Anthropologists have long emphasized emotion as a product of social life, and highlighted cross-cultural variation in the ways that emotions are expressed and experienced (Levy 1984; Lutz and White 1986). Nevertheless, the capacity to emote relies on shared neurobiological systems, which are activated in particular ways through emotionally arousing experiences. Repeated emotional arousal, particularly during childhood, therefore plays a role in shaping how people relate to themselves and others, and in creating particular ‘cultural selves’ (Quinn and Mathews 2016).
In this article, I explore what kinds of emotions are evoked through common childrearing practices observed in two urban settings, Helsinki, Finland, and Santa Marta, Colombia, and argue that the two principal emotions evoked were shame and fear. I draw a contrast between cultural schemas that emphasize the moral values of compliant autonomy in Helsinki and respectful obedience in Santa Marta. In doing so I consider how broader cultural factors shape childrearing goals and practices and, in turn, childhood emotional experiences. I start the article with a brief introduction to the theoretical starting points and assumptions and a description of the methods and field sites, before presenting and discussing the empirical evidence.
Cultural Schemas and Emotion
Drawing on transdisciplinary work from psychological anthropologists, I use the concept of cultural schemas to ground this study. Cultural schemas refer to the shared mental representations or ideas that pattern the way that individuals interact with others and the world around them, which are also shaped and reinforced by personal experiences (Chapin 2014; D'Andrade 1995). In this way, childrearing practices are shaped by both shared and individual childrearing goals and parenting ethno-theories, and at a broader level by the models of personhood, emotional landscapes, and socio-political contexts that are available to a particular person in their particular context (Chapin 2014). This implies that while childrearing practices are not identical across the individuals in any group, many of the ideas, representations, and experiences that underlie and shape these practices are shared with others and can be considered cultural (Chapin 2014).
The concept of emotion used in this article draws on the contemporary understanding, widely shared across disciplinary boundaries, that emotions are bio-cultural processes whereby an underlying neurological capacity for emotion is realized and shaped through engagement in particular cultural practices and personal experiences (Quinn and Mathews 2016; Röttger-Rössler et al. 2015). In taking such a stance towards emotion, I aim to bridge the universalist/relativist divide that is so dominant in studies of emotion and bring anthropological and psychological perspectives together to illuminate the role that emotion plays in human social life (Quinn and Mathews 2016).
Emotion and Childrearing
Emotions are central to many adult–child interactions, but the particular emotions that children commonly experience vary according to the dominant cultural and emotional schemas of the society they are raised in (Chapin 2014; Röttger-Rössler et al. 2015). Seminal ethnographies of the socialization of emotion such as Jean Briggs’ study of Utku Innuits have shown that children are guided to feel particular emotions through locally grounded childrearing practices, and through these repeated experiences they learn culturally appropriate ways of behaving and interacting with others (Briggs 1998).
Numerous examples highlight the importance of emotionally arousing experiences during childhood in the making of appropriate ‘cultural selves’ (Quinn and Mathews 2016). For example, Bambi Chapin's work among Sri Lankan families details how everyday practices that emphasize the child as a passive receiver lead children to consent to and value their subordinate position in society because of the “solidarity, nurturance, trust, and dependence” this offers (Chapin 2014: 82). Heidi Fung and Mai Thi. Thu demonstrate how children in Vietnam are lovingly coached by adults to perform embodied ritual acts, through which they develop an understanding of social hierarchies as rooted in affection, and argue that family-level hierarchies mirror wider sociocultural structures (Fung and Thu 2019). Ward Keeler's research in Java—where children are taught to feel shame when they fail to ‘know their place’—demonstrates how shame can reinforce hierarchical interpersonal relationships (Keeler 2023), while Christina Toren's analysis of the processes through which children learn and give meaning to hierarchical relations in Fiji highlights the importance of repeated everyday practices that emphasize and reinforce particularly appropriate ways of navigating social relations (Toren 1990).
These examples highlight the extent to which learning to interact appropriately implies learning to navigate and enact interpersonal relationships, many of which are hierarchically organized, according to the values and ideals that are found within shared local cultural schemas. Recent cross-cultural research has, for example, shown that children in China and the UK draw upon different norms when dealing with conflict; these are based on contrasting moral values of modest yielding to those with lower status in China and assertive respect towards those with higher status in the UK (Kajanus 2023).
The mastery of appropriate behaviors and modes of interaction is therefore a social process that is shaped by other community members, particularly socializing adults, and through this process emotional experiences orient and inform children, taking a “constructive, directive role in social relations” (Beatty 2019: 83). Such emotions that promote the learning of social norms have been conceptualized as socializing emotions (Röttger-Rössler et al. 2015). These emotions support the transmission of, and conformity to, particular social standards, practices, or modes of engaging and interacting with others (Beatty 2019; Fessler 2007). This, of course, also includes learning what types of interactions are considered antisocial or inappropriate through unpleasant emotions (Briggs 1998; Rae-Espinoza 2010).
In line with much of the research presented above, I take a process- or practice-oriented approach in this article (Beatty 2019). I am interested in the emotional experiences that guide children to learn particular—and locally appropriate—ways of interacting with others, rather than in defining the “putative boundaries” of the emotions under discussion (Beatty 2019: 18). I draw upon the concepts of cultural schemas and socializing emotions to explore and compare common emotion-inducing socialization practices in Helsinki and Santa Marta. By documenting the emotions that are reinforced through common socialization practices and childhood experiences and then exploring the relationship between these and the broader cultural schemas that shape them, this article also highlights how multiple different layers of context shape child socialization practices.
Methods and Field Sites
Data presented in this study were collected during 13 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Helsinki and 4.5 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Santa Marta.1 My interest in comparing children's experiences in these two contexts stemmed from my time working in schools in Santa Marta from 2017–2019 and in child daycare centers in Helsinki from late 2019–2020.
During fieldwork, I spent time in a range of environments to generate an understanding of the everyday communities of practice within which children spent time (Rogoff 2003). Informed consent/assent was sought from parents, institutions, and children, and I regularly discussed the research with children and families. Children had the agency to permit or deny me access to their social worlds and to guide the extent and nature of our interactions, as I tried to take on the role of the ‘honorary child’ (Atkinson 2019).
Helsinki, Finland
Helsinki, Finland's capital city and home to approximately 650,000 people, sits on the southern border of the country surrounded by the Baltic Sea. I spent my first six months of participant observation with three families in the city, participating in and accompanying them throughout everyday activities such as school drop-offs and pick-ups, play dates, mealtimes, and time simply spent at home; this was complemented by online interviews and data collection from public sources. I then spent two months on summer camps, with campers aged 7–13, and one semester at an after-school club attended by 80 first- and second-graders (seven- to nine-year-olds). The children came from a range of backgrounds; those at the after-school club were typically from middle-class families, with one or both parents working in white-collar jobs, and lived in a residential neighborhood adjacent to central Helsinki. The children at the summer camps came from somewhat more diverse backgrounds and lived across Helsinki and the capital region.
Santa Marta, Colombia
Santa Marta, the capital of the Magdalena department, has approximately 550,000 inhabitants and sits on Colombia's Caribbean coast. Here, I lived with two separate multi-generational families, observing and participating in everyday activities such as shopping for and cooking meals, cleaning, and doing school homework. I also conducted daily participant observation in a fourth-grade classroom (majority 8–9-year-olds) in a public school. All the children in the class were born in Santa Marta or neighboring towns. Colombia's system of estratos (‘stratum’) gives residential neighborhoods a ranking from high (estrato 6) to low (estrato 1) according to their level of socio-economic development; the families I lived with, the school, and most students’ homes were in estrato 2 or 3, representing lower- and middle-class families.2 This means, for example, that few parents had formalized work, but some families were nevertheless visibly better off than others; some students had air conditioning at home (a relative luxury), while others lived in insecure hillside settlements.
Ethnographic Comparison
There are many ways to compare. Here, I focus on comparing different practices, namely childrearing practices, and exploring the emotions that are evoked through them (Schmidt 2010). In doing so, I echo the stance put forward by psychological anthropologists that calls for culturally nuanced ethnographic work that is nevertheless rooted in naturalistic concepts and epistemology (Bloch 2012; Weisman and Luhrmann 2020). My approach lies between and attempts to work across the long-standing opposition in emotion research be- tween a universalist approach that draws on so-called universal or basic emotions (e.g., Ekman 1992) and a purely cultural relativist approach, seeing a forced opposition between the two as unhelpful when trying to understand human behavior (Beatty 2019; Bloch 2012). This approach enables a nuanced constructivist understanding of individual practices to be developed, while simultaneously taking into consideration how broader norms, beliefs, and systems shape these practices; it therefore facilitates fruitful comparison.
In keeping with this, I start with the assumption that shame and fear are deeply rooted emotions which are found across human societies, notwithstanding cultural differences in emic understandings and expressions of these emotions (Levy 1984). Conceptualizing them as such allows them to be useful in illuminating my ethnographic data and highlights the distinction between the socializing practices observed across two distinct contexts. A comparison of practice therefore makes the particularities of each context more explicit and demonstrates the extent to which childrearing practices are grounded in local cultural schemas, which are in turn influenced by global and historical circumstance.
My planned doctoral research focused on the socialization of hierarchy; I was interested in how children learn and enact normative ideas about social status. During fieldwork in Helsinki, shame emerged as a particularly common emotion evoked by adults in response to children's non-compliance with their expectations. I initially looked out for comparable shaming episodes in Santa Marta, interested in comparing how shame was expressed and learned across these different contexts, but instead fear emerged as the most salient emotion elicited through everyday childrearing practices.3 In comparing these two contexts, I do not intend to extend and reinforce Western assumptions about ‘correct’ childrearing practices, nor to make value judgments about shame and fear. Furthermore, the childrearing practices presented in this article are not intended to represent the full range of emotional episodes and modes of interaction observed in the field sites, many of which were overtly loving and caring, but instead to illustrate and explore common emotion-evoking disciplinary practices across the two field sites.
Socializing Shame in Helsinki
The Cultivation of Shame
Cultivating shame is an active process that starts in early childhood and tends to occur in response to perceived norm violations (Xu 2017). Ethnographic research on the socialization of shame in children in Taiwan has demonstrated how through regularly recurring shaming episodes, ‘shameless’ young children are socialized into feeling shame, and ultimately learn to independently comply with societal norms and expectations. Such episodes refer to:
. . . a stretch of interaction in which at least one participant (1) anticipated wrongdoing or attributed it to the focal child, (2) used a variety of communicative resources to reprimand the focal child and put him or her in an unfavorable light, and (3) attempted not only to forestall or bring an end to the transgression, but also to elicit shame feelings from the child. (Fung 1999: 191–192)
Such episodes unfolded frequently in Helsinki, and shame emerged as a common tactic through which to address undesirable behavior. Below, I present two typical shaming episodes and then consider the complexities of learning to feel shame appropriately through a third vignette.
Episode One
I was in the park with Elias (14 months) and his mom. Elias was playing in the sandpit alongside several similar-aged children, including Lukas. As usual, the children were in the sandpit and parents were sitting on its outer edge, interacting primarily with their own child.
Lukas toddles over to Elias and grabs the plastic truck that he is playing with; his mom quickly follows and returns it to Elias with an apology, saying to Lukas in a patient voice: “It's Elias's turn to play with the red truck, but here, you can play with the blue truck” as she hands him a different toy. Elias's mom adds that “Elias says thank you!” and the children carry on playing.
Soon after, Lukas's older brother Oscar (4) joins us in the sandpit. He spots Lukas and marches over to grab the truck from his brother's hand, telling him in a bossy tone “I was playing with this, this is my one!” His mom immediately says “Oscar! Is that how a big brother behaves? Look how nicely all the other children are playing together and sharing toys.” Oscar hardly responds, clinging to the toy. She continues, now in a tone of voice usually reserved for babies: “Are you a baby who doesn't know how to share or ask nicely? Are you a little baby, eh?” Oscar shakes his head in response but still holds the toy tight. “But it's mine! I had it first!” he argues back. “Well then, if you want to behave like a baby. . .” She picks him up, showing off her “little baby” to the other parents while Oscar squirms in embarrassment. When she lets him down, he is red-faced and looking down, avoiding eye contact with the adults around him. He tells her “I'm not a baby, I don't even want to play with it” and, dropping the truck next to Lukas, goes to play on the swings.
This typical shaming episode played out when Oscar snatched the toy and was bossy towards his brother; using physical force and overtly imposing his will was considered to be inappropriate. When Oscar resisted his mother's initial shaming, this only became more intense, and his red cheeks and awkward squirming signal the embodied reaction shaming incited in him. Although there was a playful character to the shaming, its purpose was clear to all involved, and Oscar eventually ‘gave in’.
One of the most common tactics used to shame a child was suggesting that they were acting younger than their age. I observed similar shaming events regularly, for example when a child didn't play ‘nicely’ with others, or made lots of noise during mealtimes, acting in ways that were contrary to social norms and institutional rules. It was also common for the children to shame others by drawing attention to the fact that they were behaving “like a baby” or “like a first-grader,” thereby echoing the shaming practices of parents and adults.
Oscar's younger brother received a strikingly different reaction to the same transgression. Infants and toddlers, who were not expected to adhere to social conventions, were rarely chastised or shamed. Such treatment is consistent with findings from diverse communities that infants and toddlers have a “special status” due to their perceived inability to understand how to cooperate (Rogoff 2003: 163).
Episode Two
Three eight-year-old girls were playing ‘homes’ at the after-school club; Klara and Sara were older and younger sisters, and Fiona was their mom. I was watching from a nearby mat where I was drawing with another group.
“So, both of you get your things ready for school, and big sister can help little sister.” The girls comply, with Klara saying “Don't worry little sister, I'll help” when Sara feigns childish helplessness and says she cannot make her breakfast. Meanwhile Fiona enacts ‘being a mom’, typing on an imaginary computer and muttering, “I'm just so busy.”
After helping little sister eat breakfast and get dressed, Klara says, “But pretend, actually, that the big sister is really naughty and throws all the little sister's things on the ground instead” and acts this out. Sara immediately starts pretending to cry, saying “Mommy, Klara is being naughty and mean.” Fiona looks at Klara. “Is that nice?” she uses a soothing, reasonable ‘adult-like’ tone. “Don't act like a messy baby, you're a big girl, you have to look after your little sister.”
Klara, however, doesn't stop. She carries on creating havoc, saying “And now I'm messing up all the toys and now I'm painting on the walls” and laughing while she acts this out. Fiona tries to stop her a few more times: “Sweetie, this isn't nice” and “Look your little sister is sad.” These unsuccessful attempts are followed by a sudden break of character “Klara! It's not fun anymore, you're just ruining the game, being silly and playing like a baby. I don't want to play if you keep doing this.”
Peers who recognized non-normativity in their friend's behavior regularly attempted to influence their behavior through shaming. It is not uncommon that children manage their peers and invoke authority that they would not otherwise have during role-play activities (Cobb-Moore 2012). However, even within a role-play game, children in Helsinki tended to avoid overtly dominant behavior and used shame-based strategies instead; as the ‘mom’, Fiona did not tell Klara off or shout at her, but shamed her, paralleling episode one. When that failed, she came out of character to address Klara as her peer, shaming her for her ‘silliness’; when that was still not successful, she threatened to disengage from the game, a common strategy children turned to when faced with conflict (Sequeira 2023b).
Episode Three
Aila, four, was playing in the shared garden outside her house with her sister Jenna, eight. I was outside with their mom, enjoying a moment of peace after a busy morning, and chatting about their week.
Aila and Jenna are on the swings when their neighbor Liisa comes outside to join them in the garden, happily eating a cookie. Both girls run over to greet her. Liisa and Jenna start playing together immediately, but Aila goes to Liisa's mom and asks if she could also have a cookie. She smiles and hands over two. Aila quickly looks around at Jenna and Liisa and—seeing that they don't seem to have noticed her—runs to the climbing frame on the far side of the playground and hides behind it. By the time I walk over to her less than a minute later, she's eaten both cookies and is brushing crumbs off herself. In a friendly voice, I ask her “What are you doing over here Aila?” and she turns pink, mumbling, “She didn't say I have to give one to Jenna!” adding before I can respond, “Anyway, Jenna can go and ask herself.”
This episode introduces the intricacies of learning to ‘do’ shame correctly, and the agency that children have in the process. Neither Liisa's mom nor I mentioned sharing the cookies, but Aila's behavior suggests that she is aware that not sharing could be deemed ‘wrong’ in some way. To prevent being shamed (by others), she tried to hide what she was doing, then quickly justified and defended her actions in ways that implied her innocence.
I suggest that this episode demonstrates that for Aila shame is primarily something that is evoked by others in the form of typical shaming episodes, rather than something internalized that guides her to act according to moral imperatives such as ‘sharing’. Presumably, if I had shamed her for not sharing, the emotionally arousing experience would have served to foment her body's physiological response to the transgression and ‘boosted’ the accompanying lesson (Fessler 2007; Quinn and Mathews 2016). Of course, it is also possible that she felt some shame but decided that having two cookies was worth this unpleasant feeling.
Emotional Landscapes and Cultural Schemas in Helsinki
For shame to be an effective socializing emotion, a child must learn to: recognize that they are being shamed; understand that (certain) transgressions trigger shaming; feel the unpleasant sensation of shame; anticipate disapproval and adapt their behavior to avoid shaming (Fung 1999). The goal of shaming is therefore not only to change the child's behavior in the moment, but to instill the ability to manage their own behavior in the future. This process draws parallels with the Foucauldian concept of governmentality; children's behavior is controlled not through the overt imposition of an adult's will, but instead through their becoming effective at regulating their own conduct in line with the adult's expectations (Foucault 1991). The shaming events presented above follow the aforementioned sequence with one addition; once the child complied and stopped the transgressive behavior, shaming ended, and the normative behavior that followed was praised or rewarded, reinforcing its ‘correctness’ in contrast to the previous behavior.
I suggest that cultural schemas prevalent in Helsinki that promote autonomy and independence on the one hand, and conformity and compliance on the other, underlie the prevalence of shame in childrearing practices. I have argued elsewhere that children in Helsinki are actively taught to avoid engaging in conflict with, or imposing upon, their peers, and tend to dislike overtly dominant behavior during play (Sequeira 2023a, 2023b). Per Christopher Boehm's research in small-scale and relatively egalitarian societies, leveling mechanisms that keep those who try to exert power over others ‘in check’ are commonly found in human societies and are predominantly used in response to a leader being more aggressive, self-assertive, or dominant than is deemed reasonable (Boehm 1993). I consider that the shaming practices observed in Helsinki can also be understood as a checking mechanism; in episode one, Oscar attempts to use force to take his toy back and is shamed by his mother, who ‘checks’ his behavior and effectively reminds him of correct ways of engaging with others.
Many children in the city spend a relatively large amount of time unsupervised from a young age, playing, socializing, and traveling to school with peers or alone (Kyttä et al. 2015). To be trusted with independence, they are taught to make (‘good’) decisions for themselves from an early age; to control and conduct themselves appropriately. As a result, autonomy is a key cultural value that drives childrearing practices and goals, and parents and educators explicitly uphold children's right to autonomy during their everyday lives (Sequeira 2023b). Existing alongside this focus on equality, independence, and autonomy, however, is the ideology that equality is primarily achieved through ‘sameness’ and conformity (Menard 2016). The particular ways in which these cultural schemas come together in this context positions compliant autonomy as an especially appropriate mode of interaction, and I argue that children learn this through shaming episodes.
Shaming enables adults to control and guide children's behavior without overtly imposing their will, therefore avoiding infringing upon the children's personal autonomy. Repetition of shaming experiences in the face of deviance reinforces children's internalization of social norms and ideals, and their conduct becomes controlled from ‘within’ by the conscience (Boehm 2015; Foucault 1991). Through internalizing shame, one is also able to maintain privacy around transgressions, which may be particularly important in such an individualizing context. In post-war Finland, for example, domestic violence was experienced as extremely shameful, but was also kept strictly private, which forced children to deal with difficult emotions and situations without help (Laurén and Malinen 2021).
Socializing Fear in Santa Marta
The Cultivation of Fear
A study of socializing emotions among Madagascan Bara peoples found that Bara children were oriented towards the childrearing goal of hitsy—similar to compliance—through fear-inducing emotional episodes (Röttger-Rössler et al. 2013). Fear was socialized in a series of stages, starting from the use of sanctions including corporal punishment, until—through repeated exposure to sanctions during childhood—children gained an increased ability to anticipate sanctions. Finally, in adolescence children begin to consider the socializing agents (i.e., those they needed to fear and according to whose expectations they should behave) to be their spiritual ancestors rather than their parents (Röttger-Rössler et al. 2013). In this way, fear became unlinked from a physical socializing adult and norm violations became impossible to hide; fear of supernatural sanctioning motivated the Bara to comply with social norms even beyond an age when their parents are physically larger and stronger than them.
In Santa Marta, fear also emerged as a salient feature of the everyday lives of both children and adults. Ethnographic research has highlighted how schools in the city are characterized by fear and physical violence, primarily from peers but also from teachers (Mieles-Barrera 2015),4 and I found that physical threats and corporal punishment were commonly used by adults to impose their will upon children. Adults were often explicit about their intentions; fear induced both respect and obedience. As the father of one eight-year-old student told me, “When he doesn't do his homework, I have to beat him, so he listens to the teacher and does well in school.”
In the following examples, I describe the relevance of fear in the everyday lives of children and adults in Santa Marta. First, I introduce the role of corporal punishment in arousing fear in children, then I demonstrate how fear is evoked in everyday play experiences, and the final example highlights the prevalence of fear at the societal level.
Episode Four
It was the start of the school day and one of the girls, Maria, came in looking upset. She sat at the desk next to me and avoided my eye when I looked at her with concern. It was obvious that she had been crying and I gave her a hug and asked her what was wrong.
“It's that my mom hit me and shouted at me,” she eventually tells me, and shows me her forearm, which has a red mark across it. “She thinks I have a boyfriend, so she hit me.” She starts to get upset again, and I make sympathetic noises. “I don't even have a boyfriend; she just saw me talking to the boy next door.”
According to my field notes, around a third of the class mentioned physical punishment during my semester in the school, without me directly asking at any point. While some of these referred to having been hit, like Maria, often children were anticipating the punishment they would get when they received a bad grade in an assignment or exam, or messed up their school uniform while playing, stating that “I'm going to get beaten [for this]!” Some would become visibly agitated or upset in anticipation of the punishment to come, demonstrating an embodied fear response and the emergence of its socializing function as it drew the children's attention to their perceived social transgressions.
Episode Five
It was mid-morning in the school holidays, and I was at home with eight-year-old Luisa and her grandparents. Her four-year-old neighbor, Valery, had been sent over to play, but Luisa had stayed in the hammock watching cartoons on her grandfather's phone.
“Can I play with your tiger again?” Valery eventually asks Luisa, who glares back at her. “Only if you don't do that again! Don't step on it again, you hear me?” [yesterday Valery had stamped on the new toy]; this is said in a threatening tone. Valery nods and plays with the tiger while Luisa carries on watching cartoons. When Luisa's grandmother realizes that Valery is playing alone, she comes out and stands over Luisa in the hammock, telling her to “Get off the phone and play with your friend!” Luisa complains, “But I don't want to,” but swiftly complies as her grandmother gives her a stern look.
A short while later Luisa and Valery are playing ‘house’ together; Luisa is the mom and tells her daughter to cook lunch, giving her strict instructions for what to prepare. Valery starts, and Luisa immediately shouts at her “No, I told you to do this [stirring] with the food in the pan!” Valery refuses and throws the small plastic toy foods in the air, and one hits Luisa on the head. She shouts at Valery, taking an angry tone, and grabs her arm and the pan to show her what to do: “I told you no! You stir like this and don't throw the toys!” Her grandmother shouts at her from inside, firmly: “Hey, Luisa, don't shout at the little girl! Play nicely or I'll call your mom” and Luisa switches to a whine, responding that she's the mom in the game and she's telling her naughty child off. Luisa's grandmother soon brings out bowls of ice-cream and hands one to Valery, telling her: “Careful, your mom will hit you if you don't eat all your lunch,” and laughing.
Throughout the morning, the girls experienced several fear-evoking episodes. From the first instance, Luisa used her status as a physically bigger and older child to threaten Valery, which appeared to serve its purpose as she played nicely with the toy. Luisa was then told to play with Valery, against her will; while there was no direct threat issued, there was an expectation of obedience that she complied with.
Then, authoritarian parent–child dynamics were replicated in a game. Luisa took on a dominant mom role from which she scolded Valery, and her justification of her bossy tone of voice ‘because she's a mom’ suggests that she considered this an entirely legitimate and normal manner for a mother to interact with her daughter.
Finally, there was the threat of Valery's mother hitting her, presumably if she became too full to eat lunch. My interpretation is that this was a throwaway comment made for fun; teasing was considered an excellent source of amusement for adults,5 and in many cases centered on threatening or scaring a child. The off-hand manner of the comment speaks to how normalized the practice is and exemplifies the kinds of fear-arousing experiences that children are subjected to many times throughout an ordinary day.
Episode Six
I was with Luisa, her parents, and maternal grandmother, going for sancocho, a hearty soup traditionally eaten on a Sunday. From their house in a residential area, we walked to the restaurant, around five hundred meters down the road and around a corner.
“Luisa! Come back here, now!” her mom shouts as she's about 20 meters in front, skipping along the side of the road. Luisa waits and walks alongside us for a minute or so, before running ahead again after a stray cat. “Come here. Now!” She is shouted at again, and she walks over to her mom, who grabs her hand and says “Stay right here with me. Or do you want to be taken [kidnapped]?” She turns to me, perhaps sensing my surprise, and explains, “It's that they kidnap children a lot around here.”
Fear was not only instilled in Luisa through disciplinary techniques but also through her exposure to her mother's own fear while moving around in society. This discourse of fear and mistrust was present and reinforced daily through small comments and practices. As an example, teachers in the school warned me against walking the block from the main road to the school, taking a motorbike taxi, taking a bus, taking a taxi, coming into school on rainy days, waiting for the bus alone, holding my bus money in my hand, and a wealth of other dangers. I was, essentially, being taught to fear an appropriate amount; violent crime is certainly more prevalent in Santa Marta than in Helsinki, and I consider these warnings to be a manifestation of care in an insecure environment. Nevertheless, such warnings created an emotional landscape characterized by fear, which was further reinforced by emotionally charged practices such as the use of violence as spectacle in the media and fear being used as a political tool (Cardona Zuleta and Londoño Álvarez 2018; Córdoba Laguna 2018).
Emotional Landscapes and Cultural Schemas in Santa Marta
Much has been written about the culture of terror and violence that has shrouded Colombia in recent history, and the rhetoric of fear that has defined socio-political and cultural discourses (e.g., Jimeno 2001; Uribe Alarcón 2018). The “chronic state of emergency,” high levels of violence, and societal mistrust described by Michael Taussig in the late 1980s remained relevant at the time of fieldwork (Alves 2019; Taussig 1989). Over half a century of civil war and the associated poverty, instability, violence, and insecurity shape the daily realities of much of the population, including in Santa Marta (Jimeno 2001; Mieles-Barrera 2015).
At the level of the family, the normalization of fear in the everyday lives of children becomes salient in the term chancletazo, which refers to using a chancleta (flip-flop) to smack a child. A 2021 law (Ley 2089 de 2021, known as the Antichancletazo law) was Colombia's first attempt to prohibit the physical punishment of children. Widely discussed in the media, many parents and educators did not consider that it would be effective; according to one teacher, “It's the only way that parents know how to make children obey.” Even in families where parents told me that they did not hit their children, they tended to hold the threat of doing so over them, and societal violence was ever-present and actively emphasized to the children.
Outside of school, children in Santa Marta spend most of their time at home, where patriarchal and paternalistic values based on strict authoritarian control dominate (Mieles-Barrera 2015). The belief that children should be both respectful and obedient guides parental practices, and adults are considered to know what is best for children and to be responsible for making (‘good’) decisions on their behalf. Adults’ decisions therefore typically supersede a child's own desires or opinions, and children are not expected to question their authority. As many children live in multi-generational households, at least at some stages of their lives, they are expected to defer to grandparents, aunts and uncles, and older siblings. Discipline is therefore often somewhat arbitrary as children are subject to the often conflicting or inconsistent desires of adults.6 I watched a child being sent to the shop; he was told to bring a big bottle of soda to share, and as he left his uncle shouted: “Fanta!” at him. Returning with a bottle of Fanta, he received a smack around the ear from his mother who had asked for Pony Malta. She sent him back to swap the bottle—he complained but immediately went—and when he returned without Fanta his uncle sent him back with more money, telling him to buy himself an ice-cream with the change.
This emphasis on respectful obedience in the face of overt displays of authority is also mirrored in children's own perception that they have little control over their own lives. They spend very little, if any, time moving around independently or with peers; a qualitative study highlights Santa Marta as “a city which the children perceive as adverse, since they are forced to remain prisoners in their own homes, behind the railings surrounding their homes and screens, unable to carry out physical activities, and forced into an interaction restricted to the members of their families and the school community, for the prevailing situation outside their homes is considered threatening” (Mieles-Barrera and Tonon 2015: 138).
Everyday childrearing practices and experiences that promote fear therefore serve to draw children's attention to the interpersonal hierarchies and power differentials that exist between themselves and socializing adults and reinforce their subordinate status. Through these repeated episodes, children learn to fear and obey those who are older, bigger, and more powerful than them. They learn to recognize and navigate interpersonal hierarchies in appropriate ways, demonstrating respectful obedience in the face of the wishes and demands of those with the power to punish them. The inconsistency in the enforcement of punishment, the fact that it was not necessarily linked to a transgression, and the regular teasing which served to remind them of the threat of punishment all further instilled the need to be aware of and learn ‘their place’ within these social hierarchies.
I consider that in Santa Marta, social control is therefore primarily imposed ‘from the outside’ through fear. As children grow, they become less susceptible to punishment from their parents and teachers. Nevertheless, living with the threat of everyday violence means that an undercurrent of fear runs through everyday life (Taussig 1989; Uribe Alarcón 2018), and reinforces the necessity of being attuned to and able to manage diverse hierarchical relationships.
Discussion
I have argued that emotionally evocative childhood experiences inform how children learn to relate to others in their social worlds. I have demonstrated that common childrearing practices in Helsinki and Santa Marta consistently evoked distinct emotions, shame, and fear. I have then considered how the salience of these particular emotions is both shaped by, and incorporated into, the distinct cultural schemas found in each context.
Previous research on the socialization of emotion has highlighted how emotions serve to teach children the particular ways of interacting with others that are ‘appropriate’ in a certain context (Röttger-Rössler et al. 2015). Emotionally evocative episodes are therefore a part of the civilizing project that teaches ‘not-yet-civilized’ children to interact in appropriate ways through, for example, disciplinary practices that promote—or dissuade from—certain ways of relating to others (Olwig 2011). Alongside disciplinary practices with explicit goals (“I have to beat him, so he listens to the teacher and does well in school”), the more implicit models of interaction that children are exposed to in their everyday lives also pattern the ways that they learn to interact and navigate within their social worlds.
I argue that in Helsinki, these are shaped by broader cultural schemas that emphasize the compliant autonomy of each individual; this implies the right to control over one's own life, even during childhood, but the strong expectation of conformity with social norms (Sequeira 2023a, 2023b). A tension exists between the fact that, on the one hand, society is organized in a way that adults are responsible for children, and, on the other hand, cultural values reject overt acts of control over others. Shaming emerges as a form of covert control through which adults manage children's conduct without overtly imposing on them through dominant or authoritarian practices. Furthermore, in internalizing shame, children learn to control their own conduct to avoid further shaming (Foucault 1991). This self-control is a symbol of their success at a key childrearing goal—independently making ‘good’ decisions—and this compliance with social norms leads to them being granted further autonomy, further reinforcing the socializing aspect of shame.
In Santa Marta, childrearing practices tend to reflect the more overt forms of control that go hand in hand with the strongly paternalistic elements that are found in familial and other social relationships. Children's respectful obedience was reinforced through practices that evoked their fear of those who held control over them, through the use of corporal punishment and threatening comments, and regular references to the dangers prevalent in wider society. As we see in episode five, children also learnt to balance taking explicitly subordinate and dominant positions in different contexts and within different relationships, and to both obey and express authority as appropriate. Accordingly, children repeated the patterns of interaction that they have observed and experienced in their homes with their peers; in Santa Marta, Luisa as the ‘mother’ character exerts overt control over her ‘child’ by giving her precise instructions and expecting her to follow them, whereas in Helsinki, the ‘mother’ takes up a more covert form of control and tries to influence her ‘child’ through shame.
Returning to the recent study of children in Java, Keeler argues that shame reinforces hierarchical social organization since children (learn to) feel shame when they fail to ‘know their place’ as subordinates (Keeler 2023). In Helsinki, on the other hand, shaming often contained the lesson not to impose upon another, reflecting an aversion to overt displays of authority or power. Although the outcome of shaming practices is therefore different in these two contexts—they reinforce hierarchical relationships in Java but discourage children from overtly hierarchical modes of interaction in Helsinki—this difference highlights how socializing emotions serve to orient children towards locally appropriate behaviors. Therefore, children in Helsinki and Java learn to feel shame not because this emotion inherently reinforces hierarchical organization, but because it is evoked when they act inappropriately; in the process, this emotion guides them to learn the complex patterning of social expectations, values, ideals, and norms that underpins local ideas about appropriate modes of social interaction.
Learning how to interact with others appropriately is therefore a process that is reinforced by emotionally evocative experiences that occur regularly during childhood and orient children towards particular patterns of interaction. This process requires children to learn to ‘know their place’ in the social worlds within which they are embedded; however, their ‘place’ and the way that they are expected to interact with others vary according to the cultural schemas that are prevalent and available in any particular social context.
Conclusions
This article contributes to the resurgence of comparative approaches in anthropology by providing new material on socializing emotions in two distinct urban contexts. I have explored how emotionally evocative childrearing practices serve to orient children towards particular modes of interacting with others and promote their compliance with normative moral values. I argue that in Helsinki, where the overt expression of interpersonal hierarchies is considered inappropriate, socializing practices that evoke shame serve to promote children learning compliant autonomy as an appropriate mode of interaction with others. In Santa Marta, where interpersonal relations are more overtly hierarchical, socializing practices that evoke fear orient children towards learning respectful obedience towards individuals with a higher status than themselves.
The comparison of socializing emotions and childrearing practices emphasizes that children learn to navigate interpersonal relationships and know their place within them in locally appropriate ways. It implies that childhood emotional experiences are dependent on multiple layers of context and reiterates that childrearing practices are not static entities but are dependent on many aspects of shared social life—such as socio-historical context, moral values, and societal norms and ideals—as well as individual experiences. The lessons that children learn about appropriate and inappropriate interpersonal interactions are, furthermore, taken forward into adulthood and continue to shape the ways in which they interact with others.
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank the participating children, families, and educators, without whom this research would not have been possible. Thank you also to the reviewers and the journal editor for very useful comments and suggestions. This research was funded by the University of Helsinki and the SYLFF Foundation.
Notes
Research was carried out in Finnish and Spanish. The time spent in each city was determined by the COVID-19 pandemic. In Santa Marta, existing relationships in the city facilitated the collection of rich data in a relatively short time.
The majority of Santa Marta is classified as estrato 2 or 3. Middle class nevertheless implies a relatively high level of economic insecurity and vulnerability (Mieles-Barrera 2015).
Anthropologists have typically contrasted shame to guilt and/or honor societies (Lutz and White 1986). I am not suggesting that Helsinki or Santa Marta are defined by shame/fear, nor am I contrasting the nature or expression of these emotions. Rather, I explore the use of these emotions in childrearing and compare how they shape children's learning. There might plausibly be some conceptual overlap between these two emotions; Toren's research, for example, demonstrated how shaming and physical discipline techniques went hand in hand in Fiji (1990). However, co-occurrence of shame and fear was not evident in my observations. In Helsinki, physical punishment is illegal and rare even among children (Sequeira 2023a), while in Santa Marta, adults considered that shaming was ineffective.
I did not personally witness or hear about physical punishment by teachers.
The role of humor in shame and fear episodes would be interesting to consider in future work; humor can reinforce but also challenge interpersonal hierarchies and plays a role in many intergenerational relationships (Toren 1990).
The behavior that was expected of children was more explicit and consistent in Helsinki than Santa Marta; behavior-shaping tools common in Helsinki (sticker charts or pictorial reminders of the ‘correct’ way to sit) were rare in Santa Marta.
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