Suchergebnisse

Review: Child Care and Culture: Lessons from Africa, by Robert A. LeVine, Suzanne Dixon, Sarah LeVine, Amy Richman, P. Herbert Leiderman, Constance H. Keefer, and T. Berry Brazelton.

Pepper''s [1942] conceptualization of `root metaphors´ offers developmentalists a scheme for organizing theories of child behavior held by both parents and professionals. In this paper, we identify the root metaphors underlying current perspectives on human develoment, and present evidence for their role in interpretations of child behavior by parents and mental health professionals. Study 1 demonstrates that there are stable individual differences in root metaphor preference among US parents (n = 224), and these differences are influenced by experience in predictable ways. Study 2 describes similar differences among 32 mental health professionals at a US psychiatric clinic, and confirms relationships expected on the basis of theoretical analysis between metaphoric orientation and therapeutic specialization. Study 3 replicates these findings with a broader sample of 55 mental health professionals at a Dutch psychiatric treatment center and further relates metaphoric orientation to the daily task demands of their occupational roles. Thus the studies reported here provide strong support for the proposition that Pepper''s metaphoric analysis of philosophical systems can be applied meaningfully to the cognitive systems used by both parents and professionals in interpreting children''s behavior. We discuss the implications for understanding the socially regulated nature of partents'' belief systems, the origins of individual variation, the `goodness of fit´ between mental health practitioners and their clients, and the role of theory in the developmental sciences.

Culture is usefully conceived for developmentalists as the organization of the developmental environment. This definition makes available to scientific scrutiny the processes by which culture affects the course of development, that is, how it generates the relationships and meanings of variables that are more familiar, individually, to traditional developmental scientists. One framework for parsing the environment is the ''developmental niche'', which identifies three operational subsystems – the physical and social settings, the historically constituted customs and practices of child care and child rearing, and the psychology of the caretakers, particularly parental ethnotheories which play a directive role and are, by definition, shared with the community. Three organizational aspects of the niche create particularly important developmental outcomes: contemporary redundancy, which is the mutually reinforcing repetition of similar influences from several parts of the environment during the same period of development; thematic elaboration, which is the repetition and cultivation over time of core symbols and systems of meaning; and chaining, in which no single element of the environment is sufficient in kind to produce a particular outcome, but the linking of disparate elements creates a qualitatively new phenomenon. In addition, there is a more complex set of second-order effects; sex and temperament, for example, are characteristics whose meaning and consequence are organized by features of the environment. Finally, it is argued that theoretical recognition of variable relationships between development and the environment represents our discipline''s growth toward abstract thinking.

Parents often arrange activities for their children either by providing them with opportunities or restricting their participation. The way children spend their time affects their cognitive and social development. This study compares the involvement of Asian immigrant and Euro-American
parents in their young children's daily activities, with particular attention to two contrasting roles: teacher and playmate. Parents of children aged 3 to 6 years (n = 24 children in each group) kept daily logs of their children's activities and companions for a week. Results
show that parents in both groups spent similar amounts of time in play activities with their children, although the Euro-American parents did more pretend play and the Asian parents did more constructive play. However, Asian parents spent far more time on preacademic activities with their
children such as learning letters and numbers, playing math games, and working with the computer. The cultural differences among parents are mirrored to a lesser extent by patterns of participation of siblings, friends, and babysitters with the target children. These results are discussed
in relation to universality and cultural specificity of parenting beliefs and practices.