Development During Middle Childhood The Years From Six to Twelve (1984) / Chapter Skim
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8 Ecocultural Niches of Middle Childhood: A Cross-Cultural Perspective
8 Ecocultural Niches of Middle Childhood: A Cross-Cultural Perspective
Pages 335-369
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From page 335... ...
The term ecocultural niche defines what Bronfenbrenner (1979) called the ecology of child development, going back to the tradition of Barker and Wright ~ 1954~.
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From page 336... ...
Their list, which appears below, is derived from cross-cultural as well as American studies and so includes some domains and activities that are not relevant to American children. The domains themselves, however the work cycle, health status, children's work and chores-probably represent pancultural features that affect all children: .
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From page 337... ...
. Another influences the personnel likely to be around children and what those people are likely to be doing (daily routines, division of labor, child care system, play groups)
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Regardless of the different ways to generate and cluster the variables that make up the niche description, certain dimensions recur as powerful ecocultural determinants of child development: ( 1 ) the personnel available in the family which individuals, ages, sexes, kin; (~)
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From page 339... ...
The ecocultural niche helps to account for the existence of a particular home reaming environment in the first place. It accounts for the limited child caretaking personnel available to assist American parents, for instance.
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From page 340... ...
. Although pronatural and voluntarily poor parents did differ in a number of child care practices from a comparison group, interactional styles often did not.
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From page 341... ...
The study of child development, then, should include the study of the relationships between the activity settings provided for children within the niche, on one hand, and the maturational uniformities and individual differences children and parents bring to these activity settings, on the other. Basic research on the 6-12 age period should pursue new knowledge regarding the development and influence of activity settings of children at these ages and study a far broader range of such settings in American society and around the world.
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From page 342... ...
The regions of the world are also very unevenly represented; Latin America, for example, is far more frequently mentioned than other parts of the world. WESTERN AND NON-WESTERN CULTURES In the discussion of ecocultural niches of middle childhood in this chapter, American children ages 6-12 are often lumped with Westem children or those living in complex societies.
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From page 343... ...
The topics covered in this chapter are those that are not already covered in other crosscultural reviews, such as the Handbook of Cross-Cultural Human Development (Munroe et al., 19811; that do not as yet have extensive comparative research but look promising; that appear to be important during the 6-12 age period; and that are emphasized in the other chapters in this volume. PATTERNS OF CARETAKING OF CHILDREN A central issue in American families with children ages 6-12 is the gradual shift in direct control of the child's behavior and activity settings from parents to the world of the school and peers.
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From page 344... ...
Effective performance of child care, as a part of the competencies needed to perform domestic chores and even manage the domestic routine, requires a minimum level of both these kinds of skills in childhood, and in turn domestic duties help train children in more general skills. Thus the age of greatest involvement in and responsibility for shared child and domestic task management corresponds to the 6-12 developmental period, when these social and cognitive skills become available to children.
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From page 345... ...
Shared functioning is a useful term for describing such flexible, nonexclusive family work roles and child care responsibilities (Gallimore et al., 19741. Children ages 6-12 are cared for by older children; then, through participation in pivot roles (Levy, 1973)
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From page 346... ...
Children ages 6-12 frequently divicle into groups of mixed-age girls and younger boys; younger boys are usually separated from older boys, who are off in small packs (Weisner, 1979~. This diffusion of child care responsibilities through the sibling hierarchy and among other kin relieves the parent of the constant monitoring characteristic of many Western domestic care situations.
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From page 347... ...
Contrast this with the task of the 6- to 12-year-old in more kin-based, shared-function, sibling care cultures. There are very few activity settings in which other children who are strangers would ever be present.
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From page 348... ...
In much of the world, however, this task is undertaken by relatives and child acquaintances who are already known and by groups of children who are going to be lifelong sources of support for each other or lifelong opponents or both. Sibling caretaking may assume increasing importance in this culture, and American children ages 6-12 will probably participate in shared responsibility even more than they have in the past.
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From page 349... ...
American white middle-cIass fathers, however, are already actively involved in the domestic routine and in supplemental child care, compares] with fathers in most other cultures.
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From page 350... ...
The simple assessment of task or chore responsibilities of fathers or their presence in the home needs to be replaced with a more complex picture of the types of emotional involvements and coregulation of activities that fathers share with their sons and daughters during middle childhood.
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From page 351... ...
in the tasks of the wider community outside the family. The activity settings for such children in these kinds of middle-range societies expose them to a wider circle of kin and community members and to greater responsibility and expectations for prosocial behavior than is the case for American children.
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From page 352... ...
in this section that different kinds of activity settings produce differing patterns of self-regulation, self-unclerstanding, and conceptions ot personhood. The same contrasts between Western and non-Western activity settings clescribed above for the consequences of caretaking are also relevant in shaping the development or the sets.
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From page 353... ...
They are likely to describe whole periods of their life, especially adolescence and the early years of marriage or later childhood by saying "I was in the period at that time." Shared life stage categories or kinship groupings, rather than nonshared categories, are used to compare people. The intimate, face-to~face, small-scale character of such societies seems to promote shared, nonprivate self-concepts in children.
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From page 354... ...
topical domains provide a framework for comparative data collection on the content of children's ideas about the self and social personhood in Westem and nonWestem settings. What are some of the features of activity settings for children ages 6-12 that might be linked to differences in self-conception?
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From page 355... ...
Amer' ican children learn how to make behavior and possessions private or at least capable of being kept private as a matter of their choice. Self~presentation in activity settings without privacy of these kinds is like being on a social stage with no private dressing rooms, where the stage wings are visible to nearly all of the audience, and where the same audience and cast comes to every show.
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From page 356... ...
, and there are many cultures and subcultures in the Western world without the pressures for individualism that ~ have described. Religion, ethnicity, local patterns of class or cultural dominance, and other features clearly modify the development of the individualistic self during the 6-12 age period.
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From page 357... ...
In contrast, research on American child care environments, which encourage positive self-esteem; self-confidence; egoism; individualism; and an open, exploratory demeanor in new social situations, shows the opposite pattem. American family settings promoting such a pattern in self-concept include parental warmth, personal attention to children, family democracy and negotiation, and an absence of overcontro!
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From page 358... ...
More elaborated, empirically based descriptions of the development of self in children of these ages in a variety of econiches are needed. TROUBLESOMENESS IN CHILDREN As American children enter schools, they come to the attention of teachers and others in public institutions.
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From page 359... ...
Some of the problems reported for American children depend on what definition the culture provides for a particular behavior pattern e.g., what do parents mean by poor peer relations? Others depend on cultural conceptions of what a child is capable of or what is perceived as normal for this period e.g., do Tahitian parents fee!
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From page 360... ...
found that ecological (particularly household personnel) features were most important in accounting for children's troubles during middle childhood in their longitudinal study of the children of Kauai; and they also found that nonmatemal and sibling caretaking played an important role in providing supports for resilient children those children who were at earlier risk, but without troublesome outcomes.
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From page 361... ...
SCHOOLING AND LITERACY Each cohort of children ages 6-12 over the past two generations, as well as the one to come, is participating in a transformation unique in the history of our species: the spread of formal schooling and literacy around the world. The United States has nearly universal school attendance of children ages 6-12 and has one of the highest rates of literacy in the world; however, formal school attendance is far from universal in much of the world.
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From page 362... ...
What of other new Western cultural tools looming on the horizon, which go beyond books and literacy, such as the computer? What contextually specific, culturally localized cognitive skills and changes in social-behavioral styles may appear as this new cultural too!
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From page 363... ...
Events in such activity settings or units are regulated by others in the setting, by what the actor brings to the situation, and by the environmental circumstances. ~ believe that methods need to be developed that take the activity unit as the unit of analysis not the individual actor alone, nor the thought or language of that actor, nor the localized environment.
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From page 364... ...
1978 Child Care in the United States. Working Paper No.
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From page 365... ...
Harkness, eds., Anthropological Perspectives on Child Development.
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From page 366... ...
1973 Polymatric Infant Care in the East African Highlands: Some Affective and Cognitive Consequences. Paper presented at the Minnesota Symposium on Child Development, Minneapolis, Minn.
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From page 367... ...
In M.E. Lamb, ea., Nontraditional Families: Parenting and Child Development.
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From page 368... ...
Paper presented at American Anthropological Association, Washington, D.C., December. 1982c Sibling interdependence and child caretaking: A cross-cultural view.
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From page 369... ...
1 979 Cross'Cultural Child Development. A View from the Planet Earth.
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