by Jane and James Ritchie

Any good library will supply books on almost any family you care to name - the English family, the troubled soup of American saburbia, the social problems of the Negro ghetto family, or growing up in any of several hundred 'primitive' groups. But who speaks authoritatively for ourselves ? The New Zealand family is background for no more than a dozen good novels, none of known typicality; the occasional visitor has commented, not often wisely or well, nor in terms we can both understand and accept." So say the Ritchies in the first chapter of Child Rearing Patterns in New Zealand, which remedies the situation in an original and stimulating way.

Over a two-year period Jane and James Ritchie and their colleagues interviewed the mothers of 151 four-year-olds representing all aspects of New Zealand society. As responsible social scientists they interviewed in depth, but the result of their research is not a dry treatise but an easily read analysis of a little recorded aspect of New Zealand society.Paperabck,

1972(70), 186pages, good condition