The Everyday Lives of Young Children: Culture, Class, and Child Rearing in Diverse Societies

Description

Where do young children spend their time? What activities are they involved in and who do they interact with? How do these activities and interactions vary across different societies and cultural groups? This book provides answers to these questions, by describing the lives of three-year-olds in the United States, Russia, Estonia, Finland, South Korea, Kenya and Brazil. Each child was followed for the equivalent of one complete waking day, whether at home, in childcare, on the streets or at the shops. Graphic displays and verbal descriptions of the children's everyday activities and interactions reveal both the ways in which culture influences children's lives and the ways in which children play a role in changing the cultural groups of which they are a part. This book also has a clear theoretical rationale and illustrates why and how to do cultural-ecological research.

Jonathan Tudge is a professor of human development and family studies at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro and has been a Fulbright scholar and visiting professor at the Institute of Psychology, Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil, and a visiting professor at the University of Tartu, Estonia. He completed his undergraduate and master's degrees in England, at Lancaster and Oxford respectively, and his Ph.D. in human development and family studies at Cornell University in the United States. Before becoming a professor, he worked as a teacher of young children in England, Russia and the United States. His research examines cultural-ecological aspects of young children's development both within and across a number of societies, particularly focusing on the years before and immediately following the entry to school. He has co-authored, with Michael Shanahan and Jaan Valsiner, another book published by Cambridge University Press, Comparisons in Human Development: Understanding Time and Context, has also co-edited a third book and has published more than 70 journal articles and book chapters.

Review of the hardback: '... a welcome addition ... Tudge's work makes important conceptual and empirical contributions to the developmental literature. It presents us with compelling arguments about the need to justify the choice of cultural units and observational categories in describing children's daily activities. It offers a theoretical framework for the study of culture and development, and proposes a broader conception of ethnographic research methodology. Finally, this work enables us to better understand the children of the majority world while providing new information about the children of the Western industrial world as it also guides future research in significant ways.' Human Development