Commentary On Part III-A: Children’s Development Under Conditions of Poverty: A Cultural–Ecological Analysis

This was an extremely interesting set of chapters, focusing in different, but related, ways on the relations among poverty, parents’ and institutional experiences of poverty, and children’s development. My goal in this commentary is to describe, very briefly, each of the chapters and then provide an overarching theoretical perspective that I will subsequently use to contextualize the authors’ research.

Chaves, Borrione, and Mesquita approach the issue from a cultural–historical perspective, analyzing what happened to abandoned children who were raised in a Bahian institution (the Holy House of Mercy) in the 19th century. As Chaves and his colleagues point out, to understand the ways in which poverty is perceived and society’s reaction to those who are destitute, one has to take into account contemporary ideologies, values, beliefs, and practices. As these change across both historical time and cultural groups, no comprehension of poverty is complete without specifying current cultural norms.