Whether it be soft or hard, child-rearing in the west is geared for the individual. Do we rely on each other merely for sustenance and without any authentic need for company? What potential growth opportunities and deeper meanings are we possibly ignoring in order to assure our children’s individual safety?

During the time when Adrie Kusserow was employed as a nanny in an upper middle class community on Manhattan’s upper east side, she kept a keen eye on the different child-rearing practices of three New York City neighborhoods, investigated their local preschools and interviewed a number of willing parents.

Kusserow deduced that there exists “distinctive, and not necessarily mutually compatible, styles of rearing children to be individuals.” The first style she called “soft individualism.” She defined soft individualism as “the need to cultivate a youngster’s unique inner self, assumed to be vulnerable to attacks on self esteem.  Parenting to foster soft individualism involves protecting the child from harsh threats (e.g., through avoidance of critical discipline), while seeking to actualize the child’s potentialities and abilities.”  These soft parents are more likely to “seek just the right resources for their child’s unique self-development,” she seaid.

The second style of child-rearing she called “hard individualism,” and these parents were more likely to have their kids safety in mind. Parents focused on helping their children develop harder shells for the work place or don a more, tougher, protective coat of armor. Kusserow characterized these parents as wanting “their children to have tough, resilient selves, and independence in the sense of not getting pulled into negative social dangers. If a child took karate lessons…it was not for purposes of self-actualizing, but for toughening self-defense amid local dangers.” In these particular towns she indicated that “feelings were not spared from such self-affronting practices as routine teasing, shaming, or harsh verbal discipline, since these were acts valued for imparting tough, defended boundaries of self.” Other hard parents were more concerned with their child’s social and academic prowess, demanding a higher “degree of upward striving and achievement” from their children.

Does the west honor individualism to no end? Are parents willing to go to any mile in order to assure that they their children will become self-sufficient? What does it really mean for a child to be an individual today?

Here is the link to the original article: http://ethos.anthro.illinois.edu/KusserowIndiv.htm