The Start of A New Human Life: Maximizing Well-Being in the Trade-Off Between Economic Wealth and Spiritual Richness - or - What Can South Teach North About Raising A Kid

The prologue. Establishes my perspective as a Southern migrant from Ecuador to the U.S. and the resultant ability to view both cultures through a distant and inquiring lens. I also lay on the table some important aspects of my own world view that have guided me throughout the Ph.D. program and my dissertation work.;Chapter one. This introductory chapter forms the basis for a unified approach to economic and ecological systems by establishing the relationship between energy, power, money and the contrast between physical and spiritual uses of power. This is done principally by analyzing why both economics and ecology, as disciplines, have rarely focused on the use of power in child-raising, despite the fact that this must be a key use---perhaps THE key use---of power in both disciplines. The significance of the use of power in starting a new human life is presented and leads to the question of what a sustainable use of power might mean.;Chapter two. This chapter builds on fundamental features of living systems---growth and self-regulation---to suggest that the language and concept of sustainability might be over-general and best avoided. By looking at cycles of growth, complexity, collapse and regeneration, I come to the conclusion that maximizing individual fulfillment---in both a physical/economic and spiritual sense, recognizing that these are often in conflict---might be the best way of understanding and striving for sustainability.;Chapter three. Here I present my view of how economic and ecological approaches to understanding human-environment interactions should be considered part and parcel of the same discipline. I build on the work of four authors---James Baldwin, Carl Sauer, Michael Pollan and Gerrat Vermeij---to elaborate "Seven Simple Truths" that encapsulate my understanding of how energy cycles through economic/ecological systems, and how physical and spiritual types of energy can be in competition. This chapter brings forth what I believe are the two intellectually original contributions---theoretically---that my dissertation will provide. The first is an attempt to de-mystify what "spiritual energy or power" might actually be or how it might be represented, which is the principal topic for Chapter Four. The second is a mathematical framework for analyzing scaling data from the perspective of maximizing fulfillment.;Chapter four. In this chapter, I build on the fundamental physical relationship between power, energy and time to establish a mathematical "power use" space. In this space, human metabolic power use is separated (on low-sloped lines) from human extra-metabolic power use (which is found on steeper-sloped lines). This power use space opens the question of how different aspects of child-raising scale with power use.;Chapter five. This chapter serves as a critique of traditional measures of population performance, such as GDP. I review what other alternative measures are available and look at how these metrics relate to my own perception of sustainability developed in Chapter Two.;Chapter six. Building on the work of Vermeij (2004) and Moses and Brown (2003), I argue strongly for the primacy of scale in determining how power use can be maximized. I present Moses and Brown's analysis of how fertility rates among mammals, including humans, scales with power use. I then put forth the question of where maximal fulfillment might lie on a given scaling relationship, using Moses and Brown's example, as well as another example from food provisioning and diet. Finally, I return to Vermeij's five aspects of scaling that should be analyzed in understanding the performance, or power use cycling, for living systems as a place to launch the next section of my dissertation, which will analyze populational and individual power use data related to child-raising.;The second half of the work presents my data on child-raising practice's comparing experiences in Ibarra, Ecuador and Prescott, Arizona. Data come from the government-run pre-school centers in these cities and include anecdotal data obtained from interviews with families, along with quantitative, scalable data from the centers' standard intake and evaluation forms. The Ibarra and Prescott data are compared with the massive, comprehensive, longitudinal study of child-raising in England, the Millennium Cohort Study (see Appendix One for details on data sources). Where appropriate, I also compare my finding with world-level statistics from various organizations.;Chapters 7-9. These chapters are each dedicated to presenting data results and analyses from a particular stage of child-raising (Chapter 7 is Pregnancy and Birth; Chapter 8 is Infancy and Toddlerhood; Chapter 9 is Early Childhood). My results show that parents, especially in Northern countries, believe they take rational decisions about child-raising practice from a full range of possibilities. However, in reality, their choices are constrained by the power-level, or income bracket within which they conduct their lives. (Abstract shortened by UMI.).