Children and the Environment in an Australian Indigenous Community: A Psychological Approach by Angela Kreutz

Abstract

 2015 Children, Youth and Environments Children, Youth and Environments 25(1), 2015 Book Reviews Children and the Environment in an Australian Indigenous Community: A Psychological Approach Angela Kreutz (2015). New York: Routledge, 241 pages. $145.00 (hardcover); ISBN: 987-0-415-74117-0. Angela Kreutz’s book is an unusually profound contribution to the research literature on child-friendly environments and children’s environmental experiences. Her research setting is the aboriginal community of Cherbourg, in Eastern Australia. The majority of current research on child-friendly environments concern children in affluent, Western societies. This work is a valuable a reminder of the variety of circumstances in which children grow up. By adopting a deep, long-term commitment to ethnographic research among aboriginal children, Kreutz follows in the footsteps of the most prominent classic studies in child-environment research, namely the work of Roger Hart and Robin Moore in the late 1970s and 1980s. Kreutz anchors her work in the transactional framework in environmental psychology, which refers to the mutually defining, interconnected relationship between person and environment. She applies theories of ecological psychology, particularly Roger Barker’s developmental ecological psychology and James J. Gibson’s ecological perceptual psychology; these are rare examples of truly transactional frameworks that do not dualistically separate children from their physical or social environments, but rather offer holistic concepts and theories for the study of dynamic, evolving child-environment relationships. Kreutz’s methodological approach, the triangulation of a large set of mainly qualitative methods, is an especially valuable part of the work. The exhaustive list of applied methods includes behavior observations, photography, digital storytelling, freehand and arial photograph mapping, place expeditions, activity diaries, semi-structured interviews, rating scales and futures workshops. While aboriginal children between 9 and 12 years old were the main participants in the study, the study also involved adult participants, including residents, local agency employees, and staff of the primary school. In the genuine spirit of transactional approach, the author uses this large variety of methods to capture both the “inner”—experiential and perceptual processes, as well as the “outer”—objective characteristics of the physical environment. The chosen methodological palette reveals the various sides of the transactions between a child and his/her living environment. The qualitative approach is perhaps the only way to Book Reviews 161 go in this kind of explorative, partly anthropological study. The methods are well chosen, many of them further developed and some invented for this study. The situational, continuous adjustment and patching up of the methodological shortages increases the value of the research. Revealing gradually the different layers of child-environment transactions, Angela Kreutz is following the best traditions of story-telling. In each theme, findings resulting from the use of various methods add something essential to the problem at hand. The work reveals the everyday life of a population of children that has not been documented before in child-environment research. Among the main concerns in Western studies of child-friendly environments is children’s lack of independent mobility, overscheduled time, and few responsible roles in society. The picture is radically different in Cherbourg: Aboriginal children develop exceptional environmental competence, wide territorial range, intensive socialization with peers and almost limitless freedom. Children seem to have very separate lives from adults and very few programmed activities. Surprisingly, institutional settings were perceived to be more restorative than natural settings. All of these findings are in sharp contrast to mainstream child-environment research. The reality of aboriginal children seems to represent the opposite of the standard Western and Australian childhood in many important ways, and includes several characteristics and ideals that are already lost in many parts of the world. This happy story, however, is only part of the picture. On the flip side is children’s limited freedom to explore places beyond Cherbourg. Due to the lack of possibilities for wider mobility, children are confined to their small world without many alternative sociocultural experiences. They have excessive responsibilities and adult supervision and care is almost absent. Children take care of themselves and each other, they feel stress, fear, frustration and anger, and the social and physical context around them is unstable, unpredictable and sometimes dangerous. Kreutz’s work shows the...