Snuffy said:
What happens when the human suddenly is deprived of this attention. What impact does this have during the first years of life?
1. Yes, humans tend to need affection, company, and such of others. However, this is only true in societies that value personal relationships over material possessions. The moment a person(s) begins to value material possessions over personal relationships, that's when that person breaks the bond either by migrating, focusing on his/her career or money making plans, etc.
Snuffy said:
Does it make for a less happy child and consequently a less complete adult?
Less happy? Perhaps.
One thing that must be understood is that people want to feel satisfied with their life in one way or another. If they don't have the extended family (and sometimes not even the immediate family) within reach, they will depend more on material possessions to fill the emotional hole.
Children in societies where material possessions and personal careers are valued over personal relationships (ie. individualism vs. Interdependence) tend to be highly materialistic. Many children in such societies quickly fall into boredom if they don't have a material thing in their presence or possession to make them feel "happy".
In essence, creativity is eliminated in a highly market oriented society and people depend more and more on what the market has to offer to fulfill their needs and desires.
In the US, many kids have a hard time considering a good time when something is done around the family, but many DO consider themselves to be having a good time when they are playing video games, watching television, getting toys, etc. In fact, if they don't have those material things, they become grumpy, angry at their parents, completely miserable.
Contrast with the DR where people don't depend on the market, yet, many kids are highly creative. They create an entire universe in their minds of superheroes and villains, of such wonderful material that could become a successful novel if put into writing all with sticks and stones at hand. In the US, a kid needs real gloves, a real bat, and a real ball in order to play baseball in the neighborhood streets. In the DR, kids use their imagination to create what they don't physically have and despite using a broom stick for a bat, a carton for a glove, and socks for a ball, they manage to have as much fun as those who do have the "real" thing.
I would go as far as saying that perhaps, and this is speculation, the kids in the DR get better satisfaction at the fact that they had a problem (lack of things) and they found a solution that still gave them the exact result they wanted (to play baseball). I'm not too sure a kid in the United States would be as creative, most would probably sit and whine of how bored they are because they don't have the material things to play baseball, despite all the things they could have used to make the game happen.
Snuffy said:
If you had a child and that child were surrounded by a large extended family in the Dominican Republic...would it be wise to take that child to the USA where such attention does not exist?
It's always wise to expose children (or anyone for that matter) to different cultures, peoples, and societies and teach them that the world does not consist of the places they grew up in.
However, keep in mind that it's very easy for a person to accept material things over everything else, because material things are things that we can possess and control with our own power. With a material thing (let's use a computer as an example), we buy the machine and we program the computer to serve us. Whatever we can tell the computer to do, it will do. The moment the computer malfunctions, we can either fix the computer (notice, it's in our power to fix or not) or we can simply buy a new computer that will supply us what we want.
With family members (more so extended family), there is no such thing. You don't get to pick whose your family members, you don't get to shape your family members into the perfect people you think they should be, you cannot simply buy a new family member, much less fix one. Family members in the extended family are beyond our control and materialistic people don't like to lose either control or orientation.
-NALs