• DOI:10.1086/201883
• Corpus ID: 144720648

My Brother's Keeper: Child and Sibling Caretaking [and Comments and Reply]

@article{Weisner1977MyBK,
  title={My Brother's Keeper: Child and Sibling Caretaking [and Comments and Reply]},
  author={Thomas S. Weisner and Ronald Gallimore and Margaret K. Bacon and Herbert Barry and Colin Bell and Sylvia Caiuby Novaes and Carolyn Pope Edwards and B. B. Goswami and Leigh Minturn and Sara Beth Nerlove and Amy Koel and James E. Ritchie and Paul C. Rosenblatt and Tulja Ram Singh and Brian Sutton‐Smith and Beatrice Blyth Whiting and William D. Wilder and Thomas Rhys Williams},
  journal={Current Anthropology},
  year={1977},
  volume={18},
  pages={169 - 190}
}

• T. Weisner, R. Gallimore, +15 authors T. Williams
• Published 1 June 1977
• Psychology
• Current Anthropology

Children often act as caretakers responsible for other children. Such child caretaking varies widely in its frequency, as well as in the degree of institutionalization, relationship to parental caretaking, degree of indulgence, and incidence at differing ages. Residence and household patterns, size of the family, and the subsistence economy, daily routines, and work load of the family are important in determining availability of child caretakers in the home. The United States appears to have fewer alternative caretakers available, and less child caretaking, than most societies. Child caretaking is related to a number of developmental areas during childhood; eight are suggestedin this review: (1) mother-child relationships and attachment; (2) conceptions and emergence of childhood stages; (3) formation and organization of play groups; (4) development of social responsibility; (5) sex differences; (6) development of individual diferences; (7) development of cognitive-style differences; and (8) motivation and classroom performance.