Responsibility in Childhood: Three Developmental Trajectories

In this article, we analyze the development of responsibility through the lens of the Peruvian Matsigenka, Samoan, and middle-class Los Angeles, California, childhoods. We propose that recognizing social awareness, social responsiveness, and self-reliance as keystone properties of responsibility supports an argument that children’s routine work at home enables not only social but also moral responsibility, in the form of respectful awareness of and responsiveness to others’ needs and reliance on knowledge that takes into consideration others’ judgments. We document distinct modes of engagement in community and family activities evidenced in community ethnographies of children in Matsigenka, Samoa, and in middle-class Los Angeles, and propose seven arguments (related to sociopolitical organization, necessity, development, school priority, independence–interdependence, attention practices, and inconsistency) that bear on these observations. A contradiction in the values and practices for promoting independence and giving care is manifested exclusively in the L.A. families, creating a dependency dilemma for children of these families. If moral responsibility involves an active turning toward the other that engenders the capacity for compassion, our research indicates childhood socialization practices differentially facilitate or complicate achievement of this perspective. [responsibility, child development, socialization, Samoa, Los Angeles, Matsigenka] In this article, we analyze the concept of responsibility in childhood through the lens of three societies in which we have conducted field research: the Matsigenka of the Peruvian Amazon, Samoans residing on the island of Upolu, and middle-class U.S. families in Los Angeles, California. We propose that social awareness, social responsiveness, and self-reliance are keystone properties of moral personhood and use these properties to articulate ways in which actions and stances of others influence children’s accountability in everyday family life. Building on cross-cultural studies of children’s domestic activities, this study advances the literature by arguing that much more than practical competence and social responsibility are afforded by children’s assistance in tasks. We hypothesize that practical household work is a crucible for promoting moral responsibility in the form of a generative cross-situational awareness of and responsiveness to others’ needs and desires. This proposal appreciates Aristotle’s insight that ‘‘It is of no little importance what sort of habits we form from an early ageFit makes a vast difference, or rather all the difference in the world’’ (Aristotle 1976:32). Aristotelian virtue is rooted in hexis (habit), conceived as an active state that performers continuously work to possess or hold. Journal of the Society for Psychological Anthropology RESPONSIBILITY IN CHILDHOOD 391 ETHOS, Vol. 37, Issue 4, pp. 391–413, ISSN 0091-2131 online ISSN 1548-1352. & 2009 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved. DOI: 10.1111/j.1548-1352.2009.01066.x. Philosophy has been a source of insight in psychological anthropology from cultural relativists’ reliance on Herder and Humbolt (Boas 1938), to Turner’s (1986) use of Dewey and Dilthey in explaining drama, to the import of phenomenology in recent ethnographic perspectives on empathy (Throop and Hollan 2008). The present essay hopes to offer an intellectual synergy in bridging philosophical considerations of situated human morality and ethnographic accounts of practical responsibility in children’s daily lives. Of particular importance to a psychological anthropology of responsibility are philosophical views that locate morality in a primal corporeal and perceptual attention to others. Ethnographic studies reveal ways in which such attention is socioculturally configured in early childhood, with implications for children’s differential responsibility for others across settings and communities. As noted by Stein, empathy is experienced through ‘‘the medium of corporeality’’ (1989:117). In our perspective, moral responsibility is an active turning toward the other that begins corporeally in early childhood socialization and develops as a capacity for compassion. Although practical competence does not automatically engender moral consciousness, corporeal participation in tasks may afford such consciousness. We propose that children learning tasks may also be ‘‘learning to learn’’ (Bateson 1972) a habitus of moral responsibility. This view builds on Whiting and Whiting’s conclusion that children’s participation in work-related tasks constitute ‘‘mechanisms by which children learn to be nurturant–responsible’’ (1975:103) and Weisner’s (1979) finding that rural Kenyan children, who performed work tasks twice as often as urban counterparts, tended to be more sociable, less aggressive, and sought fewer resources from their mothers (see also Grusec et al. 1996; Seymour 1988). We suggest that children’s routine assistance in housework, childcare, and self-care is a crucial path for gaining what Aristotle called phronesis (insight) and Kant called ‘‘judgment,’’ that is, the ability to think in commonsense ways that assume standpoints of others (cf. Arendt 2003). Task participation also apprentices children into responding to others’ facewants (Goffman 1967; Levinas 1969, 1985) and thus to realizing respect in ways that exceed courtesy idioms. ‘‘Please’’ and ‘‘thank you’’ exemplify a superficial level of politeness, or politesse des manières, whereas task-enactments display deeper politeness, or politesse de l’esprit and politesse du coeur (Bergson 2008; Duranti in press). We analyze growing up responsibly in middle-class Los Angeles in comparison with Matsigenka and Samoan family life. Many middle-class L.A. parents devoted time and energy assisting children in simple chores in a manner not observed in Matsigenka and Samoan families. Such interventions conflict with U.S. parental ideals of independence, creating a Dependency Dilemma (Whiting 1978), that is, children are apprenticed into a milieu where both independence and reliance on others are emphasized, rather than an alternative where modes of social awareness, social responsiveness, and self-reliance in household tasks are mutually reinforcing. We propose seven arguments (sociopolitical organization, necessity 392 ETHOS