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Everyone has to lie in Tzeltal
Abstract
In a famous paper Harvey Sacks (1974) argued that the sequential properties of greeting conventions, as well as those governing the flow of information, mean that 'everyone has to lie'. In this paper I show this dictum to be equally true in the Tzeltal Mayan community of Tenejapa, in southern Mexico, but for somewhat different reasons. The phenomenon of interest is the practice of routine fearsome threats to small children. Based on a longitudinal corpus of videotaped and tape-recorded naturally-occurring interaction between caregivers and children in five Tzeltal families, the study examines sequences of Tzeltal caregivers' speech aimed at controlling the children's behaviour and analyzes the children's developing pragmatic skills in handling such controlling utterances, from prelinguistic infants to age five and over. Infants in this society are considered to be vulnerable, easily scared or shocked into losing their 'souls', and therefore at all costs to be protected and hidden from outsiders and other dangers. Nonetheless, the chief form of control (aside from physically removing a child from danger) is to threaten, saying things like "Don't do that, or I'll take you to the clinic for an injection," These overt scare-threats - rarely actually realized - lead Tzeltal children by the age of 2;6 to 3;0 to the understanding that speech does not necessarily convey true propositions, and to a sensitivity to the underlying motivations for utterances distinct from their literal meaning. By age 4;0 children perform the same role to their younger siblings;they also begin to use more subtle non-true (e.g. ironic) utterances. The caretaker practice described here is related to adult norms of social lying, to the sociocultural context of constraints on information flow, social control through gossip, and the different notion of 'truth' that arises in the context of non-verifiability characteristic of a small-scale nonliterate society.
... And yet, if Danziger is right, then multiple, distinct concepts of lying exist in different parts of the world and in different cultural and speech communities (cf. Brown, 2002;Rumsey, 2013). To many of us, this might come as a surprise. ...
... As anthropologists, however, this kind of variation does not strike us as implausible. Speech communities seem to vary in how lying is treated: how permissible it is to lie, how frequently it is discussed, how often accusations of lying are entertained, and how serious such accusations are deemed (Brown, 2002;Cole, 1997;Gilsenan, 2016;Nishimura, 2019;Sweetser, 1987). After reading Danziger's work in Maya communities, we reflected on our own experiences in Shuar and Achuar communities in Ecuador. ...
... Consequently, commitments could be considered a lie, for instance, if they are insincere or if they imply unfeasible conditions. Judgments about whether a particular speech act counts as a lie might involve not just aspects of the speaker (e.g., their intentions and knowledge), but might also involve cultural and linguistic norms-for example, norms regarding when it is appropriate to assert certain things, which in turn might hinge on other cultural values and ideas about the world (Argenti-Pillen, 2007;Basso, 1988;Brown, 2002;Gilsenan, 2016;Rumsey, 2013). In the case of lying, we propose that norms, values, and attitudes about what makes something a lie exist within an epistemic worldview-by which we mean, a set of attitudes (implicit or explicit) about what an agent can or can't know, and therefore what is or might be justifiable for them to assert. ...
Is there variation across cultures in what counts as a lie? Here we present evidence for a potentially unique conceptualization of lying in Shuar-Achuar communities in Ecuador, contrasting this conceptualization with people in twelve other countries and non-Shuar-Achuar Ecuadorians. In Shuar-Achuar communities, but not others, predictions of the future that turn out to be false are considered lies, even when the events that render them false are unforeseen. Failed commitments, on the other hand, are not seen as lies when unforeseen events prevent them from being kept. To explain this phenomenon, we suggest that there is an epistemic norm that regulates predictive speech acts in Shuar-Achuar communities, linked to the view that the future can be known under certain special circumstances. This norm holds that claiming knowledge of the future is a form of lying when events prove the prediction false. Commitments, on the other hand, do not imply certainty about the future and so are not considered lies when circumstances prevent them from being fulfilled. In addition, we found several other factors that influence whether speech acts are categorized as lies, including the speaker's expertise, group membership, and the nature of the outcome.
... We focus on a practice that occurs in a variety of nondominant communities around the world, but which may be lumped in with negatively evaluated practices if its cultural logic is not understood. Correcting children's behavior through indirect means such as mock threats and lighthearted teasing are sometimes preferred to help children learn cultural values and appropriate ways of acting, in some Mexican-heritage, African American, Inuit, Western Apache, Mayan, and working-class white communities (Basso, 1979;Miller, 1982Miller, , 1986Eisenberg, 1986;Schieffelin, 1986;Goodwin, 1990;Briggs, 1998;Brown, 2002;Rogoff, 2003). However, even lighthearted teasing likely has a negative connotation among developmental researchers and parenting class instructors, many of whom are from European American highly schooled communities. ...
... However, some ethnographic research has suggested that instructional ribbing conveys a range of cultural values, and encourages community affiliation, conflict resolution, and muting the harshness of correction (Basso, 1979;Miller, 1982Miller, , 1986Eisenberg, 1986;Schieffelin, 1986;Briggs, 1998;Rogoff, 2003;Martínez, 2020). For example, in an ethnographic study in an Indigenous community in Mexico, Tzeltal Mayan elders used mock threats to shape the behavior of small children (Brown, 2002): "That woman will grab you and take you away" or "I'll take you to the clinic for an injection." Brown argued that this approach could promote an early development of awareness of others' minds. ...
... Brown argued that this approach could promote an early development of awareness of others' minds. Even by age 4, Tzeltal children used something like instructional ribbing to correct the behavior of younger children whom they were watching over (Brown, 2002). ...
Valued cultural practices of marginalized communities are often critiqued by dominant cultural communities. In this study, US Mexican-heritage mothers who had experience in Indigenous ways (and limited schooling and parenting classes) espoused instructional ribbing – a cultural practice involving indirectly guiding children’s behavior through mock threats or lighthearted teasing to help them see how their misbehavior impacts others – as a positive, familiar practice that encourages active learning. However, European American mothers were very critical. Indications of cultural change came from US Mexican-heritage mothers with experience in two cultural systems – Western schooling/parenting classes and Indigenous ways. Half viewed instructional ribbing positively, and half were negative and often referred to what they learned in parenting classes as a source of their change from prior generations. The value of instructional ribbing in some communities may be undermined by experience in dominant cultural systems where its familial and communal value and supports are not understood.
... To date, there has been a small number of studies directly investigating parental lying. In a pioneering study, Tzeltal farmers in Mexico were documented to frequently make false threats and promises to their children (Brown, 2002). For example, parents would tell their children that there were scary animals in the woods as a means of keeping them from wandering off the farms. ...
... Occasionally, the advice may come with a warning that something bad may happen if the children were disobedient (e.g., "Don't play hide and seek at night or the ghost will get you"). The category of supernatural lies has not been systematically examined in prior research, although specific instances have been reported in the early literature (Brown, 2002). The questionnaire does not rule out the possibility that parents could have actually believed in the superstitions and not viewed them as lies. ...
... Given that Singapore is a multiracial and multireligious society, there are many superstitions and folklore tales associated with different cultural beliefs. Such lies may transmit values and serve as a strategy to frighten children into behaving in accordance to the caregivers' wishes (Brown, 2002). We also found that parents who reported lower levels of education reported telling more superstitious lies to their children. ...
The current study extends the limited body of research on the relationship between parental lying and religiosity by investigating 4 types of lies told by Singaporean parents. We found that in contrast to Chinese and American parents (Heyman, Hsu, Fu, & Lee, 2013), greater religiosity among Singaporean parents is related to less lying to children, with the exception of white lies. This pattern of findings suggests that the effect of religiosity on parental lying may be culturally and/or religion specific. Such findings expand the current literature and provide insight into parenting practices that are nearly universal, as well as into the kinds of experiences that are likely to influence children as they begin to form their own understanding of lying.
... This seems to depend on the status of the questioner, since greetings have to do with affiliation (to a certain social group) and impression management (for instance, one would not greet one's boss not in the same way as one's buddy from the soccer club). In 'Everyone Has to Lie in Tzeltal' (Brown 2002), a homage to Sacks' 'Everyone Has to Lie' (1975), Brown discusses 'threat lies', also assuming that in certain societies lying is obligatory under certain conditions. ...
... At least from the parents' points of view, the motive here is of the type "Benefit other." With this in mind, let us briefly review the works of Brown (2002) and Wang et al. (2012), which present evidence for parents' lying in different non-Western cultures. Clearly, parents' lying is also usual in Western societies. ...
... As already mentioned above, observing Tzeltal speakers from Tenejapa in Southern Mexico, Brown (2002) dealt with a category she calls 'threat lies'. For instance, parents' utterances typically include utterances like The woman will 'tzak' you, with 'tzak' meaning 'grab you and take you away forever', in order to control the child's behaviour. ...
... Prior studies suggest that caregivers' responses to children's crying are a site of pragmatic socialization, including learning how to express affect/emotion and to interact with others (Harkness and Super, 1985;Miller and Sperry, 1987;Schieffelin, 1990;Wilce, 1998;Brown, 2002;Demuth, 2013;Ahn, 2016;Holm Kvist, 2018). In a study of caregiverechild interaction in a rural Kipsigis community (Kenya), Harkness and Super (1985) examined mothers' responses to children's crying and other manifestations of distress. ...
... Prior studies have also shown how adults' responses to children's crying socialize children into participation in discursive activities that are valued in the community (Wilce, 1998;Brown, 2002). In a Bangladesh community, Wilce (1998) observed that "troubles tellings" are a central activity among adults, and are often modelled to children by adults when responding to children's crying. ...
This special issue on crying and responses to crying is composed of six papers that investigate the ways children's crying is produced and responded to in everyday interaction in a range of languages, settings, and cultures. Crying episodes are approached from a multimodal interactional perspective, by paying attention to the participation frameworks and precipitating events in which it emerges (e.g., peer conflicts, accidents), its verbal and embodied production, and the ways caregivers and other adults and children respond in displaying stances, performing social actions, and (re-)engaging the crying children into activities. In addition to interactional micro-analysis of crying and responses to crying, the papers discuss the implications of crying episodes for children's pragmatic socialization, including stance, social action, identity, and morality.
... It is considered indirect in that there is said to be a mismatch between utterance and " meaning " (a distinction captured in Grice's 1989 definition of non-natural and natural meaning). This purported mismatch has been of great interest for cognitive reasons and has led to many studies that have probed how hearers are able to discern and interpret the unspoken aspect of ironic messages (e.g., Brown 1995 Brown , 2002 Giora 1995 Giora , 2003). According to traditional linguistic approaches to irony, the indirect nature of irony is accounted for by asserting that ironic utterances " mean " the opposite of what they say. ...
... Maya interaction has been widely noted for its " indirect " nature (see Brody 1991: 89 for a compilation of Mayanists' observations on the value of indirection) and in Sakapultek, first-person complement-taking predicates of desire and cognition, as well as evaluatively weighted lexical items (e.g., lazy, liar, whore) are seldom found in gossip, scolding, advice or any of the other moral discourse genres where we would expect to find evaluative stance-taking. 9 Indeed, I was drawn to investigate moral irony by way of responding to the following question: If assessments and locutive forms, which explicitly name a particular stance-taking action and/or are marked for first-person semantic experiencers or agents, are not commonly preferred resources for moral stance-taking, what are the stance-taking resources used among communities that value indirectness in expression? Brown (1990 Brown ( , 1995 Brown ( , 2002) and Brody (1991) have explored the discursive manifestations of the importance that the linguistic ideologies of two different Maya groups, the Tzeltal and Tojolab'al, place on indirection (see Brenneis [1986] and Brody [1991] for a breakdown of criteria for categorizing varieties of indirection). They each examine talk among women, the social category in both groups that is held to the strictest standards of avoiding conflict or public emotional expression. ...
This paper presents an ethnographically sensitive account of a family of modal constructions in Sakapultek, a Mayan language spoken in highland Guatemala. The constructions in question share many characteristics with those that have been analyzed as ironic in English and are dubbed “moral irony,” due both to their similarities to irony in other languages and to their primary interactional function. The morphosyntactic composition and semiotic processes involved in moral irony are described and the proposed account of these semiotic properties makes use of Goffman’s distinction between author, animator and principal as dimensions of the speaker role. The indexical properties of moral irony are demonstrated and it is argued that they play a greater role in determining ironic meaning than speaker intentions. Using extended examples from naturally-occurring talk, the paper also demonstrates how irony functions in evaluative stance-taking in Sakapultek. Such examples illustrate both the relatively presupposing and entailing aspects of moral irony’s indexical meaning. Moral irony is argued to be modal in that it projects hypothetical or unreal possible worlds and ironic in that it indirectly and negatively evaluates the stances of an imagined principal. Finally, on the ethnographic level, moral irony is examined in light of what it reveals about Sakapultek notions of moral personhood. Keywords: Irony; Modality; Stance; Footing; Personhood; Mayan languages.
... In a case with Tzeltal-speaking Mayan farmers from Southern Mexico, Brown (2002) shows that lying is used as a form of control by performing directives toward children 11 . One case that the author explores is threat-lies. ...
Concepts help us to represent the world. They underly how we organize our thinking regarding beliefs and complex structures, such as prototypes or theories. While some concepts appear universally present–likely due to evolved mechanisms– others seem to be culturally specific or embedded in complex cultural phenomena. Based on the existing literature, I will address where the concept of lying lies in the continuum between universalism and particularism, what we know about cultural differences in the concept of lying, and how the concept has been studied cross-culturally so far. Additionally, I will discuss the difficulties that the phenomenon of lying poses when aiming to understand it from a comparative perspective.
... In a case with Tzeltal-speaking Mayan farmers from Southern Mexico, Brown (2002) shows that lying is used as a form of control by performing directives toward children 11 . One case that the author explores is threat-lies. ...
... However, research on parents' lies to their children is scarce. To date, researchers have investigated parenting by lying in the U.S., Canada, China, and Singapore (Brown, 2002;Heyman et al., 2009;Meiting and Hua, 2020;Santos et al., 2017;Setoh et al., 2020a;Setoh et al., 2020b). These studies have focused on the types of lies that parents most commonly tell their children (Heyman et al., 2009;, as well as the associations that parenting by lying has with lying and psychosocial adjustment-in particular internalizing (e.g., anxiety, low mood) and externalizing (e.g., anger, aggression) problems (Hays and Carver, 2014;Santos et al., 2017;Meiting and Hua, 2020;Setoh et al., 2020b). ...
Parenting by lying—a practice whereby parents lie to their children as a means of emotional or behavioral control—is common throughout the world. This study expands upon the existing, albeit limited, research on parenting by lying by exploring the prevalence and long-term associations of this parenting practice in Turkey. Turkish university students ( N = 182) retrospectively reported on their experiences of parenting by lying in childhood, their current frequency of lying towards parents, their present level of psychosocial adjustment problems, and their expression of psychopathic traits. The results found that recalling higher levels of parenting by lying in childhood was significantly and positively associated with both increased lying to parents as well as the expression of secondary psychopathic traits in adulthood. The novel findings uncovered in this paper highlight the potential long-term associations that parental lying to children may have on their psychosocial development in adulthood.
... "Tinaak" can be translated as "to lie, to trick" -and this language use is also characterized by the fact that speakers knowingly and willingly tell someone something that does not reflect social or physical reality. See also Haiman (1998: 83 f.) and Brown (2002); for more general remarks see also Arndt & Janney (1987: 201). ...
This volume deals with the children’s socialization on the Trobriands. After a survey of ethnographic studies on childhood, the book zooms in on indigenous ideas of conception and birth-giving, the children’s early development, their integration into playgroups, their games and their education within their `own little community’ until they reach the age of seven years. During this time children enjoy much autonomy and independence. Attempts of parental education are confined to a minimum. However, parents use subtle means to raise their children. Educational ideologies are manifest in narratives and in speeches addressed to children. They provide guidelines for their integration into the Trobrianders’ “balanced society” which is characterized by cooperation and competition. It does not allow individual accumulation of wealth – surplus property gained has to be redistributed – but it values the fame acquired by individuals in competitive rituals. Fame is not regarded as threatening the balance of their society.
... For them, any statement that is a mismatch between the objective facts or reality will be strongly judged as a lie. The result that a lie is determined by its objective falsity is similar to the result of Brown's (2002) study on Tzeltal people. False statements turning out to be true are not lies for majority of Indonesians. ...
For most people, a lie would be defined solely as a false statement. However, many philosophers argue that a statement does not need to be false to be considered a lie, what is important is that the speaker believes that the statement is false. In a prototype semantic analysis, there are three elements of a lie, namely factual falsity, belief, and intention (Coleman and Kay, 1981). As in the case of philosophers’ arguments, English, Spanish, Arabic and Hungarian speakers consider belief as the main element of a prototypical lie. By replicating Coleman and Kay’s study of Indonesian speakers, the present paper tries to answer the following research questions. (1) Does the Indonesian word bohong ‘lie’ consist of the Coleman & Kay’s prototype elements? (2) If it does, what is the order of the elements? (3) Do Indonesians interpret the situation in which a lie occurs similarly to speakers of other languages? And (4) how to interpret the results of this experiment from the philosophical perspective? The results reveal that not all elements suggested by Coleman and Kay (1981) are present in lying according to Indonesians and the factuality of the statement is more important to Indonesians than belief. Thus, Indonesians have a perception of a lie that is different from the definitions suggested by the philosophers.
... Although childhood lying has been studied for many decades (see Lee, 2013 for a review), researchers have only recently become interested in parenting by lying. The first published paper on this topic was an anthropological study conducted on Tzeltal-speaking Mayan farmers in Tenejapa, a rural community located in Southern Mexico (Brown, 2002). In this study, parents frequently lied to their children to try to control their behavior. ...
Parents around the world engage in the practice of parenting by lying, which entails lying to manipulate children’s emotional states and behavior. The current study is the first to examine whether exposure to parenting by lying in childhood is associated with later dishonesty and psychosocial maladjustment in adulthood. Female undergraduate adults retrospectively reported their experiences of parenting by lying during childhood, the current frequency at which they lie to their parents, and their current psychosocial functioning. We found that adults who recalled relatively high levels of parenting by lying during childhood both lie to their parents more often and experience greater psychosocial adjustments problems in adulthood than adults who recalled relatively low levels of parenting by lying during childhood. This study is the first to suggest that parenting by lying during childhood may be associated with negative moral and social outcomes later in life.
... But this is only one of many ways to begin to characterize language socialization studies as there is an unusually rich concentration of comparative work as well, some areally based, such as studies of Mayan language communities which include Tzotzil (de León, 1998), K'iche (Pye, 1992), and Tzeltal (Brown, 2002). Others are topically comparative with a focus on language and gender socialization, ethnicity, morality, religion, and literacy, to name but a few, (see Kulick and Schieffelin, in press). ...
... This process may be formal, informal, or (more often than not) inadvertent (Ochs, 1990). 4. For general studies of Mesoamerican and Maya children see Brown (2002), De Leon (1998), Gaskins (2003, Greenfield (2004) and Rogoff (1981). 5. ...
In Santa Catarina Ixtahuacan adults constantly face the threat of resentment from other members of their community. Evading others’ resentment requires concealing one’s possessions, a feat that in turn entails the immoral act of speaking untruths. Children, however, can utter falsehoods that adults cannot because adults do not see children as principals of harmful words. It is argued in this article, therefore, that K’iche’ children in Santa Catarina are in the ironic situation of having influence on the adult social world precisely because adults do not view children as influential. The article shows how children’s very status as supposedly unimportant individuals gives them the pragmatic power to mediate malicious feelings between adults via their words and actions.
... Although previous research has yielded a wealth of valuable information about the contexts in which children lie to their parents (Cumsille, 90 Darling, & Martı´nez, 2010;Jensen, Arnett, Feldman, & Cauffman, 2004;Knox, Zusman, McGinty, & Gescheidler, 2001;Marshall, Tilton-Weaver, & Bosdet, 2005;Perkins & Turiel, 2007;Smetana, Villalobos, Tasopoulos-Chan, Gettman, 95 & Campione-Barr, 2009;Wilson, Smith, & Ross, 2003), the topic of parents' lying to children has been almost completely ignored. In one of the only studies addressing this topic, Brown (2002) observed Tzeltal-speaking Mayan corn farmers 100 who lived in the rural community of Tenejapa, in southern Mexico. Brown reported that parents in this community often lied to their children in an attempt to influence their behavior, and that they did not consider it morally problematic because 105 they believed there is a general expectation within their community that each person will lie at times in the service of self-interest. ...
The practice of lying to one's children to encourage behavioral compliance was investigated among parents in the US (N = 114) and China (N = 85). The vast majority of parents (84% in the US and 98% in China) reported having lied to their children for this purpose. Within each country, the practice most frequently took the form of falsely threatening to leave a child alone in public if he or she refused to follow the parent. Crosscultural differences were seen: A larger proportion of the parents in China reported that they employed instrumental lie-telling to promote behavioral compliance, and a larger proportion approved of this practice, as compared to the parents in the US. This difference was not seen on measures relating to the practice of lying to promote positive feelings, or on measures relating to statements about fantasy characters such as the tooth fairy. Findings are discussed with reference to sociocultural values and certain parenting-related challenges that extend across cultures.
... This research provides strong and consistent evidence that there is no culturally universal taboo against parents lying to their children. However, it is important to note that these practices take place within a cultural context in which it is assumed that everyone lies in the service of self-interest and lying is seen as morally neutral (Brown, 2002). It is unclear whether a similar acceptance of parental lying would be seen in a society such as that of the USA, where lying is subject to widespread disapproval. ...
The present set of studies identifies the phenomenon of `parenting by lying', in which parents lie to their children as a means of influencing their emotional states and behaviour. In Study 1, undergraduates (n = 127) reported that their parents had lied to them while maintaining a concurrent emphasis on the importance of honesty. In Study 2 (n = 127), parents reported lying to their children and considered doing so to be acceptable under some circumstances, even though they also reported teaching their children that lying is unacceptable. As compared to European American parents, Asian American parents tended to hold a more favourable view of lying to children for the purpose of promoting behavioural compliance.
Research on the acquisition of Mayan languages has shown child-directed communication (CDC) to be low in frequency. Nevertheless, long-term linguistic-anthropological research with the Tsotsil Mayan in Southern Mexico has documented episodes in family life when children engage in interactional routines or interactional formats (IFs) with their multigenerational caregivers. These interactions are sequentially organized communicative acts (verbal and nonverbal) that call forth specific responses from the child in turn-taking episodes (e.g. muts’o la sate ‘close your eyes’, chibat, uto ‘say, good-bye’). This study analyzes IFs in four communicative events involving four children (11–17 months; M = 15) each from multigenerational families with a household average of 7.75 members. Three research questions are addressed: What types and functions of IFs characterize CDC experienced by Tsotsil children? How do IF types distribute across specific communicative events? How do IF types distribute across multigenerational caregivers? The study used both qualitative and quantitative methods. IFs were classified on the basis of their pragmatic function: directive, prompting, teasing, referential, regulatory, and evaluation. The six IF types and their relative frequencies reveal core language socialization practices among the Tsotsil Mayan of the study. Quantitative analysis makes clear a significant association between IFs and event, and IFs and caregivers’ CDC. A central finding is that non-parental input from multigenerational caregivers (i.e. grandmothers and sisters) is a more significant source of CDC than parental input.
This study examined the relation between children's moral standards of honesty and their lie-telling behavior and the role that culture plays in this relation. In the study, 6- to 12-year-old Chinese and Northern American (Canadian and American) children underwent a behavioral paradigm where they had the opportunity to tell a lie about their performance to gain a benefit. The children then read vignettes where a character told lies to conceal a transgression committed to satisfy either a need or a desire and evaluated those lies. Northern American children were less likely to lie with age, but Chinese children did not demonstrate this trend. Lie-telling rates were higher for Chinese children than for Northern American children, but children were overall unlikely to tell a lie about their performance. Chinese children evaluated the lies in the vignettes more negatively than Northern American children. Children's moral standards of honesty were related to their lie-telling behavior, and the relation between children's moral standards and behavior did not differ by age in either culture. Overall, results suggest that culture influences how children make moral evaluations and decisions related to lie-telling and support the notion that children's moral standards and behavior are related. These findings suggest that socialization plays a central role in children's moral decision making related to honesty through helping children to develop moral standards related to honesty.
FEEL MORE FULFILLED AS A PARENT
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By Tope Dada
(Dada Temitope Joseph)
E-mail: thetopedada@gmail.com
http://www.topedada.com
Description
Feel More Fulfilled As A Parent by Tope Dada shed more light on parenting, styles, skills and principles.
Introduction
Parents are still the main caregivers for most children, even though many children spend a great deal of many hours in school as they grow older.
Raising a happy, healthy child is one of the most challenging jobs a parent can have -- and also one of the most rewarding. Yet many of us don't approach parenting with the same focus we would use for a job. We may act on our gut reactions or just use the same parenting techniques our own parents used, whether or not these were effective parenting skills.
Genesis 1:28 God blessed them and said to them, “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it.”
•• Children are the natural result of marriage, which God blesses.
Parenting is one of the most researched areas in the field of social science.
Developmental psychologists have long been interested in how parents affect child development. However, finding actual cause-and-effect links between specific actions of parents and later behavior of children is very difficult.
Some children raised in dramatically different environments can later grow up to have remarkably similar personalities. Conversely, children who share a home and are raised in the same environment can grow up to have very different personalities.
Despite these challenges, researchers have posited that there are links between parenting styles and the effects these styles have on children. And some suggest these effects carry over into adult behavior.
About The Author
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Tope Dada {Temitope Joseph Dada} also known as TEE DREADS, is the Co-founder of Temitope Tomiwa Dada Foundation (Formerly Hope Alive Foundation) with his wife Tomiwa Dada, He’s an Author, Speaker, Blogger, Counselor, Podcaster
He is a Psychology graduate of University of Ibadan.
Interest in Global Issues.
Each year he influence thousands of lives through Charitable Cause of Temitope Tomiwa Dada Foundation (Formerly Hope Alive Foundation) Education Outreach, Community Outreach, through Music, and Blog. He has recorded three Albums, author of three books and also an Award Winner.
This paper examines the strategies that speakers employ in response to children's crying in the remote Aboriginal community of Wadeye, in northern Australia. Drawing on spontaneous interactions amongst Murrinhpatha speaking families, we analyse instances of crying by children aged 0;6 to 8;11 years, and the ways in which they are responded to. Results indicate that adult Murrinhpatha speakers manage children's distress through a variety of verbal and non-verbal strategies, and multimodal combinations thereof. The selection of strategies directly relates to the developmental stage of the crier. Adult caregivers respond differently to the crying of infants, of children who can walk unaided but are producing little if any language, of children who can talk intelligibly, and children more advanced again who have a degree of social independence. In the particular strategies that caregivers apply, they guide children towards a developmentally appropriate self-sufficiency. Caregivers encourage autonomy in ways that reflect a child's current abilities, be it physical, linguistic, emotional, or social. By exploring responses to crying in an under-researched cultural and linguistic context, this paper offers a unique perspective on the pragmatics of managing distress and what this reveals about local constructions of personhood within the context of carer-child interaction.
This paper explores pragmatic socialization by examining episodes of two to three-year-old children's crying and adults' responses to this crying in two preschools: Sweden and Japan. Based on approximately 100 hours of naturally occurring interactions, it focuses on crying episodes that emerged within peer conflict, and analyzes ways that teachers structured a triadic framework of mediation. The results show how teachers mediated by using (1) question-response sequences to clarify what happened and (2) directives and declaratives to convey norms of behaving/speaking and to attune children to the crying of others as a negative affective act that requires a remedial response. The results reveal similarities and variations in adults' responses to children's crying in the two preschools. Although the findings in part instantiate traditional models of socialization in these two societies, they also suggest ways that departed from these models.
Parenting by lying refers to the parenting practice of deception to try to control children's behavioral and affective states. Although the practice is widely observed across cultures, few studies have examined its associations with psychological outcomes in adulthood. The current research fills this gap by sampling 379 young Singaporean adults who reported on their childhood exposure to parenting by lying, their current deceptive behaviors toward parents, and their psychosocial adjustment. Results revealed that the adults who remembered being exposed to higher levels of parenting by lying in childhood showed higher levels of deception toward their parents and higher levels of psychosocial maladjustment. Our findings suggest that parenting by lying may have negative implications for children's psychosocial functioning later in life.
Bronislaw Malinowski - based on his experience during his field research on the Trobriand Islands - pointed out that language is first and foremost a tool for creating social bonds. It is a mode of behavior and the meaning of an utterance is constituted by its pragmatic function. Malinowski's ideas finally led to the formation of the subdiscipline "anthropological linguistics". This paper presents three observations of the Trobrianders' attitude to their language Kilivila and their language use in social interactions. They illustrate that whoever wants to successfully research the role of language, culture and cognition in social interaction must be on 'common ground' with the researched community.
As I have already pointed out elsewhere (Senft 2008; 2010; 2014), the Gricean conversational maxims of Quality – “Try to make your contribution one that is true” – and Manner “Be perspicuous”, specifically “Avoid obscurity of expression” and “Avoid ambiguity” (Grice 1967; 1975; 1978) – are not observed by the Trobriand Islanders of Papua New Guinea, neither in forms of their ritualized communication nor in forms and ways of everyday conversation and other ordinary verbal interactions. The speakers of the Austronesian language Kilivila metalinguistically differentiate eight specific non-diatopical registers which I have called “situational-intentional” varieties. One of these varieties is called “biga sopa”. This label can be glossed as “joking or lying speech, indirect speech, speech which is not vouched for”. The biga sopa constitutes the default register of Trobriand discourse and conversation. This contribution to the workshop on philosophy and pragmatics presents the Trobriand Islanders’ indigenous typology of non-diatopical registers, especially elaborating on the concept of sopa, describing its features, discussing its functions and illustrating its use within Trobriand society. It will be shown that the Gricean maxims of quality and manner are irrelevant for and thus not observed by the speakers of Kilivila. On the basis of the presented findings the Gricean maxims and especially Grice’s claim that his theory of conversational implicature is “universal in application” is critically discussed from a general anthropological-linguistic point of view.
From the outset, language socialization (LS, including first and second language) has been concerned with the ways in which social and cultural contexts provide opportunity spaces for the sociocultural learning of language and in how such contexts vary from culture to culture. The basic tenet of language socialization theory is that children learn language and culture through active engagement in meaningful social interactions with adults and peers. Language learning and enculturation form part of the same process; language is always learned in social and cultural contexts that provide cues for the social and cultural meanings of the forms used, and learners are active agents in their own socialization. Differing from psychological studies of language acquisition, with their focus on dyadic, adult–child interaction in both laboratory and natural settings, LS, being grounded in anthropological and sociolinguistic theories, eschews structured or nonnatural contexts for ethnographic observations of natural, both dyadic and multiparty, interactions. The anthropological approach is exemplified in the work of researchers such as Shirley Brice Heath, Bambi Schieffelin, Elinor Ochs, and others, who have collected ethnographic data in naturalistic settings, focusing as much on the participation structures into which children can enter as ratified participants as on the exact nature of the language used when talking to children. The focus of this chapter is family dinnertime conversation, in particular, which serves as a natural, pervasive, and powerful locus of language socialization within and across ethnolinguistically diverse homes around the world.
In this study, we propose a preliminary pragmatic definition for the speech act of lying and test it via a questionnaire survey among a group of American English speakers and a comparable group of Chinese speakers. This definition contains a necessary condition of untruth followed by three elements cast as continuums: the concealment continuum (the degree to which the untruth of the assertion is intended to be concealed), the self-benefit continuum (the degree to which the untrue assertion benefits self), and the other-benefit continuum (the degree to which the untruth benefits other). As a result, lying is understood as a scalar, rather than a bivalent, notion. While we do not claim that our definition will have universal applicability, we believe that it offers a point of departure for further research on a topic that seems to have fascinated philosophers and pragmaticists alike for decades.
This paper addresses the theories of Eve Clark about how children learn word meanings in western middle-class interactional contexts by examining child language data from a Tzeltal Maya society in southern Mexico where interaction patterns are radically different. Through examples of caregiver interactions with children 12-30 months old, I ask what lessons we can learn from how the details of these interactions unfold in this non-child-centered cultural context, and specifically, what aspects of the Tzeltal linguistic and interactional context might help to focus children’s attention on the meanings and the conventional forms of words being used around them.
Political socialization is an interdisciplinary subfield that addresses questions surrounding the inter-generational transmission of political engagement, values, and preferences. Through close analysis of face-to-face conversations about political issues, events, and ideas in Los Angeles families, this article brings a linguistic anthropological and conversation analytic perspective to bear on the study of political socialization by demonstrating the key role played by discursive and interactional practices. Children in this corpus take an active role in their own socialization, as they use a range of conversational strategies – particularly questions and repair – to initiate and sustain their participation in political conversations. Parents in this corpus vary widely in their tolerance for and treatment of children’s questions: some parents attempt to shut down or re-orient lines of questioning, while others use children’s questions as teaching moments in which to state values explicitly. Several possible explanations for the variance in parents’ uptake are considered, and parents’ responses are examined for their implicit political messages or stances. Finally, the article suggests that many of the strengths of language socialization – including its focus on interaction, its consideration of child agency, and its emphasis on socialization as an ongoing process – make it a useful framework for those who study political socialization.
Coleman and Kay (1981) proposed a prototype semantic analysis of the English word lie, arguing that a ‘good’ lie is one containing three basic elements and that utterances lacking one or more element might still be considered lies but to lesser degrees. The present study replicated their questionnaire by applying it to Spanish in Eastern Ecuador. This paper examines whether or not the concept of a lie is different for Spanish and, if so, to what degree and under what semantic prototypical notions. The questions addressed are (1) if lie is a word in Spanish whose definition involves a prototype in the sense discussed by Coleman and Kay; (2) if there is a prototype containing the three elements considered; (3) how participants assign the word lie to reported speech acts; and (4) whether speakers generally agree on the relative weights of semantic elements. The general notion of a prototype is revealed in the Spanish data; however, the order of semantic elements is different from English. It is also argued that pragmatic and cultural considerations are more important, particularly with respect to social lies.
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