Nandita Chaudhary - Challenging Western-Centric Child Psychology

Mad in America: Rethinking Mental Health

Mad in America

Anxiety, Mental Health, Benzo, Science, Hearingvoices, Psychology, Antipsychotic, Mentalhealth, Depression, Panicattack, Psychosis, Medicine, Health, Health & Fitness, Psychiatry, Ssri, Antidepressant

4.8 • 201 Ratings

🗓️ 5 July 2023

⏱️ 40 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Nandita Chaudhary is a foremost expert on child psychology. She served as a professor at Lady Irwin College in India for over 35 years and teaches in Brazil.

Dr. Chaudhary has an impressive record of over 70 publications and several books. Her work challenges mainstream views of parenting, child-rearing, and child health. Given recent debates concerning child research conducted primarily in WEIRD nations (Western Educated Industrialized Rich and Democratic) and subsequently applied universally, her work carries significant relevance.

How we understand and shape the lives of children is crucial to how we perceive suffering, healing, and mental disorders. In this interview, we delve into how global organizations like UNICEF may unintentionally harm those they aim to help, how children raised with multiple caregivers can be misclassified as problematic by psychology, and how our comprehension of families, children, and mothers is severely limited.

Most importantly, we discuss how studying childcare across various cultures can enlighten us about different ways of living, loving, and understanding one of the most vulnerable among us – children. This might allow us to examine our own biases, practices, and narratives more effectively.

***

Mad in America podcasts and reports are made possible, in part, by a grant from the Thomas Jobe Fund.

Thank you for being with us to listen to the podcast and read our articles this year. MIA is funded entirely by reader donations. If you value MIA, please help us continue to survive and grow. To find the Mad in America podcast on your preferred podcast player, click here

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Welcome to the Madden America podcast, your source for science, psychiatry and social justice.
0:12.1	Our podcasts are made possible in part by a grant from the Thomas Job Fund.
0:20.9	Hello everyone and welcome to Mad in America.
0:24.1	This is your host for today, Ayurdi Dhar.
0:26.6	I am an assistant professor of psychology at the University of West Georgia and a spotlight
0:31.4	interviewer for Mad in America.
0:33.7	And our guest for today is Dr. Nandhata Chaudhry, a leading world expert on the psychological
0:38.9	lives of children.
0:41.2	Dr. Chaudhry was a professor at Lady Urban College in New Delhi, Delhi University, for over
0:46.7	30, 35 years, and is currently on a visiting professorship in Brazil.
0:52.2	She has over 70 publications to her name. She has authored and co-authored and
0:57.2	edited numerous books. But to be honest, my favorite remains her personal blog called Masala Chai.
1:04.1	Now, Dr. Chaudhry is not just any expert in child psychology. Her work has challenged mainstream
1:09.3	and predominantly Western ideas of parenting, child-rearing, child health, suffering, and a lot more.
1:16.7	So she's a cultural expert here.
1:19.1	And for those who don't know, this is a very important field.
1:23.1	Because just a few years ago, it was discovered that most of the research done in child psychology
1:29.0	specifically was done in Western industrialized, rich nations, I think over 90% of it.
1:36.5	And then it was simply applied without any thought or foresight to the rest of the world,
1:42.5	one-size-fits-all model.
1:47.2	So how we understand the lives of children is essential to how we think about suffering, how we think about disorders, how we think
1:52.3	about healing, what we call illness, what we don't call illness. It's essential to pretty much
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Mad in America, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of Mad in America and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.