If you give a toddler everything she wants, she’ll develop a bad case of the Terrible Two’s, into the Terrible Three’s and Four’s. She’ll become a spoiled brat, and she’ll probably spend her whole life demanding her own way. Everybody knows that, right? University of Maryland, Baltimore County associate professor Bambi Chapin’s anthropological research in Southeast Asia shows it isn't necessarily true.
Professor Chapin, her husband and son lived for nearly two years in a village in central Sri Lanka, an island democracy off the southern tip of India, population 20 million. She mostly was “hanging out” with women in their kitchens, drinking tea, not just talking to them about how they were raising their children, but watching them do it. She describes the surprising results in her just-published book, Childhood in a Sri Lankan Village: Shaping Hierarchy and Desire. Professor Chapin joins SheilahKast in the studio to talk about it.
Audio for this segment will be available by the end of the day.
