In recent years, there has been an uptake on promoting open, reproducible, and replicable science. One aspect of reproducibility is the replicability of experiments in non-WEIRD communities (Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich, Democratic) but therein lies the question of cultural differences – What if our cultural behaviours change us? 

In our recent journal club session, our lab manager, Fei Ting shared an interesting article from Science News on how culture helps shape when babies walk. We invited researchers from the Rehabilitation Research Institute of Singapore (RRIS) for the session to hear their insights on cultural differences in motor development.

The idea of strapping our babies in a cradle under swathes of cloth so that only their head can move for up to 20 hours a day in their first year may be shocking and unacceptable to some. However, this practice is common in Tajikistan, where mothers secure their babies in gahvoras – traditional cradles which infants are bound tightly in. The infants are not unwrapped for feeding as mothers bend over the gahvoras to nurse and the infants defecate through a hole in the cradle.  

This practice of bounding infants and restricting their movements is largely unheard of outside the region of Central Asia and has never been studied before until recently. In contemporary child-rearing guides, parents are often encouraged to move their infants’ limbs and let them roll onto their tummies. Some paediatricians warn against binding limbs of infants as it can lead to severe long-term damage to their limbs and stun their motor development. However, that is not the case with these children who go on to develop regular motor skills despite the restrictions. In general, they reach milestones like crawling and first steps at a later time compared to children in Western societies but by age 4, they are no different from their peers in other societies. 

Now, scientists want to find out if this cultural practice affects other areas of development. 

A baby’s sensory perception of the world changes when they move from lying on their backs most of the time to being able to crawl and then walk on their own. These changes in sensory perception are also coupled with changes (mainly an increase) in interaction with caregivers – you can now point to an object, name it, then ask your baby to crawl towards it and perhaps name it again. In psychology, developmental cascade refers to the cumulative consequences of development across different developing systems e.g., motor, sensory etc.; where acquiring a certain set of skills (such as walking) influence the development of other skills (e.g. language). 

So do babies who reach developmental motor milestones slower, also acquire language slower? That is the question that researchers like Lana B. Karasik are trying to find out. 

At the end of the presentation, our lab director, Prof Suzy Styles shared with us her observations about Singaporean parents being less likely to put their kids in strollers and prams compared to parents in Australia. Here, parents carried their children if they aren’t walking, which gives them more opportunity to develop neck muscles at an earlier age. Researchers at RRIS also shared about how culture may also have implications on motor development, using the “Asian squat” as an example! 

Can you think of more cultural practices we do here in Singapore e.g. using the baby bouncer? How do the different cultures in Singapore interact with the way we learn language?

Here at BLIP Lab, we’re interested to find out more about how our diverse language backgrounds influence language development for children in Singapore. Join us in our exciting discovery by clicking on this link: https://blogs.ntu.edu.sg/blip/baby/join/

This article was originally drafted by Shaza and edited by Fei Ting.