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Character

What would you do if you had a baby who would not stop crying, even though you were sure the baby was not hungry, sick, or needing a diaper change? How would you respond?

How you respond to this may depend on your culture. In Navajo Indian tribes, for example, the normal response was to take the child away from social contact. It would be taken outside the single-room home they lived in and placed in a safe, quiet place until the baby stopped crying. When it did, it would be taken back inside to join its family. It was found that babies raised like this were often very quiet (not necessarily the cause), since they apparently learned that making noise meant being taken from social contact. Contrast this with many U.S. families who might often comfort the child by holding it. This may teach the child that crying results in social contact. This isn’t to say one way is better than the other, but both are examples of what is called “socialization,” or the process we go through to learn and live in our culture (it’s how boys learn how to be boys and girls learn how to be girls, for example).

It also shows that each culture is different. To further illustrate, there is a gentle tribe called the Semai in Malaysia who avoids violence and violent people. Contrast this with the Yanomamo Indians bordering Venezuela and Brazil. This tribe raises their boys to be aggressive and tough. Yanomamo men welcome (even seek out) strong emotion and violence. The people of each tribe are socialized differently, and so the individuals in each tribe may have very different characters.

My role here, in fact, is to highlight this idea of character. We become who we are as people because of the genes we inherited from our parents, and from what we see others doing in our family and society (of course, our belief systems influence our behavior as well). While the process of this development may be complicated, I think there is definite purpose in understanding why we are the way we are. If nothing else, we can at least tell ourselves that we're crazy for a reason.
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