[In the News] Dorsa Amir interviewed by Boston's NPR station, WGBH

In a recent interview with WGBH, Dorsa Amir discussed the evolution of childhood and how industrialization has upended some of its most consistent features.

You can listen to the full interview here.

And read the "three takeaways" here:

• "Amir has observed that children in Ecuador enjoy a lot of unstructured play time, much like American kids did in the past. She says that nowadays American children have less control over how they spend their time, but they have found space to explore online. While communicating over the internet may have some benefits, Amir says it’s no replacement for face to face interactions, when it comes to a child’s development.

• According to Amir, having friends who are both older and younger is important for a child’s learning. She says that when a child is learning a new skill, it helps them to copy a slightly older child whose abilities are closer to theirs, rather than an experienced adult. But the way classrooms are set up today typically means that kids have friends who are mostly their own age, which Amir says may affect how quickly they can master new concepts.

• We all know helicopter parenting has its downsides, but how involved is too involved? Amir says that not allowing a child to have unstructured playtime and not giving kids any independence can potentially contribute to issues with attention, conflict resolution, regulating emotions, and other social skills."

[In the News] Our interview with Cultured Scene Magazine

Our team recently did an interview with the folks over at Cultured Scene Magazine, an online publication for early-career social learning researchers. If you want to know more about our group, check out the article here!

[Paper spotlight] Fatherhood, egalitarianism, & child health in two small‐scale societies

Out now from members Adam Boyette, Sheina-Lew-Levy, and their colleagues in the American Journal of Human Biology [Open Access].

Objectives

The study goals were to (a) characterize the cultural model of fatherhood among the BaYaka, a community of egalitarian foragers in the Republic of the Congo; (b) test if BaYaka fathers' quality in relation to the cultural model predicts their children's energetic status; and (c) compare the variance in BaYaka children's energetic status to that of children of neighboring Bondongo fisher‐farmers, among whom there is less cooperative caregiving, less resource sharing, and greater social inequality.

Methods

We used informal interviews to establish the cultural model of fatherhood, which we used to build a peer ranking task to quantify father quality. Children's energetic status was assessed by measuring height, weight, and triceps skinfold thickness. We then tested for associations between father quality scores derived from the ranking task and children's energetic status using ordinary least squares regression. Equality of variance tests were used to compare BaYaka and Bondongo children's energetic statuses.

Results

The BaYaka described fathers as responsible for acquiring resources and maintaining marital harmony, welcoming others to the community and sharing well with them, and teaching their children about the forest. Agreement on men's quality in these domains was high, but father quality did not significantly predict children's energetic status. BaYaka children had lower variance in energetic status overall compared to Bondongo children.

Conclusions

We suggest that the core BaYaka values and practices that maintain egalitarian social relations and distribution of resources help buffer children's health and well‐being from variation in their fathers' qualities in culturally valued domains.