The document summarizes life on the tiny island of Ifaluk in Micronesia, including its social organization, gender roles, and traditional practices surrounding childrearing. Women are responsible for gardening and food preparation while men focus on fishing. Babies are cared for primarily by mothers and female relatives according to strict traditions meant to protect infants, such as never leaving them unattended and breastfeeding for two years.

1. Huynh-Nhu Le
Never Leave Your Little One Alone:
Raising an Ifaluk Child
• Atoll of Ifaluk includes two tiny inhabited and two uninhabited islets
of barely one-half square mile long
• Western Caroline Islands of Micronesia in the western region of the
north Pacific Ocean.
• 600 individuals in 1995
• Colonial history – Germany, Japan, now part of Micronesia
.
• fishing, cultivating taro, and harvesting breadfruits and coconuts; few
income jobs

2. Social organization
• 4 villages
• clans - headed by male chief
• matrilocal groups – matrilocal post marital residence,
older women make decisions
Gender Relations
Gender Division of labor Taro
• Women garden, cultivate taro, weave, cook, infant care
• Men fish, artisan and building work in canoe house (taboo to women),
toddler care
Syncretism of Indigenous religion and Christianity
High rates of adoption
• children have 2 sets of parents and 2 families

3. The author Le chose a birth attendant / midwife / grandmother as the
baby guide “author’
Manual is for mothers; fathers prohibited from caring for newborns
Protect babies from malevolent yulas (supernatural beings)
and be maluwelu (gentle, calm, quiet)
Conception beliefs
Fetal development – a “person” after 7 months
Pregnancy taboos ; sex of fetus; reasons for adoption
Birth - birth hut, birth rituals, silent self-delivery, stillbirths and burial,
First 10 days - Bathing infant in ocean, nursing, sweating the infant,
father’s role (fishing, cradle)

4. 3-month confinement – on 10th day return home; feeding on demand;
visit adoptive parents’ home
Sleep with parents
On co-sleeping in US culture : Pro & Con (9 out of 10 articles)
Naming – may contain parts of ancestors’ names but not whole name
Father may hold after 3 months (this is changing)
Never leave infants alone after 3-month confinement when mother goes back
to gardens
Breastfeed 2 years or longer
Training – shaming, lecturing, but never hitting; obedience expected;
express calm and quiet emotions, fear of danger