INTRODUCTION

In the great arc of human development across time and space, sexuality and gender play a special role in thinking about the interaction between caregiving, culture, and developmental factors leading from childhood into adolescence. Such interaction was observed long ago in that great classic of cultural anthropology, Ruth Benedict's Patterns of Culture (1934), in which cultural relativism artfully accepted the central role of the “push” and “pull” factors of individual and society to be of equal importance in the production of what was then called “sexual temperament” and personality. Today we understand that development is not only a “shared project” in the Boasian sense (as used by Benedict and Margaret Mead), but that it also has subtle interactional components that have been documented by Robert A. LeVine and colleagues (1994). Seeing social tasks as part of the developmental competence and emotional support for caretaker/child interactions has helped to create a sharper way of understanding the “work” culture does in developmental experience. Researchers now recognize that sexuality and gender play a vital role earlier in life than had been believed (Money & Ehrhardt, 1972; Herdt & McClintock, 2000). Examples of the form this role takes include gender attitudes toward very young offspring, sexual and gender socialization that subtly guides development in particular directions, and in task assignments that match culture to experience (see also Whiting & Edwards, 1988).