TY - JOUR
AU - Harkness, Sara
AB - Anthropological approaches to human development have been oriented primarily to thesocialized adult, at the expense of understanding developmental processes.Developmental psychology, in contrast, has traditionally been concerned with adecontextualized, 'universal' child. After a brief historical review, the'developmental niche' is introduced as a framework for examining the culturalstructuring of child development. The developmental niche has three components: thephysical and social settings in which the child lives; the customs of child care andchild rearing; and the psychology of the caretakers. Homeostatic mechanisms tend tokeep the three subsystems in harmony with each other and appropriate to thedevelopmental level and individual characteristics of the child. Nevertheless, theyhave different relationships to other features of the larger environment and thusconstitute somewhat independent routes of disequilibrium and change. Regularitieswithin and among the subsystems, and thematic continuities and progressions acrossthe niches of childhood provide material from which the child abstracts the social,affective, and cognitive rules of the culture. Examples are provided from researchin a farming community in Kenya.
TI - The Developmental Niche: A Conceptualization at the Interface of Child and Culture
JF - International Journal of Behavioral Development
DO - 10.1177/016502548600900409
DA - 1986-12-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/sage/the-developmental-niche-a-conceptualization-at-the-interface-of-child-SQ8SmIp58k
SP - 545
EP - 569
VL - 9
IS - 4
DP - DeepDyve
ER -