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

An insight into the lives of three-year-olds in different cultures around the world.

Jonathan Tudge (Author)

9780521148481, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 23 August 2010

328 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.9 cm, 0.5 kg

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

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.

1. Introduction and stage setting
2. The daily lives of toddlers
3. Cultural-ecological theory and its implications for research
4. Methods
5. Life in the cities
6. Everyday activities
7. Settings and partners
8. Everyday lives
9. The cultural ecology of young children.

Subject Areas: Family psychology [JMF], Child & developmental psychology [JMC]