For Intro to Anthropology 2026, we explore a deceptively simple question: when do babies learn culture? The answer—before birth, as they develop within an already culturally-shaped environment—reveals one of anthropology’s most important insights about human nature. This lecture draws on Meredith Small’s classic article “Our Babies, Ourselves” and research from the Gusii of Kenya to the Netherlands. For more on what makes anthropology distinctive, see What Makes Anthropology Anthropological?
Key Concepts
- Babies begin learning culture before birth: the fetus develops within a culturally-shaped environment, and biological maturation continues intertwined with cultural learning. Humans are born “neurologically unfinished” (Small, 4).
- There is no nature versus nurture line: even “natural” functions like heart rate and breathing are socialized from infancy as a newborn’s rhythms synchronize with a caregiver’s.
- Ethnocentrism is mutual: Gusii mothers judged American parenting as incompetent (Small, 1), and Americans judge Gusii practices the same way. Both are learned, not natural.
- Cultural relativism asks us to understand practices in their own context before judging—easier with food or clothing than with charged values like parenting.
- Parenting transmits cultural values: American “cry it out” methods aim at independence; many societies respond immediately, valuing interdependence.
- Society shapes parenting, not just individuals: Dutch infants sleep longer because Dutch society is organized around rest, regularity, and cleanliness (Small, 2)—and around walkable towns and family leave.
- American infant care is a “cultural experiment” in extreme infant-caregiver separation, historically unprecedented (Barr, in Small, 4).
- No “bare human nature” exists outside a particular way of becoming human; many societies raise healthy children through varied approaches.
The Surprising Answer: Before Birth
When do babies learn culture? The answer challenges our intuitions: cultural learning begins before birth—not after some period of purely “natural” development. In fact, there is no period of purely natural development. The fetus is already developing within a culturally-shaped environment: what the mother eats, the sounds filtering through, the stress levels shaped by social circumstances, the expectations and preparations being made for arrival. Human beings are born “neurologically unfinished” (Small, 4), and our biological maturation happens while we’re learning culture, not before or after.
This insight dissolves the familiar nature versus nurture debate. Anthropology says no to the idea that there’s a line or dichotomy between what we call nature and what we call nurture. Our natural development occurs at the same time as we are learning a particular way of being human.
Why Human Babies Are Different
Human beings have very large heads relative to our bodies—a result of our enormous brains. To pass through the birth canal, we’re born earlier in our development than other primates. The result: for the first three to nine months of life, a baby’s head is tremendously expanding and growing, neural networks are connecting, and the infant is completely helpless and dependent on caregivers.
During this period of total dependence, something remarkable happens. When you bring a newborn close to you, their heart rate—which is initially uneven—begins to synchronize with your own heartbeat. Their breathing, which sometimes feels like gasping, starts to take on your rhythm. We’re socializing what we think of as “natural” biological functions from the very beginning.
This means that when babies are being intensely held and nurtured, they’re not just passively waiting for their biology to develop. They’re learning how to dance with their caregivers, learning what foods to eat, learning what to call people, learning how to respond to different situations. Biology and culture develop together.
Ethnocentrism Works Both Ways
To understand how deeply culture shapes infant care, consider this: when anthropologist Robert LeVine showed Gusii mothers from Kenya a film of American parenting practices, they declared “these American women are clearly incompetent mothers” (Small, 1). Americans watching Gusii practices have the same reaction—we think they’re doing it wrong.
This is mutual ethnocentrism. Here are people in a place whose name we might struggle to pronounce, looking at American mothers and judging us as incompetent. Both societies believe their way is correct and natural, when actually both are learned cultural practices.
We’re supposed to counter ethnocentrism with cultural relativism—trying to understand practices in the context of a society’s own values before judging them. But cultural relativism is perhaps easier when it comes to food or clothing. It’s much harder when it comes to values, and people get very excited about parenting practices. They’ll yell at each other in bookstores about whether you should be breastfeeding or not.
The Crying Game: What Values Are We Teaching?
Baby cries have a profound psychological effect on people. The CIA has reportedly used recorded baby cries in hostage situations to drive people out of buildings because it messes with people’s heads. If you’ve ever been a parent, you know you can’t escape it.
Different societies show very different response rates to crying. In the United States, we’re often taught that babies are “manipulative”—those little manipulative babies crying to get what they want, like care and attention. The prescribed response: “let them cry it out” so they’ll learn to be independent. “Go sleep in your own bed, little baby, come on, you don’t need me.”
What values are we trying to transmit? Self-sufficiency. We want to make those babies independent. We don’t want them to be dependent on us. Many other societies respond to crying immediately, with very different assumptions about what crying means and what independence requires.
The Dutch Example: Society Shapes Parenting
The Dutch aren’t as far from the United States as the Gusii—they’re a European industrialized society. Yet their parenting practices differ significantly. Dutch society emphasizes the “three Rs”: rust (rest), regularity, and reinheid (cleanliness) (Small, 2). The result: Dutch babies are sleeping longer than American babies within a few months.
Here’s the critical insight: this isn’t just about individual parenting choices you can adopt in your own life. Dutch society is organized such that most things are within close walking distance. You can quickly leave the house, get some bread, come back. You can’t pin a baby to a crib and go off to the store in the United States because it takes too long. Their whole society is set up to emphasize these values of rest, regularity, and cleanliness.
Parenting practices reflect broader social organization, not just individual decisions.
The American “Cultural Experiment”
According to anthropologist Ronald Barr, “Caregiving in the United States may be viewed as a cultural experiment in which the infant is relatively more separated—and separable—from the mother, both in terms of frequency of contact and actual distance” (Small, 4).
We’re doing something unprecedented in human history: extreme separation of infants from caregivers. Not sure if it’s working out—if we’re really producing the independence we’re after—but we hope we are.
Consider other practices through this lens:
- Co-sleeping: We teach parents that babies must always be in cribs on their backs because of SIDS. However, if done correctly without big soft bedding, co-sleeping might be evolutionarily beneficial—it’s common across species and human societies.
- Breastfeeding: Americans sometimes react negatively to public breastfeeding, but our closest non-human primates typically breastfeed much longer than we do.
- Childcare: Is there really a reason a 10-year-old can’t care for younger children for a few hours? In many societies, by age seven to ten, children have learned enough to get by. One great-grandfather said “when I was 10, I became a man and got a job.”
Muckle, Tubelle de González, and Camp frame this contrast as “dependence training” versus “independence training” in their Through the Lens of Anthropology textbook (203-204). For the textbook treatment and a critique of those terms, see Parenting Culture.
No “Bare Human Nature” Exists
There’s no such thing as some kind of bare human nature that exists outside of a particular way of becoming human—outside of listening to certain music, speaking particular languages, learning specific cultural practices from infancy.
Languages learned during infancy get incorporated into movements and breathing patterns. Some languages change word meanings based on whether you’re breathing out or sucking air in. For English speakers, these are nearly impossible to learn later because we weren’t biologically trained to hear those distinctions. You can learn them, but it’s much harder.
This doesn’t mean there aren’t better or worse ways socially of doing things. But there’s no single biologically-determined correct method—no “human nature way” to parent. Many different societies in different environmental and social circumstances have raised perfectly healthy, intelligent, and wonderful children using varied approaches.
Ethnopediatrics and the Question of Power
Studies like Small’s have inspired ethnopediatrics—pediatric practice that understands childcare in culturally sensitive ways rather than imposing Western norms universally. This encourages healthcare providers to consider cultural context when advising parents.
But cultural relativism in parenting requires a caution: we shouldn’t gloss as “cultural difference” what might actually be choices made under constraint. Nancy Scheper-Hughes’ Death Without Weeping shows mothers in impoverished Brazil leaving infants with young siblings not out of cultural preference, but because that is what they must do to survive. When Jared Diamond celebrates “traditional child autonomy” with a photo of an Indigenous baby playing with a large knife—is that culture, or is it poverty?
The most potent lesson may not be what we can learn from distant others, but how politically contested it remains to secure parental leave and quality childcare in wealthy countries that could easily afford them. Anthropologists like Small and Sarah Blaffer Hrdy emphasize that humans are cooperative breeders—infant care is always social, always shared. Yet policies supporting communal approaches to child-rearing face resistance, even as they align with what we know about human development. Ethnopediatrics means recognizing cultural variation, but it also means asking who has resources and who doesn’t.
Continue Your Journey
This exploration of when babies learn culture demonstrates why anthropology takes human diversity so seriously—because our biology and culture develop together from birth. For more on cross-cultural perspectives, visit the Cross-Cultural Understanding hub. To explore how anthropologists study human variation, see What Makes Anthropology Anthropological?
For an advanced treatment of how biology and culture develop together—challenging the very distinction between “innate” and “learned”—see Tim Ingold’s argument that walking and cycling are both skills that emerge through developmental processes.