From Cuenca to Queens: An Anthropological Story of Transnational Migration

6. The Children

6 The Children Introduction FortwosummersbeforeIwenttoEcuadorinIworkedinaday-care center on the Syracuse University campus. It was a great summer job. I spent much of the day outdoors, I had time to read anthropology during the children’s nap time, and I never took my work home. As it turned out, however, that job was more than an easy way to make money; it became central to refining some of my anthropological interests. Like most young North Americans, before that job I had not spent much time around small children once I was no longer one myself. Working with toddlers who were just on the cusp of becoming culturally appropriate beings, I was fascinated with analyzing their cognitive development and the ways in which cultural values are transmitted to children. I closely watched how parents interacted with their children, how the staff consistently moved children toward certain behaviors, and how the staff discussed and thought about their work. Child-rearing is one of the few times when we take what is generally implicit cultural knowledge and make it explicit. But, even then, much of teaching culture remains unspoken . Later I was able to refine my understandings of how such seeminglysmallthings (likewhenorhowoftenacaregiverinterruptsplay)can reflect culturally important ideas about proper socialization (see Honig and Lally ; Conroy et al. ; Sinha ). Anthropologists and others have argued that observable patterns in child-rearing reflect important cultural values about gender, personhood, and morality (Levine ; Whiting and Whiting ; Harkness and Super ; Reid and Valsiner ). Indeed, as Robert Levine explains, the patterns reflect  From Cuenca to Queens how ‘‘[m]ost parents in most societies produce children with the virtues the parents most desire and the vices they are most willing to tolerate’’ (Levine :). Primedbythesefreshexperiencesintheday-carecenterandindependent study classes in child development, I went to Ecuador with a keen eye for watching children and their families. In addition to observing children within families, I also spent some time in two day-care centers, one in Guayaquil and another in Cuenca. The day-care center in Cuenca was located in a busy market and was established for the children of the women who sell produce in the market. What I saw in Ecuador was often vastly different from the mainly middle- and upper-middle-class values promoted by the day-care center I worked at in the United States. Issues of self-esteem, confidence building, and independence were promoted in that day-care center, and the explicit philosophy was to redirect children who were behaving inappropriately, not to castigate or punish them. The staff members were encouraged to avoid words like ‘‘no’’ and ‘‘don’t’’ when correcting a child, to discuss the behavior, and to redirect the child toward positive activities and behaviors. We were not supposed to say to children who hit another child, ‘‘No, don’t do that,’’ but to explain why it was wrong and try to have the children reach their own conclusions about how their anger could be better handled by talking, not hitting. Through this method, the children were supposed to learn to control themselvesnotbecauseanauthorityfiguretoldthemtobutbecausethey came to understand the ramifications of their actions. It was deemed important for children to reach their own conclusions about how they would like to be treated and therefore how they should treat others. While we completely sidestepped the fact that in reality there was only one truly acceptable conclusion to these child-teacher discussions, the process of discussion and the rejection of blind allegiance to authority were considered central in promoting independent, confident children. The child-care settings that I observed in Ecuador were far from middle-class, so a direct comparison to the Syracuse setting is very problematic . Both the homes and the centers in Ecuador were poor, with few toys and supplies for the children. The day-care centers had very high child-to-teacher ratios. I offer this comparison between the Syracuse center and what I saw in Ecuador not because I think it is accurate or fair (thereareequallylargedifferencesbetweenmiddle-classandpoorpopulations in the United States), but simply to orient the reader to my perspective . I had the educated, middle-class, predominantly white, North The Children  American example most directly in my experiences. Much of what I observed and recorded about children in Ecuador was refracted through that experience. For example, one pattern that stood out for me in both theinstitutionalandthehomesettingsinEcuadorwasthatchildrenwere not encouraged to be ‘‘independent...