In Nigeria, in the context of the government's Early Child Care and Development Programs, we chose to view differences in verbal responsiveness as differences between traditional and modern strategies of child-rearing. This interpretation avoids casting negative value judgments on persons and makes it possible to appeal to the desire to be modern in order to motivate change. Recent history has transformed the requirements for profitable employment in Nigeria. Above the subsistence level, earnings now are tied to competitive educational achievement. Although professionals have been marginalized by pay scales that have failed to keep pace with inflation, these differences in earning power remain.
Unemployment is high and competition for advancement steep.
New livelihoods tend to depend on technical skill and individual competition, whereas the old relied on social skill and group collaboration. We estimate that the disparities in standards of living between rural farmers and the urban employed continue to grow larger with increasing pressures on the land. In the design of our research on Yoruba mothers and children, we assumed that rapid social change would lead to a lag in adapting parenting codes to new livelihoods and new values, and that rapidly adapting parents would have better child outcomes than those who still applied codes based on traditional modes of employment. From a nutritional perspective, we found that almost all parents still followed, to a greater or lesser degree, a previously rational formula of rather severely restricting the amount of high-quality foods of animal origin given to very young children, in order to develop the child's moral character. Through the visible sequence of serving these foods and the sizes of the pieces given to different persons, this restriction taught children the order of rank and privilege within the family and lineage, preparing them to become selfdisciplined members of a hierarchically governed society.