culture influence child develpment

culture influence children's development. The environment that children live affects children's developmental milestone. Culture may cause delays in children's development based on the "developmental theories" or may exceed a child's development. Every culture is unique; different belief and customs in children's cultures affects children's direction in life.
The children's culture influences the way children behave, think and act and children's daily experiences are culturally shaped. The cultural norm that people have decides for them what normal behavior is and what abnormal behavior is.
Culture is what decided, what the child absorb and how , and , therefore, culture conditions the child's mind and behaviour as the child grows.
We as educators must help children to Value their own cultural backgrounds- race, religion and culture.
Culture plays an essential role in how children make sense of the world. A decisive difference between children's learning and any intelligent technical system is that technical systems can recognize and organize information, but can not grasp its meaning.
Development of signification and adoption of the appropriate cultural tools (symbols, meaning, scripts, goal etc.) of human activity are basic challenges of early learning.
Culture is embodied in the way that children are raised and the environment where they grow and develop.
Children from birth start to orientate themselves based on the meaning sphere of the human life like: way thinking, ways of doing things, value and beliefs. When children are born in to a culture, they become the participators in that culture; They act, behave, think, listen, in a way that their culture values. They participate in social interaction in their culture and they understand what is been valued and what is not valued.

Self-concept:


The content of self concept in child development is varies from one culture to another culture. For example; Asian parents focus on harmonious interdependence and, on the other hand; western parents emphasize on separateness and self assertion.
For instance: In China and Japan, the self is defined in relation to the social group but in the united state the self becomes the "property" of a self contained individuals. ( Markus & Kitayama, 19991).
Children usually form individualistic culture seems to be more egoistic and competitive, however children form collectivist culture are more concerned with the welfare of others. These examples show the huge impact of social environment and culture on self-concept.

Socio-Emotional Development:


Socio-emotional development is affected by cultural context. Culture may promote of limit the demonstration of specific aspects of socio-emotional development through facilitation of suppression processes. Cultural norms and values can provide information about the interpretation and evaluation of social behavior and like providing meanings to the behaviors.
Socio-emotional characteristics in the early years can have implications for the development of social behaviors. 'Edvard found that children in relatively open communities (e.g.. Taira in Ilinawa, one of Japan's southern ) where peer interaction were encouraged had significantly higher scores on overall social engagement than children in more "Close" and agriculture communities (e.g. Nyansongo in Kenyan Khlapur in India)'.
During Social interactions, peer evaluate and response to individual characteristics in a way that are relevant with cultural belief systems in their society and express equivalent reaction (e.g. acceptance, rejection) toward children who show the characteristics. Culturally-directed social evaluations and responses, in turn, guide children's behaviors and essentially their developmental pattens.
Cross-cultural research has showed that how cultural factors plays a significant role in all aspect of children's socio-emotional developments. Researchers believe that the impact of cultural context on socio-emotional development is mostly happens through parental socialization practices and in the later years, through peer interactions.











Reference:

Cole, M. & Hkkarainen, P. & Bredikyte, M. (2010). Culture and Early childhood Learning. Encyclopedia on Early Childhood Development.


Chen, X. (2009). Culture and Early Socio-Emotional Development. Encyclopedia on Early Childhood Development.

Berk, Laura, E., & Shanker, Stuart, G. (2006). Child Development (2nd Cdn. Ed.). Toronto, ON: Pearson Education Canada Inc.