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The ethnographic study of child development has its roots in the field of academic anthropology and has generally focused on furthering our knowledge by positioning child development within the wider sociocultural environment in which it occurs. Anthropologists Margaret Mead (1928) and Bronisław Malinowski (1929) were the first to suggest the importance of cultural environment in development and to question the idea that the behavior of children in the West is necessarily generalizable to other contexts. Thus, the adolescence crisis was challenged by Mead and the Oedipus complex by Malinowski.

These early ethnographies involved months, even years, of fieldwork and resulted in intimate ethnographies that integrated the lives of children into the complex cultures in which they found themselves. The majority of ethnographic work on child development in the early 20th century focused on detailed descriptions of cultural groups, such as the Hopi, Navajos, Tikopians and indigenous communities of New Guinea. A few notable exceptions have examined child behavior across populations, to allow for comparisons. For example, the transition to adulthood in Western societies is more discontinuous than in “traditional” societies, and adults in agricultural societies are more likely to assign tasks to children than those in gathering societies (Amir and McAuliffe 2020).

Then, during the last century, subsequent waves of ethnographic work focused on assessing the usefulness of psychological theories, such as Freudian psychoanalysis and Piagetian cognitive development among children in various societies. The second half of the century saw the advent of a more modern form of ethnography, which often involved the quantification of behavioral observations. These meticulous observational studies have fundamentally reshaped our understanding of developmental variation (Amir and McAuliffe 2020).

For example, while prolonged infant crying was (and still is) common in Western societies, the generalization of this model outside the West was challenged by pioneering work on the behavior of Kung infants. Through intensive observational work, anthropologists demonstrated that Kung babies cried much less than Dutch babies because parents responded quickly and reliably (Amir and McAuliffe 2020).

These close observation methods have also been used to study a wide variety of developmental behaviors, such as the duration of infant vocalizations, the percentage of time spent with different adults and time spent playing, foraging or working, among other variables.

This helps us to better understand child development by providing ecologically valid measures of relevant behaviors in the environments where they occur. In addition, observational data is less likely to be skewed by self-reported biases, such as socially desirable responses.

Despite the growing body of observational work on child development, some researchers have argued that ethnographic literature alone is not sufficient to constitute an anthropology of childhood. In other words, while mono-cultural studies deepen our understanding of child development, more theory and cross-cultural reasoning are needed to create frameworks with greater explanatory power (LeVine 2008).

Researchers have attempted to address this through meta-ethnographic approaches that compare child development in different populations. Anthropologist Mel Konner’s “distillation of childhood” in hunter-gatherer populations (2010) has been a particularly important model in this line of research; by comparing the ethnographies of several hunter-gatherer societies such as the Hadza of Tanzania and the Martu of Australia, Konner catalogued 11 aspects of infant and child care, such as frequency of nursing, mixed play groups and self-sufficiency.

This view of child development has allowed us to better understand the similarities and differences between these various societies. For example, in all societies surveyed, infants are breastfed frequently and for long periods of time – 32 months on average. These results, combined with data from other sources, such as geochemical analyses of fossilized hominid teeth, suggest that breastfeeding is a consistent and probably ancient feature of human development. Ethnographic comparisons have also examined other aspects of early development, such as variation in learning strategies and parent–child relationships (Amir and McAuliffe 2020).

This meta-ethnographic approach has also been greatly facilitated by the HRAF (Human Relations Area Files), which maintains an archive of cultural information, a corpus of nearly 800,000 pages of ethnographic work about more than 300 different cultural, ethnic and religious groups from around the world. The technique of using and comparing archived ethnographic surveys has sometimes been called the “holocultural” approach. This approach has yielded a number of new insights into the role of cultural systems in child development.

For example, HRAF data allows us to study how different levels of social and political integration have influenced corporal punishment inflicted on children: societies with higher levels of social hierarchy and those in which non-relatives help to raise children are more likely to practice corporal punishment.

Similarly, subsistence strategy is related to child labor: hunter-gatherer children do relatively less economic work than food producers and agricultural societies assign work to children more often than hunter-gatherers. Learning begins in infancy, with children accompanying their parents on foraging expeditions, continues through early and middle childhood, primarily in the context of mixed groups, and matures in adolescence, when adults begin to teach children complex skills more directly (Amir and McAuliffe 2020).

An exemplary case study of the use of the multisite approach is an investigation by House and Silk (2013) into the “ontogeny” of social behavior. Using a forced-choice task, the authors investigated the emergence of prosocial behavior in 3–14 year-olds in Aka, American, Fijian, Himba, Martu and Shuar societies. They presented children with a choice between a 1–1 offer, which would offer one reward to the child and another to a peer (the “prosocial” choice), and a 1–0 offer, which would offer one reward to the child and none to a peer (the “other consideration” choice).

In a second task, children were offered a choice between the same prosocial offer (1–1) and a more advantageous option (2–0). Compared to the first trials, where the child received a reward regardless of choice, the second trials were costly from the child’s perspective: either they would receive two rewards or they had to share with a peer.

The results of this study showed an interesting pattern of cross-cultural variation: when faced with the first choice, children in all societies increasingly chose the prosocial option (1–1) based on their age, and there was relative homogeneity in children’s schools across sites. However, when faced with the second, more costly choice, children showed much more variation, suggesting that culture plays a more important role in children’s sharing behavior when costs are involved.

Perhaps one of the most interesting results is the finding that in late childhood children’s choices begin to converge with those of adults in their respective societies, elucidating the developmental period during which local norms can exert considerable influence on social behavior.

Contrast studies between Western and non-Western populations have been conducted largely to test the generalization of results. For example, merit-based equity judgments were compared among children in Germany, Namibia and Kenya: merit-based allocations roughly corresponded to the Western/non-Western divide, with German children assigning allocations based on merit, while Samburu children were relatively more likely to assign allocations based on equality. This result is related to the types of interactions common in these societies; indeed, frequent or infrequent interactions with outsiders could influence the relative value of merit or equality, respectively, in these societies (Amir and McAuliffe 2020).

In recent years, researchers have made great strides in formulating new methods for measuring cultural distance. In particular, Muthukrishna and Henrich (2019) have developed a new measure to help researchers design, plan and justify comparative psychological projects.

Based on a mathematical method originally intended to calculate the degree of genetic distance between two populations (called the fixation index, or F_ST), the team created a new measure, called the cultural F_ST, to calculate cultural distance from a large survey of cultural values in various societies. These methods are already gaining popularity in studies of cross-cultural variation in adult behavior.