Cultural Expressions of Preschoolers’ Emerging Self: Narrative and Iconic Representations

Abstract

The aim of this study was to investigate the socialization and internalization of children’s cultural self-representations. A total of 149 mothers and their 4-year-old children from four different cultural milieus representing different cultural models participated. The sociodemographic profiles of the four samples were associated with different emphases on autonomy and relatedness. There were 36 middle-class families from Berlin, Germany, and 42 middle-class families from Stockholm, Sweden (both representing the model of autonomy); 33 rural Cameroonian farming families (representing the model of relatedness); and 38 middle-class families from Tallinn, Estonia (representing the model of autonomy relatedness). Two tasks were investigated in view of children’s socialization and internalization of their self-representations: mother–child past event conversations and children’s drawings of themselves. Overall, the different cultural emphases on autonomy and relatedness were embodied in mother–child reminiscing and children’s drawings of themselves. Specifically, mothers in the autonomous contexts were more elaborative relative to being repetitive and focused more on the child relative to others during reminiscing. Accordingly, children provided more memory elaborations, referred more to themselves relative to others, and drew themselves bigger compared to children from the relational rural Nso milieu. Mother–child conversations in the Tallinn sample were very similar to those of the autonomous samples; however, children’s drawings were medium in size. Correlations between narrative and drawing variables were only prevalent in the autonomous milieus and not in the Tallinn and rural Nso milieus.