Jean-Pascal Assailly - Child Psychology

Initial propensities for social learning are likely to be equivalent in all populations, and these shared propensities then interact with varying cultural norms across societies to produce variations in behavior. Cross-cultural work distinguishes the characteristics of our psychology and behavior that are sensitive to cultural input in varying degrees.

In contrast to the concept of universality, which assumes that a phenomenon would be observed everywhere in the world, cross-cultural developmental psychology advances the concept of regularity (Rogoff 2003), to track and measure the regularities of child behaviors and developmental trajectories in various environments.

For example, the rejection of an allowance when they receive more than another person seems to appear with some regularity in children in different societies, which does not irrevocably demonstrate that the aversion to having more than another person is universal, but the regularity of its occurrence may lead to new research questions. For example, can the roots of this form of aversion be traced phylogenetically? Can formal models of cooperative interactions foster inequity aversion? Thus, cross-cultural developmental studies can contribute to broader theoretical and evolutionary debates about human behavior (Amir and McAuliffe 2020).

A great many theoretical models exist to explain the influence of culture on the child: Bronfenbrenner’s ecological systems model (1977), Whiting’s psychocultural research model (1977), Vygotsky’s sociocultural-historical theory (1980), Harkness and Super’s developmental niche model (1994), Weisner’s ecocultural model (2002), Rogoff’s transformation of participation approach (2003), Keller’s ecocultural model of child development (2013) and Worthman’s bioecocultural model of child development (2010).

A general characteristic of these models is that they all seek, in one way or another, to contextualize child development as a dialog between the individual and the various social, ecological and cultural inputs he or she receives.

Harkness and Super’s model, for example, focuses on three elements: the physical and social environments in which the child lives, child education and child care customs and the psychology of caregivers. The authors, and others, have used this framework to assess how parents’ ethnic theories of child development help shape practices, such as daily infant routines, and how these practices in turn influence child behaviors, such as patterns of play and social interaction.

Similarly, Bronfenbrenner’s (1977) ecological systems model, undoubtedly the best-known theoretical development framework, provides a guide for examining how the immediate, internal and external environments in which children live shape their development, with particular attention paid to individual differences, such as temperament, and the ever-changing nature of these pathways over time.

This framework has been used to examine a wide range of behaviors, for example, bullying and peer victimization among youth in the United States, in order to assess how microsystems such as parent–youth relationships, exosystems such as exposure to media violence and macrosystems such as religion all contribute to child behaviors and beliefs.

However, the concept of “culture” is a confusing one; in Bronfenbrenner’s model, the child sits in concentric spheres of cultural influence, with macro- and microsystems influencing his or her development. However, separation of the individual from his or her culture can be problematic, as culture is not separate, but rather a product of human activity (Rogoff 2003).

Indeed, development is a continuous process by which people are transformed by participating in culture, and their participation in turn transforms culture itself; the distinction between biology and culture is also flawed, as they are not alternative influences, but inseparable aspects of the system in which individuals develop. More contemporary conceptualizations thus attempt to position development in both cultural and biological contexts.

The ethnographic study of child development has its roots in the field of academic anthropology and has generally focused on furthering our knowledge by positioning child development within the wider sociocultural environment in which it occurs. Anthropologists Margaret Mead (1928) and Bronisław Malinowski (1929) were the first to suggest the importance of cultural environment in development and to question the idea that the behavior of children in the West is necessarily generalizable to other contexts. Thus, the adolescence crisis was challenged by Mead and the Oedipus complex by Malinowski.

These early ethnographies involved months, even years, of fieldwork and resulted in intimate ethnographies that integrated the lives of children into the complex cultures in which they found themselves. The majority of ethnographic work on child development in the early 20th century focused on detailed descriptions of cultural groups, such as the Hopi, Navajos, Tikopians and indigenous communities of New Guinea. A few notable exceptions have examined child behavior across populations, to allow for comparisons. For example, the transition to adulthood in Western societies is more discontinuous than in “traditional” societies, and adults in agricultural societies are more likely to assign tasks to children than those in gathering societies (Amir and McAuliffe 2020).

Then, during the last century, subsequent waves of ethnographic work focused on assessing the usefulness of psychological theories, such as Freudian psychoanalysis and Piagetian cognitive development among children in various societies. The second half of the century saw the advent of a more modern form of ethnography, which often involved the quantification of behavioral observations. These meticulous observational studies have fundamentally reshaped our understanding of developmental variation (Amir and McAuliffe 2020).

For example, while prolonged infant crying was (and still is) common in Western societies, the generalization of this model outside the West was challenged by pioneering work on the behavior of Kung infants. Through intensive observational work, anthropologists demonstrated that Kung babies cried much less than Dutch babies because parents responded quickly and reliably (Amir and McAuliffe 2020).

These close observation methods have also been used to study a wide variety of developmental behaviors, such as the duration of infant vocalizations, the percentage of time spent with different adults and time spent playing, foraging or working, among other variables.

This helps us to better understand child development by providing ecologically valid measures of relevant behaviors in the environments where they occur. In addition, observational data is less likely to be skewed by self-reported biases, such as socially desirable responses.

Despite the growing body of observational work on child development, some researchers have argued that ethnographic literature alone is not sufficient to constitute an anthropology of childhood. In other words, while mono-cultural studies deepen our understanding of child development, more theory and cross-cultural reasoning are needed to create frameworks with greater explanatory power (LeVine 2008).

Researchers have attempted to address this through meta-ethnographic approaches that compare child development in different populations. Anthropologist Mel Konner’s “distillation of childhood” in hunter-gatherer populations (2010) has been a particularly important model in this line of research; by comparing the ethnographies of several hunter-gatherer societies such as the Hadza of Tanzania and the Martu of Australia, Konner catalogued 11 aspects of infant and child care, such as frequency of nursing, mixed play groups and self-sufficiency.