How we raise young children is one of today's most highly personalized and sharply politicized issues, in part because each of us can claim some level of "expertise." The debate has intensified as discoveries about our development-in the womb and in the first months and years-have reached the popular media. How can we use our burgeoning knowledge to assure the well-being of all young children, for their own sake as well as for the sake of our nation? Drawing from new findings, this book presents important conclusions about nature-versus-nurture, the impact of being born into a working family, the effect of politics on programs for children, the costs and benefits of intervention, and other issues. The committee issues a series of challenges to decision makers regarding the quality of child care, issues of racial and ethnic diversity, the integration of children's cognitive and emotional development, and more. Authoritative yet accessible, From Neurons to Neighborhoods presents the evidence about "brain wiring" and how kids learn to speak, think, and regulate their behavior. It examines the effect of the climate-family, child care, community-within which the child grows.

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From Neurons to Neighborhoods: The Science of Early Childhood Development

Socioeconomic status (SES) is a pervasive predictor of child development; parenting is a large part of the reason why. This chapter deals with a historical introduction to research on SES and parenting, followed by a discussion of definitions of SES and approaches to its measurement. It summarizes the literature on differences in parenting cognitions and parenting practices associated with SES. The chapter traces pathways of influence from SES to parenting and identifies the separable effects of its constituents, income, education, and occupation. It discusses remaining questions and future research directions in the study of SES and parenting. Parenting practices are the behaviors parents produce in interactions with their children, the home environments parents create for children, and the connections to the world outside the home that parents both enable and permit. Parents from different socioeconomic levels expect different developmental timetables.

Socioeconomic Status and Parenting

This article examines how people learn by actively observing and “listening-in” on ongoing activities as they participate in shared endeavors. Keen observation and listening-in are especially valued and used in some cultural communities in which children are part of mature community activities. This intent participation also occurs in some settings (such as early language learning in the family) in communities that routinely segregate children from the full range of adult activities. However, in the past century some industrial societies have relied on a specialized form of instruction that seems to accompany segregation of children from adult settings, in which adults “transmit” information to children. We contrast these two traditions of organizing learning in terms of their participation structure, the roles of more- and less-experienced people, distinctions in motivation and purpose, sources of learning (observation in ongoing activity versus lessons), forms of communication, and the role of assessment.

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Firsthand Learning Through Intent Participation

Bringing order out of chaos: Psychometric characteristics of the confusion, hubbub, and order scale

In this Monograph, we examine how toddlers and their caregivers from four cultural communities collaborate in shared activities. We focus both on similarities across communities in processes of guided participation--structuring children's participation and bridging between their understanding and that of their caregivers--and on differences in how guided participation occurs. We examine the idea that a key cultural difference entails who is responsible for learning--whether adults take this responsibility by structuring teaching situations or whether children take responsibility for learning through observation and through participating in adult activities with caregivers' support. We speculate that these two patterns relate to cultural variation in the segregation of children from adult activities of their community and in emphasis on formal schooling. The four communities of our study vary along these lines as well as in other ways: a Mayan Indian town in Guatemala, a middle-class urban group in the United States, a tribal village in India, and a middle-class urban neighborhood in Turkey. In each community, we visited the families of 14 toddlers (aged 12-24 months) for an interview that was focused on child-rearing practices, which included observations of caregivers helping the toddlers operate novel objects spontaneously during adult activities. Results are based on systematic analysis of patterns of communication and attention in each family in each community, combining the tools of ethnographic description, graphic analysis, and statistics.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)

Guided Participation in Cultural Activity by Toddlers and Caregivers

Foreword List of tables and figures Preface Part I. African Infancy: Frameworks For Understanding: 1. The comparative study of child care 2. Infant care in subsaharan Africa Part II. Parenthood Among The Gusii of Kenya: 3. Gusii culture: A person-centered perspective 4. Gusii fertility, marriage, and family 5. Pregnancy and birth: Part III. Infant Care and Development in a Gusii Community: 6. Infant care: Cultural norms and interpersonal environment 7. Survival and health: The priorities of parents 8. Communication and social learning during infancy 9. Variations in infant interaction: Illustrative cases: Part IV. Interpretations: 10. Early child development in an African context: Comparative lessons Appendices References.

Child Care and Culture: Lessons from Africa

Maternal responsiveness is usually associated to varied forms of behavior contingent on a variety of infant signals. This article on cultural and educational variations in maternal responsiveness presents two separate studies examining these hypothesis: 1) that maternal responsiveness is affected by cross-cultural differences in conventions of conversational interaction and 2) that maternal responsiveness is affected by intracultural differences in mothers levels of formal education. The first study compared mother-infant interaction among the Gusii of Kenya with those in suburban Boston Massachusetts. The second study conducted in the Mexican city of Cuernavaca examined variations in mother-infant interactions by maternal schooling within a local sample of low-income mothers of similar cultural background who attended school from 1 to 9 years. Findings from both studies indicated a comparison in the verbal and nonverbal forms of maternal responsiveness on the account of the gross behavioral categories and varying educational levels between the Gusii and Boston samples as well as the Mexican samples.

Cultural and Educational Variations in Maternal Responsiveness

THE QUESTION OF HOW FEMALE SCHOOL ATTENDANCE influences fertility and child survival in developing countries has emerged as an important problem in the analysis of demographic change and the evaluation of health and population policies. An extensive research literature based on national surveys and censuses conducted in developing countries shows maternal schooling to be a highly consistent household-level predictor of reduced fertility and child mortality, even when other socioeconomic factors are controlled.' This has led to proposals for expanding female school enrollment as a means of facilitating future reductions in fertility and child mortality rates in those countries where they remain high-despite scant information on the processes through which these reductions would occur.2 Gender equality in access to schooling can be justified without reference to the consequences for health and population growth, let alone scientific analysis of the processes involved. But consideration of expanded opportunities for schooling as an instrument of health and population policy calls for a deeper understanding of how the formal education of women affects their reproductive and health behavior.3 The research reported in this article was designed to contribute to that understanding through community-level studies in Mexico. The robust and widespread associations found between women's schooling and demographic variables are at once extremely familiar and

Women's Schooling and Child Care in the Demographic Transition: A Mexican Case Study

Comparison of observed maternal behavior to infants in five cultures shows differences between agrarian and urban-industrial societies as well as culture-specific patterns related to each local context.

Maternal behavior to infants in five cultures.

The childcare practices of mothers in suburban Boston seem to reflect the mothers' emphasis on cultural values such as independence and exploration to further cognitive development.

Amy Richman

Papers

Child Care and Culture: Lessons from Africa

Cultural and Educational Variations in Maternal Responsiveness

Women's Schooling and Child Care in the Demographic Transition: A Mexican Case Study

Maternal behavior to infants in five cultures.

The socialization of infants in suburban Boston