Beyond Parents

Gabriel Scheidecker

ISBN 10: 3032057671 / ISBN 13: 9783032057679

Published by Springer Nov 2025, 2025

About this Item

This item is printed on demand - Print on Demand Titel. Neuware -This book provides a detailed look into the social world of infants and toddlers and explores the consequences of that environment on learning and socio-emotional development. Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork and systematic observation in a rural community in Madagascar, it shows that children there grow up in dense social networks from birth, surrounded not only by parents and siblings but also by peers, cousins, aunts, grandparents, neighbours, and more. It challenges dominant parent-centric frameworks that assume socio-emotional development begins in relationships with parents, which form the basis for a gradual expansion of children's social relations. By contrast, the multiple coexisting but distinct social relationships of young children in this study provide parallel developmental pathways. This enables them to acquire simultaneously hierarchical-interdependent and egalitarian-autonomous modes of relationships, emotion, and self. The book presents a powerful critique of mainstream developmental science and calls for a broader, more inclusive understanding of early childhood across cultures.Springer-Verlag GmbH, Tiergartenstr. 17, 69121 Heidelberg 304 pp. Englisch.

Seller Inventory # 9783032057679

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Beyond Parents
• Publisher: Springer Nov 2025
• Publication Date: 2025
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 3032057671
• ISBN 13: 9783032057679
• Binding: Buch
• Condition: Neu
• Dimensions: 216W x 153H x 21D millimeters 216 millimeters width by 153 millimeters height by 21 millimeters depth
• Weight: 506 grams

About this title

Synopsis

This book provides a detailed look into the social world of infants and toddlers and explores the consequences of that environment on learning and socio-emotional development. Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork and systematic observation in a rural community in Madagascar, it shows that children there grow up in dense social networks from birth, surrounded not only by parents and siblings but also by peers, cousins, aunts, grandparents, neighbours, and more. It challenges dominant parent-centric frameworks that assume socio-emotional development begins in relationships with parents, which form the basis for a gradual expansion of children's social relations. By contrast, the multiple coexisting but distinct social relationships of young children in this study provide parallel developmental pathways. This enables them to acquire simultaneously hierarchical-interdependent and egalitarian-autonomous modes of relationships, emotion, and self. The book presents a powerful critique of mainstream developmental science and calls for a broader, more inclusive understanding of early childhood across cultures.

About the Author

Gabriel Scheidecker is Assistant Professor in the Anthropology Department at the University of Zurich, Switzerland. His ethnographic research focuses on childhood and the politics of parenting in Madagascar, Vietnam, and Germany. He currently leads an SNSF Starting Grant that critically examines early childhood and parenting interventions in the Global South.