In Southern Madagascar, Gabriel Scheidecker observed Bara children playing. He was struck by their elaborate games. A group of 3- and 4-year-olds recreated a bilo, the possession ceremony that is a key psycho-social healing technique for this pastoralist community. One child took the role of the healer, two took the roles of those possessed by spirits, and the others sang and clapped in the distinctive rhythms used to induce the state of possession.
Bara children have rich, playful social lives among other children in the villages. This cohort of age mates, including many cousins and siblings, will grow up to be economically intertwined throughout their lives, herding and subsistence farming together. Their play thus serves many purposes. It facilitates mental, physical, and social development, as is the case for children around the world, it establishes bonds among peers with whom one’s economic life will unfold, and it includes developing local skills and knowledge, such as the songs and steps to perform the bilo.
The engrossing lives of Bara children occur in a context of family role norms that differ markedly from the expectations of Western families today. As in most places around the world and probably through the span of human history, it is considered inappropriate for Bara parents to play games with or to speak at length to a child. Adults are warmly present, providing attentive, nurturing physical care. Children are lovingly fed, washed, nursed through sickness, and protected from all possible harm. But Bara parents do not see themselves as a source of entertainment. For one thing, they are busy working and caring for the family and elders. For another, such behavior would disrupt important age hierarchies.
Age hierarchies are central to the economic, social, and emotional fabric of societies across Africa and beyond. They cement the commitment of young people to contribute to the local community and to care for elders later in life, essential in contexts where no public pension system is available. They also provide a system of coordination where families and larger kin networks are economic units. This is analogous to the needs of corporations and universities in the West, which are also typically hierarchical. In general, family structures the world over are best understood as culturally-transmitted systems adapted and attuned to the social and economic context.
“Early Childhood Development” Interventions Impose Contemporary Western Values
All over the world right now, however, local family structures are being disrupted by the Early Childhood Development (ECD) interventions of European and North American non-governmental organizations (NGOs; aka non-profit organizations). Parents are taught by such programs that their caregiving is inadequate or even harmful. For children’s brains to develop properly, parents must play with their children themselves and provide educational toys.
There are many problematic aspects of ECD interventions. For one, they are based on biased science. As in other domains of psychology, the studies that define our understanding of normal development and adequate child-rearing were conducted almost solely with Western children, and perspectives from the rest of the world face a higher bar to publish. For example, as Heidi Keller has detailed, attachment theory represents a Western middle-class perspective, ignoring the caregiving values and practices in the majority of the world, while claiming universality in its components and implying a moral judgment of other parenting practices.
ECD interventions also produce and disseminate unjustified deficit claims about populations in the Global South, placing blame on disadvantaged families while leaving unaddressed the structural conditions that generate global inequality. Furthermore, these interventions and their underlying research are funded largely by corporate foundations such as the Lego foundation, where there could be concerns about a conflict of interest.
ECD interventions disrupt age hierarchies both by reshaping the role of children in the family systems and by treating parents like children who need Western education to fulfill their roles. Local knowledge, the priorities parents have for their children’s development, culturally adjusted socialization strategies, and the web of lifespan needs that local norms evolved to meet are largely disregarded.
ECD interventions ignore that children in many contexts around the world, particularly in rural contexts, play with and explore the real world around them and the objects in it, and that there are children’s cultures of transforming local materials into toys. They elevate the importance of toys related to specific cognitive skills, for example manipulating square symmetrical objects. Other kinds of locally valued skills, and the social responsibility that might be most highly valued, are disregarded.
Perhaps most concerning is that these interventions sometimes occur in coercive contexts, where it is difficult for parents to decline or avoid participation. For example in Ethiopia, parenting interventions targeted Borana pastoralists who had taken refuge in a displaced-persons camp during a severe drought. Many parents feared that refusing might jeopardize access to food.
Echoes of Past Injustices
There are echoes of past wrongs here. For example, this brings to mind how the Nestlé corporation increased markets for baby formula in Africa by sending sales representatives dressed as nurses to distribute samples, which were free long enough for a mother’s milk to dry up, then had to be purchased at sometimes unaffordable costs.
There are also echoes of the “Indian boarding schools” that sought to dismantle Native American culture. At the time, the practice was justified by similar arguments as ECD interventions today, and similarly, many people involved probably believed they were protecting or enhancing opportunities for vulnerable children. Looking back, we wish they had sought to understand local practices and reflected on their own ethnocentrism.
Psychologists certainly aim to do better now, for example, as seen in the American Psychological Association’s 2023 offer of apology to First Peoples in the United States and 2021 offer of apology to people of color. But sadly, in studying only Western children, then assuming universal relevance, developmental psychologists are unwittingly involved in this new form of psychological colonialism.
To be aligned with efforts to right past wrongs, psychologists must think critically and learn about local culture before implementing interventions of any kind. Research that takes the knowledge and perspectives of parents and families around the world seriously, and approaches local practices with curiosity, is essential for a better scientific understanding of childhood development. It can also allow psychologists and educators to develop forms of support aligned with real needs and that build on the strengths of families and communities.
