“There are many different ways of approaching parenting as there are cultures. However, in non-industrialized cultures, the similarities are also striking. Extended nursing, co-sleeping, carrying the baby in close physical contact, responding promptly to cries or distress, never leaving a baby alone, are all virtually universal in traditional societies that have not become overly "westernized".”

“...please remember that leaving your baby alone protesting for more fun with you while you get dressed is not the same things as abandonment. Similarly, leaving your baby alone protesting for more fun when she needs to sleep is not neglect. ”

“It is a highly valued function of society to prevent changes in the rules of the many games it embraces... Deviancy, however, is the very essence of culture. Whoever merely follows the script, merely repeating the past, is culturally impoverished. There are variations in the quality of deviation; not all divergence from the past is culturally significant. Any attempt to vary from the past in such a way as to cut the past off, causing it to be forgotten, has little cultural importance. Greater significance attaches to those variations that bring the tradition into view in a new way, allowing the familiar to be seen as unfamiliar, as requiring a new appraisal of all that we have been- and therefore all that we are. Cultural deviation does not return us to the past, but continues what was begun but not finished in the past... Properly speaking, a culture does not have a tradition; it is a tradition.”

“Psychology researchers now claim that it is important for babies to learn how to stop crying by themselves. Fortunately, many parents still prefer to comfort their babies. If they didn't, we might find ourselves living in a society of very solitary people, who had learned to control thier distress rather than to find strength through sharing it.”

“A “class analysis” does not necessarily begin and end with Marx’s nineteenth-century version, a version I regard as grossly inaccurate. The class struggle, moreover, does not begin and end at the point of production. It may emerge from the poverty of the unemployed and unemployables, many of whom have never done a day’s work in industry; it may emerge from a new sense of possibility that slowly pervades society—the tension between “what is” and “what could be”—which percolates through virtually all traditional classes; it may emerge from the cultural and physical decomposition of the traditional class structure on which the social stability of capitalism was based.”

“Because cultural difference has long been conceived as a redemptive solution to the ambivalence of a Western culture established in the destruction of its own traditions, the appropriation of other aesthetic and spiritual modes is ultimately self-referential. This means that any attempt to perceive another culture based on the commodification and consumption of difference will fail. Understanding never really was the point.”