[All posts in this series can be found at The Arab Mind archive.]
"Give me a child until he is five and he is mine forever."
(Various attributions)
Arab Child Rearing Practices
A culture's Child rearing practices transmit the culture from one generation to the next. Because of the complex interplay of child rearing, character formation, and culture (the sum total, and emergent characteristics, of the character of the members of the culture), child rearing practices and the culture so engendered evolve slowly. Contact with a new culture often accelerates evolutionary change in cultures that are relatively open to such change; at the same time such contact often provokes significant reactionary movement, but without such encounters, culture is very stable.
Cultural norms and trends reinforce and/or stigmatize various child rearing tendencies, often with surprising results. In the last 100 years in America, corporal punishment of children has gone from an unquestioned norm ("spare the rod and spoil the child") to a cultural and legal transgression. While many bemoan the the loss of discipline that has accompanied the changes of which this is emblematic (permissive child rearing has become the norm in much of the American middle class) such changes also have had significant positive effects. For example, children raised in our permissive environment tend to have more curiosity, are more strongly individualistic, and are less inhibited (mentally, ie more creative, as well as in other ways.)
Arab culture has been static for a very long time. Arab child rearing practices reinforce those character traits which tend to support stasis.
In this post and a number to follow, I will discuss details of Arab child rearing practices and how such treatment effects character.
Arab boys and girls are treated so differently, from birth, that to describe child rearing requires two completely separate treatises. I will start with some basics and then go into more detail for both boys and girls.
[Unless otherwise specified, all quotes are from The Arab Mind, by Raphael Patai.]
Traditional Arab child rearing starts with the overvaluation of the infant boy and the utter devaluation of the girl. It is complicated by the high value placed on discipline and obedience to the authority of the father. It can come as no surprise, considering how women are treated in the most religious Muslim communities, that a women's status is based almost exclusively on her relation to the men in her life. She is subservient to her father and brothers early in life, then to her husband, and once married her value depends on her giving birth to a boy. The birth of a daughter is treated as a disaster, shameful, at best ignored by all, while the birth of a son is met with celebration and joy. With each pregnancy, the stakes are raised for the woman who has not yet had a son.
(This forms part of the central core of the recent novel A Thousand Splendid Suns, by Khaled Hosseini, an Afghani author. Phyllis Chesler has written quite movingly about her experience in purdah at her Blog and in her recent book, The Death of Feminism: What's Next in the Struggle for Women's Freedom.)
Thus, from the moment of birth a child in the Arab world is given a positive or negative valence. And from that moment, their experiences are quiet distinct in ways that would shock even the most sexist of American parents.
Of equal importance, the two parents have distinctly different roles in the family, and again the sexual dimorphism involved would be surprising to those who have grown up in a more egalitarian culture: (pp. 27)
Local and individual variations aside, the general situation in the Arab family is that it is the father who is severe, stern, and authoritarian, while the mother is, by contrast, loving and compassionate. This difference between the attitude of the the parents is so often referred to in Arabic literature, including proverbs, and in studies dealing with Arab communities, that one cannot doubt its widespread occurrence. It is because of this difference in treatment of the child that the latter, while respecting and even fearing the father, develops a more affectionate attachment to the mother. In the lives of both sons and daughters the love for the mother remains important, even after marriage.
The combination of the strict differentiation between the parents and the concomitant differences in value of the child are expressed throughout childhood. Arab boys are typically breast fed for 2 to 3 years while girls are weaned after only 1 year. There are complicated reasons for this including the folk mores that support pampering the nursing infant and the belief (which has some truth to it) that the mother will become pregnant more easily (in order to have a son) after the infant is weaned. Arab mothers practice demand feeding. The girl is thus weaned well before the development of significant language and once weaned, her needs are relatively neglected. The young boy, on the other hand, continues nursing until long after the establishment of language. He is able to verbalize his desires and is instantly gratified when he desires the breast, which comforts and arouses as well as nourishes. As per Patai: (pp. 33)
... the verbalization of the one major childhood desire, that for the mother's breast, is followed, in most cases at least, by instant gratification. And, what is psychologically equally important, the emphatic verbal formulation of the wish carries in itself, almost automatically, the guarantee of its fulfillment without the need for any additional action on the part of the child. This experience, repeated several times a day for a number of months, cannot fail to leave a lasting impression on the psyche of the boy child. It may not be too far-fetched to seek a connection between this situation in childhood and a characteristic trait of the adult Arab personality which has frequently been observed and commented upon: the proclivity for making an emphatic verbal statement of intention and then failing to follow it up with any action that could lead to its realization. It would seem that - at least in certain contexts and moods - stating an intention or wish in itself provides a psychological satisfaction which actually can become a deterrent to undertaking the action that is averred.
In addition, we now know that insufficient frustration in early life, ie imperfect and occasionally delayed gratification, is an essential component of a healthy character. Children who receive too much gratification, just as those who receive insufficient gratification in early life, are prone to developing narcissistic and borderline character traits, such as, among others, poor frustration tolerance, poor affect control, and over-reliance on the environment to help regulate internal mood states.
Thus far I have just touched the surface of Arab child rearing customs. With the caveat that there are always going to be many exceptions and that even children raised under pathogenic circumstances can grow up to be happy, psychologically healthy adults, we can already discern some patterns that are troubling. The extended period of instant gratification, nursing on demand, predisposes Arab boys to be demanding, with poor frustration tolerance, little ability to delay gratifications in the interest of long term goals, and poorly empathic. Although I have so far focused primarily on the Arab boy, the impact of her experiences are equally signifcant for the Arab girl. Treated as a shameful creature from birth, weaned early and neglected emotionally, Arab girls pay a high price for the "crime" of being born the wrong gender; I will elaborate more on their experiences in a future post.
There is a great deal more to explore about Arab child rearing and its effect on the development of the Arab mind; more to follow.
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