The Everyday Lives of Young Children: Culture, Class, and Child Rearing in Diverse Societies ‐ by Jonathan Tudge

Abstract

The Everyday Lives of Young Children: Culture, Class, and Child Rearing in Diverse Societies. Jonathan Tudge. New York: Cambridge University Press. 2008. 328 pp. ISBN 9780521803847. $85.00 (cloth). Anthropologists have a long tradition of immersing readers in the flavors and textures of various cultures through detailed accounts of their time spent observing, listening, and talking to family members all over the world. Jonathan Tudge's The Everyday Lives of Young Children: Culture, Class, and Child Rearing in Diverse Societies (2008) is a nod to this tradition, though, as a developmental psychologist, Tudge introduces some interesting bifurcations from traditional approaches to studying culture. First, the family members at the center of Tudge's research are generally shorter, more prone to napping, and less inhibited than the typical subjects of ethnographic work. Thus insights into values, beliefs, and practices are granted by a dedicated focus on how young children are socialized into a given society's ways of being and doing. Tudge takes us one step further by considering how young children themselves shape and change their own cultures. This is a brilliant departure from classic studies of cultural transmission that frame children as culture bearers. Second, the cultural-ecological theory guiding Tudge's research, and inspired by Vygotsky and Bronfenbrenner, brings many layers of analysis, including psychological, sociological, historical, and anthropological. This multiplicity of lenses is one of the primary characteristics that makes Tudge's work stand out among studies of young children and marks the book as a breakthrough contribution. The multidisciplinary nature of the work also invites readers to consider culture (what it is, what it means for our lives, how it changes) in all of its complexity and fluidity, and presents interesting possibilities for studying education, urbanicity, and childrearing as shaped by - and as they shape - culture. Third, this work pushes the boundaries of research typically classified as cross-cultural by spotlighting children in urban settings around the world and by including comparisons not only across societies but also within societies (Cohen, 2009). Traditionally, when children in the ' 'majority world' ' - a term for nonindustrialized countries Tudge borrows from Kagitccibasi (1996) - are studied, the subjects are from communities. This contributes to the predominant impression among members of the industrialized (minority) world that rural is a concomitant of non- Western societies. In contrast, Tudge's research was conducted in seven cities similar in one or more ways to Greensboro, North Carolina, United States, where the study began. They include Obninsk, Russia; Tartu, Estonia; OuIu, Finland; Suwon, South Korea; Kisumu, Kenya; and Porto Alegre, Brazil. Besides Kenya and to some extent Brazil, these countries are not part of the usual lineup in comparative studies, as the objective of many such studies is to contrast societies perceived to be radically different from one another (Hallpike, 2004). In addition, traditional crosscultural studies comparing majority- world societies with minority-world industrialized urban ones tend to conflate societal differences with social class differences. By including middle- and working-class participants in his study, Tudge is able to engage within-society comparisons. Further, the Greensboro site also includes two ethnic groups, White and Black, allowing for within-society comparisons across ethnicity and attention to the intersections of culture, class, and ethnicity (Tudge & Putnam, 1997). Tudge accomplishes these sophisticated contributions in nine well-organized chapters. In Chapter 1, Tudge sets the backdrop for the research presented in the book and provides an overview of approaches to studying children from three disciplines - developmental psychology, sociology, and anthropology. …