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- Author, Samuel Forbes and Prerna Aneja
- Author’s title, The Conversation*
For parents, caregivers and teachers, it is often tempting to base our understanding of a child’s development on what we believe is “normal.”
We often do it without thinking, when we describe a child as “doing well” in one subject and “falling behind” in another.
Whenever we make this kind of comparison, we have some kind of mental reference point in our heads: for example, a toddler should be able to climb furniture at age 2.
Increasingly, child development researchers argue that the same is true in their field, the study of how behaviors and skills such as language develop.
Many of the studies that claim to investigate child development, whether implicitly or explicitly, claim that their findings are universal.
There may be many reasons for this. Sometimes there is a temptation to exaggerate conclusions, sometimes it can be the way readers or the media interpret the findings.
The result is that what has been found in a group of children is then taken as the standard, the criterion against which future research is compared.
Academic biases
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Most research on child development comes from wealthier Western countries, particularly the United States, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Germany, and France.
Chances are, if you’ve heard of childhood development milestones, they occurred in one of these countries.
This is because it can be difficult to conduct basic research on child development in developing countries, as colleagues and reviewers will ask or demand comparisons with Western populations to put findings from these regions in context.
Of course, without realizing it, these colleagues and reviewers have established Western children as the norm.
Complex environments
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But is it fair to make these comparisons? One of the complicated aspects of child development research is that it occurs in a cultural and social context from which it cannot be separated.
But this context is often confusing. Differences in physical environment, parenting styles, location, climate, etc. interact to shape children’s growth.
In addition to these differences, there are also individual variations. These can be, for example, curiosity, shyness and neurodiversity, which can frame the way a child shapes their own learning environment.
Take the field of childhood motor development: the study of how children learn to move.
Many parents in particular may be familiar with charts showing when they can expect their child to sit, crawl, stand and run. The existence of these graphs makes it seem quite universal, and a child’s motor development is often judged in this way.
This makes sense. Early research was concerned with finding out what was normal, and it makes sense to try to support children who might be at risk of falling behind. The time and order investigated then gave rise to the norms and scales that we still use today.
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Is something like the timing of motor development universal? It’s easy to imagine it could be. When there are no physical or cognitive barriers, we all learn to sit and stand, so at first glance it seems fair to say that it could be.
But it turns out that the context in which children develop plays a very important role even in something as seemingly universal as this.
In countries and cultures where babies routinely receive firm massages from their caregivers, such as in Jamaica, motor development accelerates. It is clear that a norm developed in one culture may not translate well to another.
Beyond the rules
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Clearly, the problems highlighted above are not unique to motor development. In areas such as language development or social development, the cultural component is even more pressing.
There is simply no way to understand these elements of child development without also understanding the context in which they take place.
Each child develops within a context and, no matter how normal our own culture may seem to us, There is no objective, context-independent standard with which we can compare other children..
That is, we should accept the disorder.
If we think of normal child development as something that just happens, researchers miss understanding the dynamics of development itself.
But worse, educators and caregivers may not realize that development is something we can act on, and they miss the opportunity to create change.
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An important part of viewing child development as intertwined with culture is that it not only means collecting data from other cultures, but involving local communities and research perspectives.
Understanding communities means listening to them, empowering them and giving them space to have a voice.
Moving beyond a Western-centric understanding of child development will not only benefit researchers and lead to more accurate science, but will hopefully benefit everyone who works with children around the world.
*This article was published on The Conversation and reproduced here under the creative commons license. Beam click here to read the original version.
Samuel Forbes is Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of Durham and Prerna Aneja is a Lecturer in Psychology at the University of East Anglia.
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