What are children?

That may sound like an oddball question but we need to ask it. Are children just smaller versions of adults? Are children just good imitators of the "adultness" around them?

Many years ago the above two questions would get a resounding "yes" or a "strong maybe." Next time you are at a museum look at the old masters paintings of families - the children are dressed in adult-like clothing and their proportions are adult-like. Did the artist "see" this when painting or was it such a prevalent attitude that the artist intentionally "missed" the actual size of the child in order to appease the family - who was paying for the painting. Compare those children with the one above and note the head size differential.

Children being seen as something different from adults was not a viable notion until the early part of the 1900's - not that long ago. There are still persons today who think children have no ideas of their own and are molded solely by what their parents do. And there are those who still attribute adult-type thoughts and intentions to their children.

Children are different. Yes they are the same species as the adults who raise them but how they function - how they learn, think, talk follow a child's path of development - not an adult path.

Cross Cultural Studies

Another way to look at development is to study different cultures. This allows us to see the vast range of behaviors in humans. Most research that you read is based in the USA and is limited by our own cultural models.

The most usual behaviors studied are in the realm of child rearing and family living arrangements and we find variations that are far outside the normal distributions of those behaviors that we find in the United States.

Child rearing practices

Last year after the tsunami you might have noticed on TV and in the papers news about "baby 81" in Sri Lanka. If you noticed, he had a mark on his forehead, a black "mottu," put there by a nurse to ward off evil. There are many cultures that put a mark somewhere on an infant or child or put an amulet on an arm or leg. Some cultures cover the bed of the sleeping infant with black cloth to ward off evil.

[Some pediatricians in the United States would suggest that our infant talcum powder and whatever else we sprinkle on babies fit into the same category.]

Sleeping

In many cultures infants and young children sleep with their parents. In our culture this is usually taboo as we have some cultural prohibitions about where children sleep and with whom. There is recent research on this topic that does suggest that even in the United States infants should sleep near the parents and even in the same bed.

Weaning and toilet training

In the United States we tend to use a calendar or an aging system to mark when children should do things. If you asked most American parents when their children were weaning or toilet trained they will give you the child's age. Parents sometimes feel that the earlier the child is toilet trained the more "brownie points" they get. This is one of my personal biases. I have see too many cases of child abuse resulting from a child wetting a diaper when the parents thought the child should have stopped doing so.

In other cultures toilet training is just not an issue. This is especially true in warmer climates with houses with dirt floors. There is no stigma attached to when and where you go but like with puppy training the goal is to go outside the house.

Regarding weaning - in many cultures an infant is breast-fed for years. More recently there has been a move in the United States to encourage longer periods of breast-feeding.

The above issues about sleeping and breast-feeding are just a few examples of where cross-cultural findings have affected what is now suggested in the United States. But it takes decades for some ideas to take hold here when they’ve been practiced forever elsewhere.

Another cross-cultural factor is what defines a "family." In the USA we mainly have what is called a nuclear family, a set of parents and their children, all living in one house. This is a combination found mostly in Western cultures. Other cultures have a wider variety of living situations. Living with or next to relatives is quite common; calling all people in your immediate neighborhood or village “family” is found in various parts of the world. In some cultures, parents with many children may share their children with relatives who have none. None of this is “right” or “wrong” - each culture determines it’s own rules and values.

Language

All infants start life being able to make all human sounds. Even that eu French sound and the African click. Where did they go? Well - did your parents keep encouraging you to make those sounds? Do you encourage them in your children?

Toys

In some cultures children play with the adult tools such as machetes; tools that many American parent would cringe at.

Physical activity

Barring illness, children have the capacity to be very active. Yet here we label active children as having ADHD and medicate them [opps yes I have strong biases!] Look at the current crop of Olympians - Americans are no longer in the elite categories in many sports...One could ask if we are deteriorating physically or is it that we no longer allow our children to develop in that area?

Intellect

Cultures differ in their emphasis on school education. Some do everything possible to ensure that the children are well educated - from early on. Some don't - and some say they do and yet they don't.

The oops where have I been query.

I'm glad we are into 2006. The end of 2005 was too busy for me...getting ready to teach again and having a friend in town - which meant skiing and a short vacation to the Olympic Peninsula :).

But my resolution is to do my blogs regularly - starting today.

Studying Children

How do we study children? I have been known to say that there are two professions that are difficult - being a veterinarian or a pediatrician - both require working with organisms that can not always communicate clearly what feels "wrong."

Studying children sort of fits in here too but I have been a researcher - with newborns, infants and 5 year olds. The main difference is that researchers are working with populations that need not communicate what is "wrong" and we just need to find ways to measure what communication IS there.

Research comes in many forms - studying individuals or groups, short term or long term studies, and combinations of the forms.

How do we know what changes occur say from year 1 to year 2? We can study the same child for the year or we can look today at a 1-year-old and also look at a 2-year-old and measure the differences. Studying the same person over time is called longitudinal research. Studying the two different children is called cross-sectional research. Both are valid types of research.

Much of what we learned about development in the past came from longitudinal studies, mainly at universities, and which were funded for decades. Going back to the last post, can you see how the investigator can have a biased approach? Not to say they did or that the research was flawed, but when you study the same people over time you, as the investigator, are now part of that person's life and being the one studied is part of the persona of the people in the study.

Cross-sectional research is less affected by long term biases but the draw back here is that the researcher is studying two different children with all that entails. Getting two different yet "matching" groups of individuals is done statistically. Factors are matched as best they can be- such as family make-up, education levels of parents, type of neighborhoods lived in, etc.

All research has flaws and all researchers have flaws - we are all human. But the knowledge we have gained over the decades from all kinds of research and researchers has led to an understanding of child development.

Another caveat - gains in technology have led to gains in the study of humans. For example, when I was in college, child development was a relatively small field of research and there were few text books on the subject! When I was in graduate school, researchers were finding ways of studying infants; some were looking at perception and language development and very few were interested in fathers! Now infancy, fathers, prenatal, early postnatal, and language and perception are major fields of study.

Just imagine what we will know in the future.