Cultural child-raising

Does it count as quality time with Baba if she's asleep and doesn't know she's having it?

Chillin' in her swing, staring at something of great fascination to her (we didn't see anything)

Maybe someday she'll have big swimmer paddles for hands, but she's got a little growing to do first

This morning I laid Zarya down for a nap in a room by herself while she was still fully awake.  Since her last nap I'd fed her, given her a bath, and carried her around a little bit while I did a few things around the house, and I figured it was about time for her to have some self-entertaining alone time and sleep.  (She had different opinions about the sleeping, but that's a different story.)  I left her in the bedroom and went into the kitchen to do dishes.  I could hear her making little noises to herself as she looked at whatever she found to be of interest and hung out in there on her own for a while.

While washing the dishes, I had the thought that I was already training her in my culture.  I'm not sure about all the details of Tanzanian child-raising practices, but I'm pretty sure that Tanzanian mamas don't tend to give their four-week-old babies intentional alone time or leave them by themselves to go to sleep.  Tanzanian adults don't like to be alone when sleeping and I think this probably comes from never having slept by themselves before (there are exceptions to this, but in general it seems to be true).  And what Tanzanian likes to be all alone in a room?  Not many!  Most homes in East Africa have lots of people and not many rooms, so people aren't usually alone much.  And why be alone when there are people around, anyway?  What's the point of that?  In my mind, it's good for Zarya to be alone sometimes - she's learning to entertain herself, learning that it's okay to be away from mama sometimes, and (hopefully) learning to put herself to sleep.  I have a feeling that while those values are important to me, they are lower on the scale of the average Tanzanian mother.

There are elements of personality that affect each person, but a lot of cultural values are learned ones, and I'm pretty sure I'm training Zarya up in American culture pretty thoroughly, even now.  Before she even knows how to talk, she's going to have preferences that Tanzanian children won't have, and vice versa.  Part of me thinks that it's a bit sad that I can't really help but give her all of this cultural input.  I like the idea of raising a child who is not so ingrained in her own culture.  But what can I do - whether I like it or not, I'm thoroughly American and have a strong cultural bias, and it's going to come through in my parenting practices.  I guess the only way to combat it a bit and raise a more balanced child would be to pack her up at a very young age and move her around the world or something drastic like that.  Maybe we'll just have to do that... :-)