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general, abstract, even universal meanings. We come to think, when we have confronted no other languages, that “sitting” is just sitting, “drinking” is just drinking, “over there’’ is just over there. In fact, the situated, social, and
cultural nature of meaning often becomes visible to us only when we confront language-at-work in languages and cultures far distant from our own.
4.4 Cultural models in action: middle-class parenting
I want to briefly discuss two now classic examples from the literature of cultural models at work. Both examples demonstrate the connection between cultural models and social class, though in different ways. Thus, these
examples, and others that follow below from my own research, begin our discussion of the social, cultural, and political issues that are implicated in the study of cultural models.
The first example is a study of middle-class parents in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in the United States Harkness, Super, and Keefer 1992. When these parents talked about their children, two cultural models were highly salient.
One was tied to the notion of “stages of development” through which children pass. The other was tied to the notion of the child’s growing desire for “independence” as the central theme giving point and direction to these stages.
For example, consider how one mother talked about her son David: he’s very definitely been in a stage, for the last three or four months, of wanting to help, everything I do, he wants to
help . . . . And now, I would say in the last month, the intensity of wanting to do everything himself is . . . we’re really into that stage . . . . I suppose they’re all together . . . ya, I suppose they’re two parts of the same thing.
Independence, reaching out for independence. Anything he wants to do for himself, which is just about everything, that I move in and do for him, will result in a real tantrum.
ibid.: 165–6 David’s mother later gave as an example of his “wanting to do things for himself,” an episode where she had
opened the car door for him when he was having a hard time getting out of the car: “He was very upset, so we had to go back and . . . close the door” p. 166. She also attributed David’s recent dislike of being dressed or diapered to
his growing sense of independence: “. . . he’s getting to the point where it’s insulting, and he doesn’t want to be put on his back to have his diaper changed.”
However, in the same interview, David’s mother also mentioned another behavior pattern. To get David to sleep, she straps him into his car seat and pretends to be taking him for a drive. He almost immediately falls asleep, and
then she returns home, leaving him in the car, with a blanket, to
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take a nap: “But he goes to sleep so peacefully, without any struggle, usually” p. 167. Though this latter pattern is a repeated daily routine, David’s mother does not talk about this behavior as part of a
“stage.” Rather, she says, the behavior “just sort of evolved.’’ This is somewhat remarkable. Being strapped into a car seat and taken for a ride that inevitably ends in a nap might be seen as inconsistent with David’s need for
“independence,” just as having his diaper changed is, and thus equally cause for being “insulted.”
Ironically, another pair of parents in the same study use their daughter’s active resistance to being put in a car seat as an example of “this whole stage of development” and “the sort of independence thing she’s into now,” but in the
same interview say “the thing that’s interesting is that she allows you to clean her up, after changing her, a lot more easily than she used to. She used to hate to be cleaned up. She would twist and squirm.”
So here too, parents appear to be inconsistent. They take the child’s desire not to be manipulated into a car seat as a sign of a growing desire for “independence,” but are not bothered by the fact that this desire doesn’t seem to carry
over to the similar event of having her diaper changed. And, oddly, this little girl exemplifies just the reverse pattern from David who resents having his diaper changed, but willingly gets strapped into the car seat, even to
take a nap.
Many parents, and many others in our culture, consider stages to be “real” things that are “inside” their children. Furthermore, they interpret these stages as signposts on the way to becoming an “independent” and a rather “de-
socialized” person. But, it appears, parents label behaviors part of a stage only when these behaviors represent new behaviors of a sort that both could be seen as negative or difficult and that require new sorts of responses from the
parents.
Behaviors that are not problematic in the parent–child relationship – e.g. David yielding to naps in his car seat or the little girl yielding peacefully to being diapered – are not labeled as stages. Furthermore, the parents interpret
these potentially negative behaviors which get labeled as stages in terms of the culturally valued notion of “independence,” a notion that other cultures, even different social groups within our culture, may well view as
socially disruptive or as “anti-social.”
These notions of “stage” and “independence” are partially conscious and partially unconscious. These cultural models need not be fully in any parent or child’s head, consciously or unconsciously, because they are available in
the culture in which these parents live – through the media, through written materials, and through interaction with others in the society.
These parents, situated within their own social, cultural, and class-based Discourses, have a set of connected cultural models about child development, stages, interaction between parents and children, and independence.
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Other social groups operate in terms of different cultural models. For example, some working-class families operate in terms of cultural models in which children are seen as inherently willful, independent, and selfish, and in need of
socialization that leads not to more independence, but to collaboration with and caring about the needs of family and others Philipsen 1975.
It is striking that the cultural models, in terms of which the Cambridge families operate, are quite similar to the “formal theories” found in child psychology and child rearing books. This should not really be surprising, however,
since these are just the sorts of people that read and write such books. What we have to ask, however, is how much of psychology reflects the cultural models of upper-middle-class people because psychologists hold these models as
part and parcel of their class and culture-bound experiences in the world, and not because they are “true” in any scientific sense?
4.5 Cultural models in conflict
