Cultural Differences in Childhood
Cultural differences in childhood refer to the variations in beliefs, values, behaviors, and practices related to child-rearing across different cultures. These differences can impact children's socialization, cognitive development, and emotional well-being. Understanding and respecting cultural diversity in childhood is essential for promoting inclusive and effective social and educational environments.
5 Key excerpts on "Cultural Differences in Childhood"
eBook - ePubConstructions of Childhood in India
Exploring the Personal and Sociocultural Contours
- Ravneet Kaur(Author)
- 2021(Publication Date)
- Routledge India(Publisher)
...Each culture defines children and childhood differently and these beliefs mediate what it means to be a child as well as when childhood begins and ends (Richards & Light 1986 ; Schaffer 1996 ; Woodhead, Faulkner, & Littleton, 1998). These particular cultural constructs are a product of the long-term evolution of the cultural consciousness of people over centuries. Such constructs shape how people behave with and relate to children (Kakar, 1979). Children too learn to think, feel, communicate and act within the cultural practices and processes of a particular sociocultural context. Saraswathi (1999), in her research on childhood, focused on the socialization settings, processes, outcomes and ways of studying childhood in the sociocultural matrix. She highlighted that out of the three models of socialization (Jahoda & Lewis, 1987) that had emerged from European thought—the unfolding model (based on the belief of inherent potentials for which nurture only provides a forum); the moulding model (with emphasis on shaping, training and dominance of nurture); and the interactive model (which acknowledges the role of both nature and nurture), the last two models are what govern most of the research on socialization and stand as best representations of Indian ethnotheories about children and their development. She added that the Indian psyche sees the child as born with basic predispositions (based on his genetic makeup and also carry over from his previous birth). The role of the family is to nurture the child so that his potentials are actualized and negative tendencies constrained. Kakar as early as 1979, in the Inner World, argued that the traditional cultural prescriptions relating to childhood possess an enduring continuity that influences caregiving in contemporary times, and so they must be factored in into any study of modern childhood. Burman (2008) too endorsed this idea...
...Childhood, as distinct from biological immaturity, is neither a natural nor a universal feature of human groups but appears as a specific structural and cultural component of many societies. Childhood is a variable of social analysis. It can never be entirely divorced from other variables such as class, gender or ethnicity. Comparative and cross-cultural analysis reveals a variety of childhoods rather than a single or universal phenomenon. Children’s social relationships and cultures are worthy of study in their own right, independent of the perspective and concern of adults. Children are and must be seen as active in the construction and determination of their own social lives, the lives of those around them and of the societies in which they live. Children are not just passive subjects of social structures and processes. Ethnography is a particularly useful methodology for the study of childhood. It allows children a more direct voice and participation in the production of sociological data than is usually possible through experimental or survey styles of research. Childhood is a phenomenon in relation to which the double hermeneutic of the social sciences is acutely present. That is to say, to proclaim a new paradigm of childhood sociology is also to engage in and respond to the process of reconstructing childhood. (James and Prout 1990 : 8–9) Such an approach, in this context, displays a variety of purposes. First is an endeavour to displace the overwhelming claim on childhood from the realm of common-sense reasoning – not that such reasoning is inferior or unsystematic, but that it is conventional rather than disciplined (Schutz 1964 ; Garfinkel 1967). Common-sense reasoning serves to ‘naturalize’ the child in each and any epoch, that is it treats children as both natural and universal and it thus disenables our understanding of the child’s particularity and cultural difference within a particular historical context...
eBook - ePubHandbook of Applied Developmental Science
Promoting Positive Child, Adolescent, and Family Development Through Research, Policies, and Programs
- Richard M. Lerner, Francine Jacobs, Donald Wertlieb(Authors)
- 2002(Publication Date)
- SAGE Publications, Inc(Publisher)
...As articulated succinctly by Miller and Chen (2001), studies of parenting ethnotheories provide, Insight into the contexts of human development, in highlighting the need to understand the impact on parenting of cultural beliefs and practices, sociopolitical and demographic forces, globalization and cohort-related historical shifts. They also raise central questions regarding the nature of socialization and of developmental change, (p. 1) Furthermore, as contributions to the understanding of parents’ cultural belief systems have emerged from various allied disciplines, including anthropology, cross-cultural psychology, cultural psychology, and developmental psychology, the area demonstrates a particularly rich potential for integrating existing perspectives and literature. We begin by highlighting three major approaches to the study of culture and child development, drawing on the literature from developmental, cross-cultural, and cultural psychology. First, we focus on conceptualizations of culture and context within developmental psychology itself. Then, we highlight the work of cross-cultural psychologists, followed by the approaches that fit under the cultural psychology umbrella. Although all three approaches are distinct and separate in the assumptions they make about individual functioning and how it is influenced by culture, there is recent evidence of some convergence. Indeed, we draw on this convergence, as well as the complementary foci of the three subfields, to document how integrated perspectives in the study of parenting ethnotheories hold rich promise for developing culturally inclusive and comprehensive knowledge about parenting belief systems...
eBook - ePub- Kylie A. Peppler(Author)
- 2017(Publication Date)
- SAGE Publications, Inc(Publisher)
...In relation to research on out-of-school learning, cross-cultural studies document the accomplishments, challenges, and social practices of children and youth in home, community, or workplace settings around the world. These results are often contrasted with school-based or formal learning environments. In general, cross-cultural research in out-of-school settings helps make visible the intellectual resources and situated learning practices of diverse groups of people. Such research aims to understand how learning is embedded in social life and identity and how these may differ from school life across cultures, particularly because individuals and groups in many communities and regions of the world have differential access to education in general and the learning practices that are found in schools in particular. Differential and unequal access to schooling may be related to issues such as poverty, child-rearing practices, gender roles, linguistic differences, ideologies, and life opportunities, which vary considerably across global contexts. Major Conceptual Approaches With its focus on learning activities in home, community, and workplace settings, cross-cultural research on out-of-school learning draws from theories in linguistics, anthropology, ethnographies of communication, and educational and social theory. Underpinning many of these theories are sociocultural perspectives, which view culture in terms of the social, cultural, historical, and political circumstances in which people live. Grounded in the work of Lev Vygotsky, a Russian psychologist, sociocultural perspectives consider culture as both fluid and continuous. Learning is examined within the complex networks of social practices and human relationships and is defined within the context of communities and families across cultures...
eBook - ePub- Leena Alanen, Berry Mayall, Leena Alanen, Berry Mayall(Authors)
- 2002(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...Child-adult relations are therefore structured and operationalised at the intersections of the understandings derived (in part) from social influences, that individuals and groups work with. Education policy in the UK provides an example here. Parents and teachers grew up under the influences of policies current in the 1970s (and deriving from those of the 1960s), but both they and children are now faced with dramatic changes in education policies, formulated in the late 1980s. The concept of generation is thus useful in drawing attention to people in their membership of groups, and to how group experience and understanding is shaped by large-scale historically rooted influences, ideologies and policies. In the case of children this is especially useful in helping us to become more sociological, to move from a focus on the individual child and local adult influences on her, and to lift children and childhood, theoretically speaking, out of the family. Then we can begin to see children as a social group operating in relation to the social order; to understand local activities and interactions in relation to large-scale forces. Key to understanding the character of childhood at any given point is the dominant social understanding of the appropriate balance of responsibility for childhood, as between the parents and the state. It can be argued that societies conduct a continuous negotiation about this division of responsibility (Shamgar-Handelman 1994). Wintersberger (1996) argues that attention to children’s protection and provision rights is a pre-condition of assuring their participation rights; countries vary in how far they have seriously addressed the appropriate issues, but probably in all countries radical and concerted changes are needed to the material conditions of daily life (such as child-friendly town planning), and in the distribution of parents’ working time...
