Jan 14 HW (Ch 8) Child Development Across Cultures

• Looking at the differences in children’s development across the world

• Undergrad courses often teach about the regularities of child development as whole

• Discusses the applicability of the most popular content taught in Developmental psychology courses

3 Interconnected Components at work in Culture to Affect Child's Development

• Customs and practices

  • Normative child behaviors within a culture (religious rituals)

• Settings

  • Physical, economic, and social contexts

• Caretaker psychology

  • Wider cultural beliefs

  • Shared understanding about the needs of children’s development

^these do not operate independently of each other

Ethnotheories

• Shared beliefs about the goals of a child

  • Timetables for expectations

  • Nature vs nurture

Connections exist between cultural practices, beliefs, and settings

Cognitive Development: Piaget's Stages

• Piaget’s Stages

• 4 Stages (don’t accurately portray the full range of children’s transformation)

• Mostly conducted studies on his own children and tried to apply them to all children

1. Sensorimotor Stage

• Birth - 2 years old

• Children rely on basic sensory and motor abilities

• Children will not think about objects that are not directly in their line of sight

*Cultural differences may alter the progression pace of these stages

2. Preoperational Stage

• Ages 2 - 6

• Able to identify missing objects, recall the past, imagine future events

• Creative imaginative practices

• Found across cultures child often develop from these stages around the same times throughout cultures

3. Concrete Operational Stage

• Ages 5-7

• Children can perform linked, reversible mental actions on objects

• Logical problem solving abilities (limited to tangible objects)

• Still aligns in age across cultures

*Some studies show non-western cultures emerge later during concrete operational

*Urban/rural living, years of schooling, etc can affect the onset of the different stages

*Differences in task performance using the childs native language

4. Formal Operational Stage

• Final stage (around puberty)

• Abstract and hypothetical ideas

• Researchers have’t universally researched this final stage

*Final stage is strongly related to schooling

*Most individuals do not complete this stage

*Found that college students usually only use formal reasoning when its related to their major

Modern Approaches to Cognitive Development

• Children learn, practice thinking, and develop their skills through participating in everyday activities which are organized through cultural conventions and routines

• As a result, culture and cognition are very interlinked. The development of three cognitive processes—attention, autobiographical memory, and theory of mind —serves as illustrations of cultural influences.

Attention Development

• Mothers use different strategies to guide their infants

• Depending on where the mothers attempted to guide their infants attention changes the children’s behavior (simultaneous attention ability or not)

• Cultural differences in attentional socialize during childhood can impact adult cognitive styles (how individuals allocate attention +(info being processed)

  • Attention-following/attention-directing

  • Multiple events/one specific event

  • Attention/non attention to interactions for directed towards themselves

  • Learning by observing and pitching in/ assembly-line instruction

Autobiographical Memory Development

• People tend to remember things that are meaningful to themselves (their goals, motivations, and perspectives)

• Culture can influence what people remember and how they make decisions

• Different cultures parents focus on different conversations with their children

  • Infantile Amnesia

Theory‐of‐Mind Development

• Ability to make inferences about other peoples mental states (desires, feelings, opinions, intentions)

• Children learn this very early on and learn how to differ other peoples minds from their own (at different ages in different cultures)

• Hypothesis: cultural norms and beliefs shape our mental state inferences

• They gain T-O-M that follows the pattern of their own cultures preferences and values

• Influenced by culture + school

  • Does this make you able to feel empathy?

Temperament

Thomas and Chess Profiles

• Alexander Thomas and Stella Chess brought to light that individual personality differences are evident at birth

• Temperament (easy, difficult, slow to warm up)

• Goodness-of-fit: How well a child’s environment accommodates his/her dispositional makeup greatly influences healthy psychological adjustment

• Studies did not hold up everywhere since aspects could be interpreted differently (different characteristics were not perceived as problematic one place)

• Impact of temperament on a child’s interaction with it’s environment is considered universal across cultures

A Modern Perspective on Temperament

(3 Factor) Constructs of Temperment

• Extraversion-surgency (tendency to approach rather than withdrawal)

• Negative affectivity (tendency for discomfort along with intense negative reactions like anger/ fear)

• Effortful control (behavioral or physiological processes involving self-regulation )

*Individual components are genetic predispositions but environmental influences can further alter these

• Cannot measure all behaviors in each culture because some will be interpreted differently (research had parents self-reporting their childrens behavior)

• Revealed universal patterns and cultural differences

*When values are different in different places, children’s behavior may reflect this (shy in US may be seen as incompetence)

Attachment

Attachment Theory

• Child’s emotional tie to their primary caregiver has a lasting impact on psychological development

• 4 Attachment Phases

  • (a) undifferentiated reactivity (0 to 2–3 months); (b) discriminating social responsiveness (3 to 6–7 months); (c) clear‐cut attachment (7 months to 3 years); and, finally, (d) a goal‐corrected partnership (beginning around age 3).

Research on infants when separated from caregiver and reaction

1. Infants who convey little distress and avoid the caregiver upon reunion are classified as insecure‐avoidant

2. Those who seek much proximity/contact with their caregivers yet resist interaction, exploration, and feeling comforted are classified as insecure‐resistant.

3. Infants who express their distress, readily seek and achieve comfort from their caregivers upon reunion, and use the caregiver as a secure base for returning to exploration are classified as secure

Limits to the Universality of Attachment Theory?

• Research has shown that substantial amounts of the attachment organization is exempt form culture influence

Universality‐nature hypothesis

• Scholars think attachment is a universal phenomenon

• All normally babies will grow attached to one primary care giver

Normativity‐optimality hypothesis

• Infants secure attachment is theorized by looking at the infants use/need. ofthat caregiver when given ability to explore without them

• A lot of research uses European-American values. of individualism and independence on these studies

• Assessments gathered from more than 20 countries indeed indicate that approximately two‐thirds of infants are classified as securely attached

Some cross cultural researchers beleive labeling a child as insecure because of one action universally is simply a judement of other cultures

Sensitivity‐origins hypothesis

• Variations in the caregivers sensitivity predicts different attachment patterns

• Maternal sensitivity is correlated with secure attachment

  • Maternal sensitivity is measure very differently in each culture

  • Understanding each cultural definition of cultural sensitivity is vital

Competence‐consequences hypothesis

• Bowlby (1969) and Ainsworth et al. (1978) hypothesized that securely attached infants would become more socially and emotionally competent children and adults than those who were insecurely attached.

• secure attachment has been theorized to be linked to direct communication and emotional openness