Cultural Differences in Child Development Expectations

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Cultural Differences in Child Development Expectations

ABSTRACT

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A small research has been carried in order to find out how different

cultural backgrounds can influence a child’s developmental

expectations in adults and the consequences of these expectations.

The design of the method was a replication of Hess et al., 1980,

study, applied into two mothers with early age daughters, coming from

two different cultural backgrounds, English and Spanish. They answered

at what age they thought different statements about child development

would be reached by their children and being these statements about

grouped into 6 main developmental areas the averages were calculated

and compared.

The results showed an earlier expectation of achievement in all areas

of development, except for independence, in the English participant

and a complete opposite position of the Spanish participant expecting

a late development of the child in general.

This might be due to the demand, in the first, of a highly advance

society, and the influence in the second of religious and moral

values.

INTRODUCTION

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Relationships between culture and knowledge development have a

peculiar character. Societies provide to their members with different

types of experience that affects and conditionate their knowledge. At

the present time many developmental psychologists analyse the

cognitive development in relation with the cultural context (Hichman,

1987). For this researchers the main question consist in weather to

accept or not the existence of “cognitive universals” which the

cultural context will condition and modernise (Laboratory of

Comparative Human Cognition, 1983) in other words, if there are

“equally valid patterns of life that mankind has created for

himself”.(Das Gupta 1994).

But in which ways these universal patterns are affected by historical

and cultural context? What do different people expect from children

and their development?

Social influences have made many theories about child development

arise and many other researches have been carried about this matter.

During this study some of these theories will be applied , like

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