Friedman: How did your fieldwork inform your own theory of parenting? You’re also grandparents now. How about your theory of grandparenting? Do you sit in the living room with your kids and talk about how Inuit hunters in the Canadian Arctic handle toddlers? [Note: Here’s how Inuit hunters in the Canadian Arctic handle toddlers.]

Sarah: No, we didn’t do that. We actually took them to the field. They lived in Africa with us when they were little children, and they lived in Mexico when they were pre-teens. We were of the persuasion, all those years ago, that children should unfold like flowers. We were very interested to see what they’d become—maybe our children [would] be completely different from us. One of them is actually an engineer, a computer engineer. We’re hopeless with computers! We can hardly change a light bulb.

The point being: We didn’t talk to them about our research at the time that we were doing it. And now that they’re parents themselves, we’re very careful not to talk about it because we can upset them very easily.

Robert: They’re touchy.

Sarah: We have a comparative research project because one [of our kids] is raising a child in America, and the other is raising a child in Germany. Americans have this notion that giving children choices empowers them—that, at a very early age, it gives the child trust in his or her own judgment. And that this is what we need in America because we want to have high self-esteem in our children so that they will barrel through life and overcome hurdles. This makes for an entitled child, I have to say. Or it tends to.

[In Germany and other European countries like France, the philosophy is] parents know better. They don’t necessarily know best. But they know better—that they’re responsible for raising their children. And as parents they have to fulfill that responsibility rather than handing it over to the child, because the child rarely is in a position to have good judgment.

Friedman: Is there a risk in studying parenting cross-culturally, or really any human phenomenon, of seeing all the negatives in the society you know best and only positives in the society you’re briefly observing?

Robert: We saw plenty of flaws in other cultures. For example, in many parts of Africa, they used force-feeding of kids, where the kids had to essentially inhale a supplementary food as babies, [an] extremely scary phenomenon. I watched it one time. We have loads of examples [in the book] of people who are doing things that are not to be recommended.

Sarah: Anthropologists are supposed to be relativistic. You’re supposed to see whatever you see and not pass judgment. However, when I started doing fieldwork, I had been trained as a psychiatric social worker and a child therapist at the University of Chicago. I saw things, in our first fieldwork together, that truly horrified me. What I saw was completely contrary to what I had been trained to believe was optimal. It’s now almost 50 years ago, looking back. Perhaps writing this book produced the capstone of digesting what I’d seen. It took a very long time for me to see the true benefits—not of everything, but there were benefits to the overall process that it took me a long time to perceive.