In this chapter, Dr. Fouts presents observational data on two boys, Anbo and Dema, aged 2 years, who live in the Congo Basin rainforest in the Central African Republic. The children are members of two different subgroups of the Bofi speaking people who are exposed to different rearing conditions: Anbo's parents primarily hunt in the forest whereas Dema's family lives in a nearby farming community.

The author presents these two case studies to detail the individual parenting these boys experience and to illustrate the “tension” between evolutionary and cultural contexts as they are reflected in the children's lives. Although the author discusses her case examples primarily from an anthropological and social and ecological point of view, I will discuss this “tension” from the point of view of my experience as an academic infant and child psychiatrist who also lived and practiced for some years in sub-Saharan Africa. Thus my comments will use an ecocultural perspective that is based on two assumptions: (a) the “universalist” assumption, which implies that human societies exhibit significant commonalities and that children have universal biological and emotional developmental needs; and (b) the “adaptive” assumption, which views behavior as differentially developed and expressed in response to ecological and cultural contexts (Berry, Poortinga, Segall, & Dasen, 2002). Under the adaptive assumption, individual parents or small groups may use their universal ability, for example, e.g., speech or the provision of physical punishment in a variety of culturally determined ways.