Professor Sara Harkness’s research was recently written up in a Brazilian newspaper, a recent interview O Globo.   You can find the article here, http://oglobo.globo.com/sociedade/educacao/criacao-de-filhos-pelo-mundo-filao-editorial-objeto-antropologico-20781234, or see English translation below.

 

Parenting throughout the world is an editorial trend and anthropological object

Books about parenting among the Dane joins others about the French and the Dutch

 

RIO – The book “The Danish Way”, which has just arrived in Brazil, has a leading predecessor in the editorial market, also from the Fontanar label, from Companhia das Letras: “French Children Don’t Throw Food” by American journalist Pamela Druckerman . Launched in Brazil in 2013, the title ran for several weeks on the best selling lists in the country – and, according to Nielsen data, is already considered a long seller because of the large volume of sales over a long period. The book had a monthly average of 1,700 copies sold in the last three years.

 

Pamela presents a limit known as “cadre”, in which French children have autonomy and freedom up to a certain limit – beyond that, remains the authority of parents. The idea of a possible balance between the needs of the parents and the child seemed to enchant the world, and it gave the journalist the opportunity to publish two more books on the subject.

 

In addition to the books on child raising in France and Denmark, there are also titles on the world’s “happiest children”, which would be Dutch, according to Rina Mae Acosta’s and Michele Hutchison “The Happiest Kids in the World”; and even those who bring global aspects of education, such as Christine Gross-Loh’s “Parenting without borders.” On Amazon, books in the category “Parents and relationships” total more than 220.000.

 

Ways of educating around the world have been the subject of research since the 1970s for American anthropologist Sara Harkness, from the University of Connecticut. Along with her husband, who is also a university researcher, Sara has lived for years in countries such as Netherlands and Kenya — where the first of the couple’s four children was born — in search of different cultural models for raising children. To them, the couple gave the name of “parental ethnoteories”.

 

— They are examples of a group shared ideas about the place of parents, children, family, development … And many of them are implicit, but they are in situations like: when the baby cries at night, do you pick him up soon? Or go back to sleep, letting him cry? — exemplifies Sara, stressing, however, that her work does not seek to generalize characteristics of countries. — There is a very great contrast between cultures on issues such as holding babies on their lap. There is, in Korea and Africa, for example, a strong idea that babies should be held in their lap enough, to be physically close. Another point that brings a lot of cultural differences is sleep planning: some groups believe that children should sleep next to their mother, but in countries like the United States, others argue that babies should stay in separate beds and bedrooms.

 

Nuances like these, and even more surprising ones, are in the French documentary “Babies”, by director Thomas Balmès, who accompanied the lives of four babies for a year in Mongolia, Namibia, the United States and Japan.

 

For Sara, parents’ interest in products that portray the different ways of educating the world correspond to the intense process of globalization:

— In times of rapid social transformation, people are relying less on what they have learned during their own growth.

 

Assistant Professor Alaina Brenick, Associate Professor Annamaria Csizmadia, Asstistant Professor Linda Halgunseth, and Professor Rebecca Puhl were awarded a Provost General Education Course Enhancement Grant for HDFS 3141: Developmental Approaches to Intergroup Relations and Victimization.

They will use this funding to make 3141 a Gen Ed course, in hope that it will be offered at all UConn campuses.

The Connecticut Office of Early Childhood (OEC) was recently awarded a multi-million dollar grant from the Department of Health & Human Services (HHS).  Professors Sara Harkness and Charles M. Super, Co- Directors of the Center for the Study of Culture, Health, and Human Development (CHHD), will be doing the evaluation part of the project.

Below is the project description from OEC-

Maternal, Infant and Early Childhood Home Visiting Program Innovation Award

The Connecticut Office of Early Childhood will partner with community experts, institutions of higher education, and professionals in early childhood development and related fields to develop and retain a highly skilled MIECHV-funded home visiting workforce through an innovative video-based intervention designed to address the particular challenges of working with complex, multi-need families. Using a randomized control trial design, two versions of the intervention will be implemented and evaluated.

Assistant Professor Caitlin Lombardi’s research was recently featured in a news article titled, New research suggests maternity leave is more important for mothers than it is for their kids.  Read the online article from Quartz Media/Baby Balance.

Professor Michael Ego was recently interviewed on the Richard French Live talk show on the Regional News Network about the Legacy of WWII Japanese Internment Camps. Watch the interview.

Associate Professor Annamaria Csizmadia received funding for her proposal to the Provost’s Academic Plan Mini Grant Competition.  Her project, “Promoting Active Learning through Blended and Flipped Classroom Design in HDFS Graduate Education: Revision of HDFS 5102: Early and Middle Childhood Development” will involve creating online resources for providing this graduate course in a blended/flipped/hybrid format.  These resources will be valuable not only for Annamaria, but for anyone else in HDFS who might teach this course in the future.

Assistant Professor Ryan Watson’s project, “Transgender Erasure and Exclusion: Next Steps in the Discourses at the Nexus of Gender Identity, Policy and Health” received funding from the Public Discourse Project at UConn.  Ryan will be editing a special issue for the International Journal of Transgenderism titled, “Today’s transgender youth: Health, well-being, and opportunities for resilience”, and the organization of a group of stakeholders at UConn and the CT community that deal with transgender students to identity and enact the next steps to better the health and well-being of the population.

Professor Michael Ego’s recent trip to Scotland was featured in Guide & Gazette article. It highlights his time there visiting programs designed to use golfing memories and football action groups to help individuals with dementia.