Children’s Social Worlds in Cultural Context

This book addresses cultural variability in children’s social worlds, examining the acquisition, development, and use of culturally relevant social competencies valued in diverse cultural contexts. It discusses the different aspects of preschoolers’ social competencies that allow children – including adopted, immigrant, or at-risk children – to create and maintain relationships, communicate, and to get along with other people at home, in daycare or school, and other situations. Chapters explore how children’s social competencies reflect the features of the social worlds in which they live and grow. In addition, chapters examine the extent that different cultural value orientations manifest in children’s social functioning and escribes how parents in autonomy-oriented cultures tend to value different social skills than parents with relatedness or autonomous-relatedness orientations. The book concludes with recommendations for future research directions.

Topics featured in this book include:

• Gender development in young children.
• Peer interactions and relationships during the preschool years.
• Sibling interactions in western and non-western cultural groups.
• The roles of grandparents in child development.
• Socialization and development in refugee children.
• Child development within institutional care.

Children’s Social Worlds in Cultural Context is a valuable resource for researchers, clinicians/practitioners, and graduate students in developmental psychology, child and school psychology, social work, cultural anthropology, family studies, and education.

• At-risk children across cultures and social development
• Children and social identity
• Cooperative problem-solving in preschool
• Cultural practices, attentional strategies and children
• Culture, communication, and sociocognitive development
• Emotional development and competence in children
• Forced displacement, safe havens, and child development
• Gender development, culture, and young children
• Grandparents, child development, and culture
• Institutional care and child development
• Japanese preschool and social-emotional development
• Parenting and family across cultures
• Pedagogical practices and child development
• Peer interactions and early childhood
• Peer interactions, conflict, and culture in preschool
• Prosocial behavior in young children
• Siblings and cultural complexity
• Social cognition and preschoolers
• Toddlers and institutional conditions
• Urban and rural settings and child development

• Department of Psychology, University of Tartu, Tartu, Estonia

  Tiia Tulviste

• Department of Psychology, Wake Forest University, Winston-Salem, USA

  Deborah L. Best

• Department of Psychology, Saint Louis University, Saint Louis, USA

  Judith L. Gibbons

Tiia Tulviste, Ph.D., is a professor of developmental psychology at the University of Tartu, Estonia. In her research on child cognitive and social development, she has paid special attention to the developmental contexts in which children grow. At the beginning of her scientific career, Dr. Tulviste was involved in studies trying to detect the role of schooling in the development of verbal thinking by comparing thinking processes of adults with and without school education in Soviet Central Asia and in West Siberia. During recent decades, she has been interested in the question to what extent changes in developmental context (e.g., return to the Western world in Estonia) reflect changes in cultural meanings and practices of child socialization as well as their effects over time on child development and adjustment. Dr. Tulviste has acted as project leader in several comparative research projects related to child socialization and development dealing with cultures around the Baltic Sea, such as Estonia, Finland, Latvia, Germany, and Sweden, as well as the U.S.A. She has written numerous journal articles and book chapters in this field. She is the former president of Estonian Union of Psychologists and is a member of the editorial board of the European Psychologist, International Journal of Behavioural Development (1998-2002), and Estonian Papers in Applied Linguistics.

Deborah L. Best, Ph.D., is the William L. Poteat Professor of Psychology at Wake Forest University, USA, where she previously served as Chair of the Psychology Department and was the first woman to serve as Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences. She is active in the International Association for Cross-Cultural Psychology as an Honorary Fellow, President (2000-2002), and Treasurer (1988-1997), and in the Society for Cross-Cultural Research as President (2011-2012). She has served as Associate Editor (1996-2012) and Editor (2012 to present) of the flagship journal of IACCP, Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology. She has written and edited five books as well as numerous book chapters and research articles; her work includes landmark studies of gender stereotypes in 30 nations. Her research has focused on children’s cognitive and social development, primarily examining gender-related concepts among young children in the United States and other countries.

Judith L. Gibbons, Ph.D., is Professor Emerita of Psychology at Saint Louis University, USA. She is the founding editor of the American Psychological Association Division 52 journal, International Perspectives in Psychology: Research, Practice, Consultation, former president of the Society for Cross-Cultural Research and the Interamerican Society of Psychology (SIP),  a former Fulbright scholar at the Universidad del Valle de Guatemala, and an Associate Editor of the Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology. Her research includes the study of the development of adolescents, especially girls and at-risk youth, in the majority world, intercountry adoption, and gender roles. With many collaborators, local and international, she has published numerous journal articles on those topics. She has written or edited three books including The Thoughts of Youth: An International Perspective on Adolescents’ Ideal Persons,  Intercountry Adoption: Policies, Practices, and Outcomes, and Women’s Evolving Lives: Global and Psychosocial Perspectives.

Policies and ethics