Parental ethnotheories shape socialization beliefs around childrearing more broadly, and children's friendships more specifically. While prior work has examined aspects of parental socialization of friendships among school‐aged children and adolescents, no studies have examined beliefs held around the function of friendships among ethnically diverse mothers of toddlers from low‐socioeconomic contexts. Toddlerhood marks a point in development when the concept of “friendship” gains impact and relevance due to leaps in children's social, cognitive, and motor skills, as well as children's increasing access to contexts where they organically encounter peers. Toddlerhood is also a time when caregivers may initially consider the influence of peers on their children, beliefs that could eventually guide and shift how they navigate socialization practices around friendship. In the present study, we document U.S. Dominican American, African American, and Mexican American mothers’ socialization beliefs around functions of friendship for their 2‐year‐old children. We found that mothers emphasized a variety of friendship functions, including learning of social skills and morality, and communicating and experiencing emotions. A majority of mothers viewed their children's friendships as unidirectional, and framed their children as undiscerning in their engagement with social information from peers. Findings are discussed in relation to mothers’ orientation to children and “childhood” via cultural and developmental beliefs.
This content will become publicly available on April 1, 2025
Young children and adolescents in subsistence societies forage for a wide range of resources. They often target child‐specific foods, they can be very successful foragers, and they share their produce widely within and outside of their nuclear family. At the same time, while foraging, they face risky situations and are exposed to diseases that can influence their immune development. However, children's foraging has largely been explained in light of their future (adult) behavior. Here, we reinterpret findings from human behavioral ecology, evolutionary medicine and cultural evolution to center foraging children's contributions to life history evolution, community resilience and immune development. We highlight the need to foreground immediate alongside delayed benefits and costs of foraging, including inclusive fitness benefits, when discussing children's food production from an evolutionary perspective. We conclude by recommending that researchers carefully consider children's social and ecological context, develop cross‐cultural perspectives, and incorporate children's foraging into Indigenous sovereignty discourse.
more » « less- Award ID(s):
- 2051264
- PAR ID:
- 10514941
- Publisher / Repository:
- Wiley-Liss
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Evolutionary Anthropology: Issues, News, and Reviews
- Volume:
- 33
- Issue:
- 2
- ISSN:
- 1060-1538
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
More Like this
-
more » « less
Abstract -
more » « less
The transition to specialization of knowledge within populations could have facilitated the accumulation of cultural complexity in humans. Specialization allows populations to increase their cultural repertoire without requiring that members of that population increase their individual capacity to accumulate knowledge. However, specialization also means that domain-specific knowledge can be concentrated in small subsets of the population, making it more susceptible to loss. Here, we use a model of cultural evolution to demonstrate that specialized populations can be more sensitive to stochastic loss of knowledge than populations without subdivision of knowledge, and that demographic and environmental changes have an amplified effect on populations with knowledge specialization. Finally, we suggest that specialization can be a double-edged sword; specialized populations may have an advantage in accumulating cultural traits but may also be less likely to expand and establish themselves successfully in new demes owing to the increased cultural loss that they experience during the population bottlenecks that often characterize such expansions.
This article is part of the theme issue ‘Human socio-cultural evolution in light of evolutionary transitions’.
-
more » « less
Abstract The study of immune phenotypes in wild animals is beset by numerous methodological challenges, with assessment of detailed aspects of phenotype difficult to impossible. This constrains the ability of disease ecologists and ecoimmunologists to describe immune variation and evaluate hypotheses explaining said variation. The development of simple approaches that allow characterization of immune variation across many populations and species would be a significant advance. Here we explore whether serum protein concentrations and coarse-grained white blood cell profiles, immune quantities that can easily be assayed in many species, can predict, and therefore serve as proxies for, lymphocyte composition properties. We do this in rewilded laboratory mice, which combine the benefits of immune phenotyping of lab mice with the natural context and immune variation found in the wild. We find that easily assayed immune quantities are largely ineffective as predictors of lymphocyte composition, either on their own or with other covariates. Immunoglobulin G (IgG) concentration and neutrophil-lymphocyte ratio show the most promise as indicators of other immune traits, but their explanatory power is limited. Our results prescribe caution in inferring immune phenotypes beyond what is directly measured, but they do also highlight some potential paths forward for the development of proxy measures employable by ecoimmunologists.
-
more » « less
Abstract To understand socialization pathways in the development of specific, self‐relevant emotions, we examined the socialization of third‐grade children's experience and expression of pride in a sample of 196 mother–child dyads, including children's gender and race as instantiations of cultural contexts. Mothers' self‐reported beliefs about the value of positive emotions, beliefs about the value of negative emotions, and positive expressivity within the family were examined in relation to Black and White boys' and girls' own reported feelings and expressions of pride in response to five vignettes. Results revealed that mothers' beliefs and expressive behaviour were associated with their children's feelings of pride, but were not significantly associated with children's expressing pride in the vignettes. Socialization processes seemed similar across child gender and race, with the one exception of maternal value of positivity being differently associated with children's pride expression by race. Results exploring gender and race as cultural contexts indicated that mothers' beliefs and expressivity varied little by child gender, but did by race; Black mothers reported valuing positive emotions more so than White mothers. Children reported pride differences in the vignettes by both gender and race, with female and Black children reporting feeling and expressing pride more so than male and White children. These findings suggest parental and cultural roles in the socialization of how children feel and express pride.
-
more » « less
Abstract Individual differences in children's cognitive abilities impact life and health outcomes. What factors influence these individual differences during development? Here, we test whether children's environments predict cognitive performance, independent of well‐characterized socioeconomic effects. We analyzed data from 9002 9‐ to 10‐year olds from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development Study, an ongoing longitudinal study with community samples across the United States. Using youth‐ and caregiver‐report questionnaires and national database registries (e.g., neighborhood crime, walkability), we defined principal components summarizing children's home, school, neighborhood, and cultural environments. In two independent samples (
n s = 3475, 5527), environmental components explained unique variance in children's general cognitive ability, executive functioning, and learning/memory abilities. Furthermore, increased neighborhood enrichment was associated with an attenuated relationship between sociodemographics and general cognitive abilities. Thus, the environment accounts for unique variance in cognitive performance in children and should be considered alongside sociodemographic factors to better understand brain functioning and behavior across development.
