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The Everyday Lives of Young Children

The Everyday Lives of Young Children

The Everyday Lives of Young Children

Culture, Class, and Child Rearing in Diverse Societies
August 2010
Available
Paperback
9780521148481
$48.00
USD
Paperback
USD
Hardback

    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.

    • Includes end of chapter review questions, allowing readers to monitor their understanding of the material presented
    • Features three-year-old children from a range of different cultures, but all as part of a single project, using the same methods in each society
    • Features both cross-societal and within society comparisons
    • The theoretical foundation for the book is explained and the modes are based explicitly on the theory

    Reviews & endorsements

    "...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, Artin Göncü and Barbara Abel, University of Illinois at Chicago

    "... a breakthrough contribution. The multidisciplinary nature of the work also invites readers to consider culture in all of its complexity and fluidity, and presents interesting possibilities for studying education, urbanicity, and childrearing as shaped by—and as they shape—culture... this work pushes the boundaries of research typically classified as ‘‘cross-cultural’’ by spotlighting children in urban settings around the world and by including comparisons not only across societies but also within societies..."
    --Fabienne Doucet, New York University, Journal of Marriage and Family

    See more reviews

    Product details

    August 2010
    Paperback
    9780521148481
    328 pages
    229 × 152 × 19 mm
    0.5kg
    Available

    Table of Contents

    • 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.
      Author
    • Jonathan Tudge

      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.