Socio-Cultural Influences on Early Development

Question 1

Parenting is Culturally Constructed

Answer 1

Cultural beliefs and values structure parenting practices
* May be some immediate and long-term effects on children

Question 2

Parenting is Culturally Constructed

LeVine (2004)

Answer 2

What do infants need?
Gusii Case in Western Kenya
* Unique ways of parenting from a western perspective: Carry children on their backs for most of the day
* Less opportunity for face to face communication and joint attention
* Restricting food intake and physical punishment

Question 3

Gusii Case in Western Kenya

Richman et al. (1992): Maternal Responsiveness

Answer 3

Responsiveness of Gusii mothers is directed towards soothing ang quieting infants rather than arousing them
* Compared to responsiveness of Boston mothers who engaged infants in emotionally arousing conversational interactions
* Gusii mothers: Emotional excitement must be avoided and communicative actions should be puched back until the child can speak

Question 4

Encultured Motor Development

Answer 4

Can be hindered or facilitated by socio-cultural practices
* Interplay between social, motor, and cognitive systems

Question 5

Encultured Motor Development

Tao & Dong (1997)

Locomotion and Cross-Cultural Differences

Answer 5

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
* Placed on a soft bed surrounded by thick pillows that did not have enough resistance to efforts to push
* Delayed development of the upper musculature
* Slower to start crawling and delayed in visual-spatial search tasks

Question 6

Encultured Motor Development

Karasik et al. (2018;2023)

Answer 6

Gahvora cradling in Tajikistan restricts movement of infants body and limbs
* 20% of 12-24 month olds spent more than 15 hours bound
* A lot of interaction and breastfed
* Belief that children should not be freely moving at such age

• Age 1: 62% Tajik babies are crawling, 9% are walking
  
  • WHO standards: Almost half of all Tajik babies would be diagnosed with motor delays
• Age 3-4: Achieve milestones that are not on traditional developmental scale
  
  • Perching on a hedge, handling sharp tools, etc.
  • Encouragement and freedom to do so
• Age 4-5: Developmentally caught up to WEIRD peers

Question 7

Learning Conditions Across Cultures

Singh et al. (2022): Perceptual Narrowing

Answer 7

Diverse socio-economic and lingustic sample in Singapore
* Tested ability to discriminate native phonetic constraint and non-native
* Infants’ native sensitivites were positively predicted by family socio-economic status

Question 8

Question-Asking Across Cultures

Answer 8

Children’s home environement moderated both their propensity to ask questions and the types of questions they asked
* Middle class children in the UK devoted more conversational turns with their mothers to curiosity-based as opposted to procedural or authority-challenging questions
* In conversations with their mothers, Chinese children ask less questions than their American peers

Question 9

Question-Asking Across Cultures

Trust in Testimony Across Cultures

Answer 9

Pre-school children trust others’ counter-intuitive testimony and sometimes continue to endore it even after obtaining contradicting evidence from first-hand exploration