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It is an undisputed fact among attachment researchers that children need stability and continuity in their caregiving environment for optimal developmental outcomes. However, anthropological studies show that informal and often temporally limited kinship-based foster care, including changes of children's primary caregivers, is widespread in some cultural contexts and considered normative and thus beneficial for children. Based on ethnographic interviews with Nso families in northwestern Cameroon, we analyzed the dynamics of caregiving arrangements and relational networks during infancy and early childhood. Exploring household compositions, caregiving responsibilities, children's preferred caregivers, and foster care arrangements revealed multiple caregiver networks, with the importance of the mother decreasing and the importance of alloparents and peers increasing as the children grow older. Also, families have fluid boundaries, with about one-third of the children changing households in the first three years of life. The Nso children's experiences reflect a relational cultural model of infant care as a cooperative task and a communal conception of attachment. The results are discussed in relation to attachment theory's claims about universal patterns of development. more...

Attachment studies mostly follow the Western middle-class model in theory and methods. To demonstrate that the assessment of children's caregiving context is an often neglected, but crucial prerequisite for attachment studies, we (a) conducted a literature analysis of attachment research in non-Western contexts and (b) empirically investigated the caregiving arrangements and cultural concepts of attachment figures in three cultural groups in Costa Rica: rural Guanacaste, urban San José, and rural indigenous Bribri. All persons involved in caring for 65 infants (7-20 months) participated in the study, resulting in a total of 179 semistructured interviews. The samples showed differences in caregiving practices, with the urban sample resembling Western middle-class contexts emphasizing the maternal importance; the two rural samples showing extensive caregiving networks; however, differently composed. Moreover, the three samples revealed culturally specific concepts of potential attachment figures. The study emphasizes the need for culturally sensitive conceptual and methodological approaches in attachment research. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved). more...

Caregiver-infant interactions in Western middle class often take place in dyadic play settings, engaged in infant-initiated object stimulation, and surrounded by a positive emotional tone, reflecting a distal parenting style. With this study we aim to investigate whether the same conception of caregiver-infant interaction is embodied in the proximal parenting style. For this purpose, we compare the context and pattern of caregiver-infant interactions in two cultural groups in Costa Rica: Urban middle-class families in San José and rural indigenous Bribri families. Naturalistic observations and caregiver interviews revealed significant differences between the groups, with San José families resembling the Western middle-class interaction pattern. Among the Bribris, adult-child play is uncommon so that children interact with adults in primary care settings and with older siblings in play settings. Bribri interactions are further characterized by emotional neutrality. The groups did not differ in terms of body contact. Also, caregivers in both samples took the lead in interactions more often than infants. The results are discussed in the context of an autonomous-relational style as combining psychological autonomy and hierarchical relatedness. We argue that early childhood theories and intervention programs need to abandon the assumption that Western middle-class strategies are universal and recognize locally relevant patterns of caregiver-infant interaction. more...