Multiple Caretaking of Infants and Young Children: An Area in Critical Need of a Feminist Psychological Anthropology

Abstract

Multiple caretaking of infants and young children, although nearly universal, remains controversial in the United States. Why? This article addresses that question by first reviewing some of the pertinent cross‐cultural record on multiple child care and then by drawing on my own and others' research in India as a case study. The article critiques some of the Western developmental and psychoanalytic assumptions that underlie beliefs that exclusive mothering is essential to a child's well‐being and argues that a feminist psychological anthropology is required to address these important issues about child care in American society and to help normalize multiple child care in both practice and theory.