Socio-cultural influences on early development

WEIRD crisis

• Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich, Democratic

• Routinely claim that “this is how the human mind works” or “these are the milestones that children are meant to reach” and they are not substantiated when we look at other, non-WEIRD societies

• E.g., the Muller-Lyer illusion is not universal (Segall et al., 1966)

• Need to strive for generalisable, replicable science and science that is sensitive to these cross-cultural differences

The need for cultural approach

• Issues with human universals, generalisability, external validity

• Much emphasis on at what age children reach certain milestones

• Leads to deficit model where variations in communities are seen as different from normal and in need of intervention - affects research, society and policies (WHO would be looking at research to develop policies)

The need for knowledge of childhood environments

• Cultural approach notes that different communities may have different expectations or lead to different pathways of development

• E.g., when does intellectual development permit children to be responsible for others? When can they be trusted to take care of an infant? - varies between countries, drives behaviour towards children

Diverse goals of human development

Go beyond to understand why this is the case

Other factors/regularities/patterns that may affect goals at community level:

• How relevant are literacy skills?

• Is society structured around Western schooling and bureaucratic system?

• How much priority is given to social relationships vs. schooling?

• Physical/public health issues

Parenting is culturally constructed

Cultural beliefs and values structure parenting practices

There might be some immediate and some long-term effect on children

• What do infants need?

• Challenging Expert Knowledge: Gusii case (LeVine, 2004)

• Maternal sensitivity to infant signals - what was normal reaction

• Maternal attention - gaze and speech

• Compliance - commands, threats, and praise

• Sibling care

Compared to mothers from Boston - found that Gusii mothers are more directed towards soothing and quieting infants rather than arousing them whereas the Boston mothers designed to engage the infants in emotionally arousing conversational interaction

Encultured motor development

4E view of motor development

• Can be hindered or facilitated by socio-cultural practices

• If we take in synamic systems view, it is the interplay between social, motor and cognitive systems that gives rise to particular behaviours

Locomotion and cross-cultural differences

Infants in dense urban areas in China showed an average 3.3 month delay in onset of locomotion:

• Result of living in constrained contemporary urban apartments

• Infants are placed on a bed surrounded by thick pillows; the bed is soft therefore not enough resistance to efforts to push

• Result: delayed development of the upper musculature; the infant is slower to start crawling

• The same infants were delayed in visuo-spatial tasks - motor skills are intertwined with social cognitive skills

Locomotion and restricted movement

• “Gahvora” cradling (Tajikistan) restricts movement of infants’ body and limbss

• Across age, time in the gahvora decreased, yet 20% of 12-24 moth olds spent more than 15 hours bound in

• At age 1, just 62% of Tajik babies were crawling and 9% walking

• Using WHO standards, almost half of all Tajik babies would be diagnosed with motor delays

• Once it is eased, they catch up with their WEIRD peers by the age of 3 or 4

• Karasik et al., 2018

Facilitating vs hindering motor experience

• Motor skills can be acquired out of order and selectively accelerated or decelerated through cultural practices

• Ugandan and Kokwet babies sat, stood and walked about a month earlier than babies in the West and trained through exercises like air stepping

• But were slower to master other skills, such as lifting their heads, rolling over, crawling due to being actively prevented (Super, 1976)

• Beng babies in Ivory Coast sit earlier than Western babies but are actively discouraged from walking before age 1 (Gottlieb, 2012)

Acquisition of motor skills is valuable, flexible and driven by beliefs of those who care for them

Question asking across cultures

• Children’s home environment moderates both their propensity to ask questions as well as the types of questions they ask

• Middle class children in the UK devoted more conversation turns with their mothers to curiosity-based as opposed to procedural or authority-challenging questions

• The number of questions parents ask their children predicts their children’s propensity to ask questions - more emphasis on independent curiosity driven learning

• In conversations with their mothers, Chinese children ask fewer questions relative to their American peers

Cultural variation in early memories

• Earlier memories among European-American vs East-Asian adults - role of different rates and tyes of child-parent reminiscing

• European-American mothers mentioned thoughts and feelings more often and offered more causal explanations for children’s emotions vs Chinese mothers produced more didactic comments, often framing events around proper behaviour

Trust in testimony across cultures

• Preschool children trust others’ counter-intuitive testimony (smallest doll = heavier), and sometimes continue to endorse it even after obtaining contradicting evidence from first-hand exploration

• Replication in Turkey, China and Belarus

• Parental survey to measure the extent to which parents prioritize their child’s conformity or autonomy:

• Obedience vs self-reliance, good manners vs curiosity, being well behaved vs being considerate

• No cross cultural differences - all children not very keen on exploring and continued to endorse testimony of adult

• Ronfard et al., 2020, 2021

Intelligence: Impact of environment

• Western culture defining intelligence as cognitive (math and verbal skills)

• What about other cultures?

• Do we see evidence of cross-cultural and SES differences? Yes but why?

• Specific information acquired as part of cultural upbringing?

• Learning opportunities not equal? e.g. playing video games that require fast responding and mental rotation of visual images increases success on spatial test items

• Some people in some cultures strive in high stakes testing environment and motivation

Developmental science and cross-cultural research

• Historically, developmental science suffers from small sample sizes, small effects, large fuss-out rates, lack of standardization

• Developmental science has been actively adopting replication attempts, pre-registrations, rgistered reports, open data, meta-analyses, and other transaprent research practices

Bioecological systems theory - Bronfenbrenner

• Stresses the interaction of a changing organism in a changing environment - different layers of sociocultural environment

• Development is defined as the phenomenon of continuity and change in the bio-psychological characteristics of human beings

• Furthered study on children’s ‘ecological niches’