Socio-culture influences on early development

Question 1

is there The need for cultural approach?

Answer 1

• Are WEIRD “standard subjects” representative of any other population?
  
  • Issues with human universals, generalizability, external validity
  • Much emphasis on at what age children reach certain milestones
  • Leads to deficit model where variations in communities are seen as different from normal and in need of an intervention
  • Desperate need for knowledge of childhood environments

Question 2

When can children be trusted to take care of
an infant?

Answer 2

• United Kingdom = 14 yrs
• Middle class American = 10 yrs
• Mayan Guatemalan = 5-7 yrs
• Kwara’ae of Oceania = 3-4 yrs

Question 3

Parenting is culturally constructed?

Answer 3

• Cultural beliefs and values structure parenting practices
• There might be some immediate and some long-term effect on children
• What do infants need?
• Gusii case (LeVine, 2004)
  
  • Maternal sensitivity to infant signals
  • Maternal attention – gaze and speech
  • Compliance – commands, threats, and praise
  • Sibling care

Question 4

what are the Maternal responsiveness?

Answer 4

• The responsiveness of the Gusii mothers is directed toward soothing and quieting infants rather than
  arousing them, as compared to the responsiveness of Boston mothers designed to engage the infants in
  emotionally arousing conversational interaction.

Question 5

what is the Enculturated motor development?

Answer 5

• “4E” view of motor development:
  
  • enculturated
    
    • Can be hindered or facilitated by socio-cultural practices
• Interplay between social, motor and cognitive systems: towards an integrated view

Question 6

Locomotion and cross-cultural differences?

Answer 6

• Infants in dense urban areas in China showed an average 3.3 mo delay in onset of locomotion:
  
  • A result of living in constrained contemporary urban apartments
  • Infants are placed on a bed surrounded by thick pillows; the bed is soft therefore not enough resistance to efforts to push
• Result: delayed development of the upper musculature; the infant is slower to start crawling
• The same infants were delayed in visuo-spatial search tasks

Question 7

Locomotion and restricted movement?

Answer 7

• “Gahvora” cradling (Tajikistan) restricts movement of infants’ body and limbs
• Across age, time in the gahvora decreased, yet 20% of 12- to 24-month-olds spent more than 15 hours bound in
• At age 1, just 62% of Tajik babies are crawling and 9% are walking:
  
  • Using WHO standards, almost half of all Tajik babies would be diagnosed with motor delays

Question 8

Facilitating vs hindering motor experience?

Answer 8

• Motor skills can be acquired “out of order” and selectively accelerated or decelerated through cultural practices
  
  • Ugandan and Kokwet babies sat, stood and walked about a month earlier than babies in the West and trained through exercises like air stepping
    
    • but were slower to master other skills, such as lifting their heads, rolling over, crawling due to being actively prevented (Super, 1976)
• Beng babies in Ivory Coast sit earlier than Western babies but are actively discouraged from walking before age 1(Gottlieb, 2012)

Question 9

what is Perceptual narrowing?

Answer 9

• Diverse socio-economic and linguistic sample in Singapore
• Tested on their ability to discriminate both a native phonetic contrast (/ba/ versus /da/) and a non-native Hindi contrast (/ta/ versus/ʈa).
• Infants’ native sensitivities were positively predicted by family SES, whereas non-native sensitivities were not.
• Maternal socio-economic factors uniquely predicted native language sensitivity.

Question 10

what is Visual processing?

Answer 10

• 6-month-old infants who live with a dog and cat looked more at images of dogs and cats than did infants who did not have pets at home (Hurley et al., 2010)
• 10-month-old infants who did and did not have pets at home adopted different strategies for how to distribute their looking to the top and bottom halves of animals faces (Hurley & Oakes, 2018).

Question 11

what are the Question-asked across cultures?

Answer 11

• Children’s home environment moderates both their propensity to ask questions as well as the types of questions they ask
• Middle class children in the UK devoted more conversation turns with their mothers to curiosity-based as opposed to ‘procedural’ or authority challenging questions; the number of questions parents ask their children predicts their children’s propensity to ask questions
• In conversations with their mothers, Chinese children ask fewer questions relative to their American peers

Question 12

what is the Cultural variation in early memories?

Answer 12

• Earlier memories among European-American vs East-Asian adults
  
  • role of different rates and types of child-parent reminiscing
  • European-American mothers mentioned thoughts and feelings more often and offered more causal explanations for children’s emotions vs Chinese mothers produced more didactic comments, often framing events around proper behaviour

Question 13

what is the Trust in testimony across cultures?

Answer 13

• Preschool children trust others’ counter-intuitive testimony (smallest doll = heaviest), and sometimes continue to endorse it even after obtaining contradicting evidence from first-hand exploration
• Replication in Turkey, China, and Belarus
• Parental survey to measure the extent to which parents prioritize their child’s conformity or autonomy:
  
  • obedience vs. self-reliance
  • good manners vs. curiosity
  • being well behaved vs. being considerate

Question 14

what is the Bioecological systems theory?

Answer 14

• Stresses the interaction of a changing organism in a changing environment
• Development is defined as the phenomenon of continuity and change in the biopsychological characteristics of human beings
• Furthered study on children’s “ecological niches”

Question 15

what is the link between Developmental science and cross-cultural research?

Answer 15

• Historically, developmental science suffers from small sample sizes, small effects, large fuss-out rates, lack of standardization
• Developmental science has been actively adopting
  replication attempts, pre-registrations, registered
  reports, open data, meta-analyses, and other transparent research practices
• In many respects, even leading the way: ManyBabies, MetaLab, Databrary, data sharing practices