Strengthening the Family: Implications for International Development.

• Author: Saffron, Joseph

In many countries, and certainly in the West, much is made by politicians of the contemporary decline of the nuclear family, the rate at which family values are eroding, and the prospects for reversing that trend. With all this apparent primacy on the family, the irony lies "in the design of development policies, [where] families have remained an invisible layer sandwiched between the individual and the community". The authors posit that the smallest unit of analysis should be neither the individual nor the household, but the family. Unfortunately, federal and private aid programmes generally fail to recognize this.

Scholars all, these authors rely on vast fieldwork. Zeitlin has worked in 24 countries and specializes in the design of child and family development programmes. Megawangi is a faculty member at Bogor Agricultural University, Indonesia, whose research interests focus on women and family. A pediatric nutritionist, Kramer has worked directly in child nutrition programmes for the past 15 years. Colletta has worked in developing countries for 25 years, designing developmental programmes for preschool children. Babatunde is associate professor of anthropology at Lincoln University, Pennsylvania, with a research focus on family values and social change. An associate professor of economics at Tufts University, Garman's research centres on applications of econometrics.

The basis for this book develops from a five-year, three country United Nations Children's Fund study on the development of children in poverty. A judicious review of an extensive body of literature was undertaken and, proved to be dominated by studies of Western, North American Caucasian families. To counterbalance this bias, the authors use structural models to test their hypotheses against studies of two family groups distinct from the West, the Javanese of Indonesia and the Yoruba of Nigeria.

The...