This article delineates four universal features of child rearing that together explain how child rearing everywhere so effectively turns children into valued adults. Cultural models for child rearing, so variable in the substance of what they teach, are all equally designed to make the child’s experience of those important lessons constant, to link those lessons to emotional arousal, to connect them to evaluations of the child as approved or disapproved of, and to prime the child to be emotionally predisposed to learn them. This design insures that the child is receptive to these lessons, and that the lessons themselves are unmistakable, motivating, and memorable. The result, human adulthood, could not be accomplished otherwise.
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