerations informed all phases of the Bangladesh study. As explained in the introduction to one report (Ahmed et al., 1994),

Many hygiene interventions that attempted to reduce childhood diarrhoea failed to demonstrate any effect, mainly because they were culturally unsuitable and often developed without understanding the problem in the target community … The researchers sought to

APPLIED DEVELOPMENTAL SCIENCE 7

Some of the reasons girls benefitted

Some of the

reasons boys did worse

Here is an example of an intervention that considered culture

identify local adaptive behaviours that could be modified by a trial process and implemented as culturally acceptable and low-cost interventions (p. 1).

The Developmental Niche framework was adopted at the beginning of the study, as it was well suited to the documentation of proximal causes of diarrheal infections among infants and young children in this context.

In the decades after independence (1971), infant diarrhea and malnutrition, closely linked problems, were major health issues in rural Bangladesh. In the villages selected for evaluation and intervention in this project, the prevalence of infant diarrhea was over 60% at one year of age, and the median weight-for- age was more than two and one-half standard devia- tions below the international norm (Ahmed et al., 1994). Maternal interviews, non-intrusive behavior observations, and the collection of demographic and health information on the infants – all key methods for studying the developmental niche (Super & Harkness, 1999) – provided data for quantitative ana- lysis identifying behaviors associated with positive outcomes, mostly having to do with specific routes of contamination through unsanitary practices. A “Clean Life” program of maternal education was developed in collaboration with community members and leaders. The intervention focused on ground sanitation, food sanitation, and personal hygiene, all involving behav- ior change or affordable materials (Ahmed et al., 1991). Evaluation after only five months indicated substantial health gains: Severe malnutrition, which had been 10% higher at baseline in the intervention group than in the comparison group, was now 30% below (Ahmed et al., 1993). Crucially, the post- intervention evaluation identified (through direct observation) which specific family behaviors linked the interventions with positive results, thus allowing subsequent refinement of the intervention. Ultimately, the program was adopted by BRAC (BRAC.net), a national (now international), nonprofit NGO, and applied widely across the country.

Because one of the present authors (CMS) was dir- ectly involved in this project, application of the Developmental Niche framework, along with mixed methods, was an obvious strategy for both under- standing and addressing the health challenge. Maternal interviews provided the researchers with insights into their parental ethnotheories regarding infant health and care. For example, it was found that most of the mothers were not aware of germ theory, and therefore assumed that simply removing dirt or excrement with water was sufficient for keeping them- selves and the infant clean. Relatedly, the mothers’

customary practice of wiping their rinsed hands on their sari provided a constant source of contamination within easy reach of their infants, as did the daily bath in polluted water. The physical and social set- tings of daily life, as systematically observed by the researchers, clearly showed infants’ exposure to patho- gens as they sat on the mud floor of the dwelling with piles of animal excrement close by. Having mapped out the pathways of infection, including the local beliefs and customs that supported them, the research- ers and staff were then able to develop an intervention to address the behaviors that were direct causes of infant diarrhea and consequent malnutrition. To the initial amusement of mothers in the study, the project also introduced a new, more sanitary physical setting for the infants by adapting a manger for calves to a playpen, keeping infants safely apart from sources of contamination on the floors of the homes. In summary, integration of information guided by the Developmental Niche framework allowed researchers in the Bangladesh study to establish a reliable and replicable strategy for reducing diarrhea, related developmental delays, and presumably deaths in this population.

Discussion

The MTO project and the Bangladesh childhood hygiene project both provide evidence for the useful- ness of the Developmental Niche framework, includ- ing parental ethnotheories, for interventions to support children’s health and development. More broadly, both projects also illustrate the seven features of culture described above, in ways that are sometimes more obvious than others. First, the “shared” aspect of culture is a critical piece of the picture in both projects, although it was explicitly recognized only in the Bangladesh project. Defining a population such as single mothers living in urban public housing (the group targeted by the MTO project) as sharing a “culture” may seem unfair or even racist, but ignoring their shared ideas and practices took away what could have been a valuable means to meet their needs as they transitioned to a new environment.

A similar point can be made in relation to the second feature of culture, namely that it organizes meanings and actions across widely diverse domains. Briggs et al. (2010) later analysis of the MTO pro- gram, in its exploration of why outcomes for girls and boys in the MTO diverged, weaves together a wide range of different themes and observations, from girls’ fear of sexual harassment to boys’ pressure to join gangs and prove their emerging manhood. In the

8 S. HARKNESS AND C. M. SUPER

Here are the

results of the

interventi on

Bangladesh study, we see how mothers’ ideas about hygiene were relevant to their actual practices of care- taking. The absence of knowledge about germ theory that was identified among these mothers also illus- trates the third feature of culture as including implicit commonly shared ideas, including ideas that were in contradiction to scientific knowledge. In this regard, the Bangladesh intervention was probably effective in part because changes in thinking and behavior were publicly endorsed by local community leaders.

The fourth feature of culture, that each culture is unique but none are totally different from all others, becomes especially important when we think about the generalizability of interventions carried out in one specific context. In the case of MTO, the initial impetus for this massive intervention came from one successful program in Chicago. Reviewing the history of how the MTO program was developed, Briggs et al. (2010) note that there were many unanswered ques- tions about how well this model would apply to the new multi-city intervention. As they comment, “Beyond these questions was the greatest unknown: Given the social dynamics the families were leaving behind, how might relocating actually affect their lives?” (p. 53). In addition, the much larger scale of the MTO program entailed a certain “leap of faith” about how the counseling component of the original program would be implemented. In the case of the Bangladesh project, the design of the project itself – investigating ethnotheories and practices before plan- ning the intervention – provided a guide to interven- tions in other similar contexts, at least in south Asia. Even if major differences were found, it seems likely that the findings from the Bangladesh project could provide at least some starting hypotheses regarding where to look for the causes of childhood diarrhea.

The resilience of cultural beliefs and values, the fifth feature of culture, is evident in both positive and negative ways in the MTO program. Mothers who moved with their children from urban public housing to low-poverty, mostly suburban areas, brought with them expectations about their daughters’ needing pro- tection, and a more autonomy-granting approach to raising their sons. The children themselves also brought their own expectations to the new environ- ment, for both better and worse – the girls were sur- prised but comforted by their new freedom from sexual harassment, while the boys apparently felt less at home after moving, and thus sought to maintain old ties that corresponded more closely to their sense of themselves. In the Bangladesh study, we do not know whether earlier beliefs regarding hygiene and

infant care may have re-surfaced after the intervention ended; but the holistic nature of the intervention, affecting multiple features of the culture, was probably a safeguard.

The sixth feature of culture as both a shared envir- onment and the internal representations that members of a culture carry in their own minds can readily be applied to both MTO and the Bangladesh project. Interestingly, the planners of the MTO seem to have recognized the environment of public housing as a kind of culture, but they did not extend this aware- ness to the ways that mothers and their children thought or felt about their lives in that context – rather, it appears that they assumed (in retrospect, wrongly) that any rational person would gladly accept the offer of better living conditions, and would pros- per in the new environment. In contrast, the designers and implementers of the Bangladesh project approached the intervention based on a definition of culture that included both environment and beliefs, as illustrated in the quote above (Ahmed et al., 1994).

The last feature of culture, that it is not a larger version of personality, needs to be taken into account in any intervention for children and families, in the sense that a “one size fits all” approach is often not a good fit for some of the intended targets, even within a recognizable cultural community. Ronald Kessler, quoted above regarding the MTO program, seems to have recognized this when he commented to Greene (2014) that similar interventions in the future should provide programs “that help these new families inte- grate optimally into better neighborhoods” rather than “just putting a roof over their heads.” In contrast, the Bangladesh project involved local home visitors work- ing individually with families to fine-tune the interven- tion more closely to their particular situation, and, at several points in the development of the intervention, using feedback from families to improve the program.

Of course, it could be (and frequently is) argued that such an individualized approach is simply not feasible for large-scale interventions like the MTO program. A counter-example to this argument is pro- vided by the New Hope project, a privately funded experimental program implemented in the mid-1990s in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, to lift full-time low-wage workers out of poverty as well as providing health insurance and childcare subsidies for people who needed them (Duncan et al., 2006). Participants chosen for the intervention in this randomized control trial were offered a standard set of benefits; in add- ition, each participant was assigned a “project repre- sentative” (a purposefully respectful term) who

APPLIED DEVELOPMENTAL SCIENCE 9

worked individually with them to address the specific challenges they faced. The evaluation team, including anthropologist Weisner used qualitative and ethno- graphic methods to learn how the New Hope program affected participating families and control group fami- lies. Based on both quantitative and qualitative data, the researchers were able to discern who the program worked well for, and who did not reap the expected benefits.

Conclusion

At the beginning of this paper, we quoted Lewin’s fam- ous dictum that “There is nothing so useful as a good theory.” As we reflect on the theories and their actual or potential applications for children and families described here, it is reasonable to ask whether – in this case at least – good theories are always useful. The fact that both the Developmental Niche and Parental Ethnotheories have been cited thousands of times in the international research literature would suggest that they have met the criteria for both “goodness” and “usefulness” for understanding the cultural construction of child development. In the two examples above, we have attempted to illustrate how these conceptual frameworks could also be useful for the design, imple- mentation, and evaluation of interventions to support children and families. In the end, though, theories are only useful insofar as they are used. It remains to be seen whether recognizing the essential role of culture in children’s development can be more effectively and comprehensively translated into action.

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