Starting at the Beginning

*The research done and the information given is from a neighborhood unit called Mahalla in the town of Kunduz, in Northern Afghanistan.

To thoroughly understand a religion or culture it is important to start from the beginning, so I will start my blog by looking into child rearing in this specific community. Male and female children are raised and treated very differently, starting as early as from the womb.
Some have said that mothers of boys are able to feel movement in the fourth month and are thought of as “hot,” while mothers of girls feel movement in the in the fifth month and feel idle or lazy. This could be viewed by some as the initial superiority of men over women. Also, in some communities when boys are born they are face down, for the dishonor of potentially seeing his mother’s genitals, whereas girls are face up. Even details of the most “common” acts such as naming, covering the child, and mothers giving the breast on demand, are thought by some researchers to vary widely; for example, boys being given the breast longer than girls.
At a certain age women begin to convert their child, both boys and girls, from breast milk to solid food. The difference in this process is that women will tease the young boys with their breasts; this practice was not done with girls. Another significant difference is the age at which boys and girls are toilet trained. Normally there is more urgency to train girls than there is for boys, usually before the child even learns to walk. Shalinsky attributes this to ‘modesty rules.’ Regardless of age, it is never tolerated for women or girls to be immodest. She even states that on many occasions she witnessed a wife being reprimanded by her husband for allowing their daughter to walk around without a diaper.
Another noteworthy difference is, unlike boys, girls are raised close to their mothers, in a very literal sense. While boys are pressured into joining peer groups and taught there should be a natural rejection from their fathers, girls conversely find a bond in the strong emotional attachment they share with their mothers. This bond only grows stronger as the child matures, through “culturally patterned identification.”
Since girls accompany their mothers so often, it is only natural that they would pick up their mothers views of their fathers, or of husbands in general. One of these would be a women’s choice to only do certain things to please their husbands out of fear of polygamy. In this culture, the motherhood role is viewed as more of a goal than the wife role.

As we have discussed in lecture, the environment in which a child is raised is a fundamental aspect of the person he/she becomes. Your environment can shape and construct your culture. A lot of times it is there where we learn the basic ideals and social norms that we become convinced of; such as gender roles.
I personally feel the most important aspect to understand about child rearing is that it is culturally relative. It is necessary to understand that all cultures have their own logic, and as an outsider you don’t need to accept it, just make sense of it. Methods of child rearing vary culture to culture; i.e. Americans’ want their children to be independent because that is a trait our culture values, so babies here are not held as much as in other cultures and have their own rooms.
Because I understand this I am able to understand the values in this culture, for example, modesty rules. This culture expects women to be modest (even as toddlers), just like our culture expects children to be polite and use their manners. In our culture many times we won’t even allow the child to proceed with their on- goings until the child says the “special word.” Cultures can be more a like than we think.

Citations:

Shalinsky, Audrey C.. "Learning Sexual Identity: Parents and Children in Northern Afghanistan." Anthropology & Education Quarterly 11(1980): 254-265.