Intro
In the post-colonial era, many Indigenous communities, ethnic groups, and nations return to their roots by rekindling and preserving their traditional family and childcare practices. Escalating migration has intensified conflicts over cultural identity, adding to challenges in intercultural cooperation, and created a dilemma: how can extensive childcare research from formerly colonizing nations be integrated with the rich traditions of indigenous infant care—on equal terms?
This column highlights reflections from Fairstart´s program, educating 950 staff for NGO and government partners in 38 countries. Students train groups of parents, foster parents, and teachers with sessions in attachment-based care and learning, covering 100,000 infants and children. By invitation from editor Hiram Fitzgerald, the design is described in Handbook of Infant Mental Health (Rygaard, 2024).
Working with partners spanning from Asia to Chile and the Global South profoundly challenged the author´s Western foundation in child psychology – to the point of asking himself whether the term “formerly colonized” should be replaced by “still colonized”? One eye opener indicating continued oppression and exploitation was the United Nation’s count of 153 million orphans worldwide, raising a number of questions: How can equal cooperation happen on de facto unequal terms, and how can low-cost interventions be upscaled by using semi-virtual solutions?
Background: who cares for the caregivers of infants and children?
During a 2006 world tour of lectures and dialogues with local caregivers of orphans, the author observed a stark gap between Western academic knowledge and the local knowledge of frontline caregivers. Most caregivers were formally untrained and underpaid women, caring for traumatized children. For example, interviewing a 65-year-old rural foster mother in Rwanda, hosting three foster children, three babies from her sister who died of AIDS, and three from her brother, killed in the Rwandan genocide. When asked what kept her going, she indicated that she lives by the Kafala tradition where any relative takes the responsibility to care for children of troubled relatives. Or, interviewing an Inuit teacher in Greenland who had been sterilized at age 12 in a Danish state program to prevent overpopulation, then sent to a Danish foster family to help “civilize” Inuit children. Or, two women in a Mexican orphanage caring round the clock for 29 babies, abandoned in the wake of desperate migration. These observations – and the gap between research and practice – led the author to co-found the Danish Fairstart Foundation.
Think global, act and design with the local partner
To accommodate to various cultural contexts, Fairstart adapts programs according to ten principles for intercultural projects (Bruns and Walker 2008): Planning must be grounded in local partner and caregiver’s perspective, and be strength based. Participants must share responsibility for developing, implementing, monitoring, and evaluating programs. They must have respect for and build on the values, culture, and identity of the child. Fairstart added: Local researchers and governments must participate in program design and implementation.
Why does indigenous care organization enhance secure attachment?
Secure infant attachment requires time and support for parents and caregivers. And above all, the avoidance of traumatic parent/infant separations. And an analysis of indigenous strengths in care cultures: in collectivist cultures, any extended family member can replace another, children are raised in groups, mothers breastfeed their neighbor’s child, and community networks are strong. Colonization and mass migration to cities often disrupt traditional care and networks (in 2050, 80 % of the world population will live in a major city). Urban individualization causes increased parental burnout (Roskam et al., 2021), frequent divorces, weakened community bonds, and daily separations of infants from an early age, leading to the overwhelming of mental health services. In this merger on unequal terms, valuable indigenous care practices are lost. As Fairstart is based on mutual learning, it works to map and reinstate them. In trainings, caregivers learn to replace the dark sides of traditional care (such as physical discipline, the mutilation of young girls, and gender inequality) with jointly developed relational care skills.
Towards global ethics in decolonization
At the European Congress of Psychology 2025, a panel on global ethics addressed the need for cooperation on equal terms: Saths Cooper who shared a prison cell with Nelson Mandela, later president of the International Union of Psychological Science, spoke about economic colonization. Professor Ava Thompson, University of Bahamas, spoke about teaching her students professional integrity in an exploited society, and the author spoke about the global rights of families and children. This and other initiatives may contribute to a set of global ethics in the process of decolonization.
References
Bruns, E. J., & Walker, J. S. (2008). Ten principles of the wraparound process. https://nwi.pdx.edu/NWI-book/Chapters/Bruns-2.1-(10-principles-of-wrap).pdf
Roskam, I., Aguiar, J., Akgun, E., Arikan, G., Artavia, M., Avalosse, H., … & Mikolajczak, M. (2021). Parental burnout around the globe: A 42-country study. Affective science, 2(1), 58-79.
Rygaard, N. P. (2024). Parenting and infant mental health in global perspective: Exploring standards for virtual intervention designs. In H. Fitzgerald (Ed.), WAIMH Handbook of Infant and Early Childhood Mental Health (Vol. 2, pp. 129–150). Springer Nature.
Authors
Rygaard, Niels Peter
CEO at Fairstart Foundation,
Denmark
