By Dan Nonte, University Relations
Contact: (336) 334-4314
Posted 4-11-08
GREENSBORO, NC – Middle-class families are more likely than working-class families to encourage young children to be autonomous, according to a study of 150 children in seven countries by Dr. Jonathan Tudge.
The study is documented in Tudge’s new book, “The Everyday Lives of Young Children: Culture, Class, and Child Rearing in Diverse Societies” from Cambridge University Press.
Working-class families are more likely to encourage the following of rules. “Those who have working-class jobs need to follow the rules in order to keep their jobs, and they pass those ideas on to their children,” says the professor of human development and family studies.
Almost 20 years in the making, the book is based on the observation of 3-year-olds in seven cities of similar size: Greensboro; Obninsk, Russia; Tartu, Estonia; Oulu, Finland; Suwon, South Korea; Kisumu, Kenya; and Porto Alegre, Brazil. Tudge and his collaborators observed the children when they were 3 and then tracked their development through their first years of school.
Tudge also found that children in different countries may have more in common than is typically thought. Differences among cultures can be exaggerated, he said, because researchers often compare children in U.S. cities to children in rural areas of developing countries. When children in similar-sized cities are compared, class differences are as revealing as cultural differences, Tudge found.
Clipboard-toting researchers spent 20 hours or more during a single week with each of about 150 children in the study, who wore small wireless microphones during the observations. Taken together, the sessions for each child covered every waking minute of the day. The observers used a detailed coding system to document what occurred during a 30-second period every six minutes.
“I was interested in applying something like an anthropologist would do, just observing, and observing for long enough that children would become used to the observer’s presence,” Tudge says.
The study included about 20 children per city, 10 from working-class families and 10 from middle-class families, with two exceptions. In Greensboro, 39 children were observed, because Tudge included almost equal numbers of black and white families, evenly divided by class. In South Korea, only 12 children were observed, because of challenges in family recruitment.
The cities, with populations ranging from 100,000 to 700,000, are generally considered medium-sized in their home countries. Only Porto Alegre falls outside those parameters with more than a million people. Each of the cities has at least one institution of higher education. Homes were considered middle class when parents had successfully completed higher education and were engaged in professional occupations.
Despite their differences, the children had much in common. “In many ways, kids are kids are kids,” he said. “They do the same sorts of things. In all of the groups the children played most of the time.”
The research was supported by the Spencer Foundation, the International Research and Exchanges Board, three Brazilian governmental funding agencies, the University of Oulu (Finland), the University of Tartu (Estonia). UNCG helped Tudge by providing two sabbaticals for him to work on the project and grants from its Human Environmental Sciences Foundation and its International Program Center’s Kohler Fund.
Tudge earned his doctorate in human development and family studies at Cornell University and joined UNCG in 1988. He has written more than 60 book chapters and journal articles, and co-authored the 1996 book “Comparisons in Human Development: Understanding Time and Context.”
