For parents, caregivers, and teachers, it is often tempting to base our thinking on what we consider “normal” child development. Most of the time we do this without thinking, describing a child as “doing well” in one subject and “backward” in another.
Whenever we make these types of comparisons, we have some kind of mental benchmark or scale in mind: for example, a child should be able to climb on furniture by the age of two. Increasingly, child development researchers are arguing that the same goes for child development research – the study of how behaviors and abilities such as language develop. Read this also Parenting 101: Not just academics and grades, teach kids these key life skills to groom future leaders
Many studies that implicitly or explicitly claim to research child development claim that their findings are universal.
There can be many reasons for this. Sometimes there is a temptation to oversell the findings, sometimes the findings may be interpreted that way by readers or the media. The result is that what is found in one group of children is taken as the standard – the yardstick against which future research is compared.
Most research on how children develop comes from rich, Western countries, particularly the US, UK, the Netherlands, Germany and France. Chances are, if you’ve heard about milestones in child development, they were developed in one of these countries.
This is so much so that it can be challenging to conduct basic research on child development in developing countries, as colleagues and reviewers will ask or demand comparisons to Western populations to put findings from these regions into context. Of course, without realizing it, these peers and reviewers have idolized Western children.
But is this comparison fair? One of the intriguing things about research on child development is that it occurs within a cultural and social context that cannot be removed. But this context is often confused. Differences in physical environment, parenting style, location, climate etc. interact to shape the development of children.
Apart from these differences, there are also individual differences. For example, these could be curiosity, shyness, and neurodiversity, which can determine how a child shapes his or her learning environment.
Take for example the field of motor development in infancy – the study of how babies learn to walk. In particular many parents may be familiar with charts that show when they can expect their baby to sit, crawl, stand and run. The existence of these charts makes them quite universal, and a child’s motor development is often judged accordingly. Read this also Parenting Tips for Success: Expert Ways to Master Problem-Solving, Resilience and Empathy in Children
This is understandable. Early research was busy finding out what was normal, and whether it made sense to try to support children who may be at risk of falling behind. The timing and sequence of investigations at that time gave rise to the criteria and scales that we still use today.
Is there something universal like motor development timing? It’s easy to imagine that this could happen. We all learn to sit and stand when there are no physical or cognitive barriers, so on the surface it seems reasonable to say that this could happen.
But it turns out that the context in which children develop plays a big role even in something as seemingly universal as this. In countries and cultures where infants regularly receive massage from caregivers, such as in Jamaica, motor development is faster. It is clear that an ideal developed in one culture may not translate well to another culture.
beyond the norms
It is clear that the problems highlighted above are not unique to motor development. The cultural component is even more attractive in areas such as language development or social development.
There is no way to understand these elements of child development without understanding the context in which they occur. Every child is developing within a context and no matter how normal our own culture may seem to us, there is no objective context-free benchmark with which we can compare other children. What this means is that we should embrace messiness.
If we think of normal child development as something that just happens, researchers miss out on understanding the dynamics of development. But what’s worse is that teachers and caregivers may not realize that development is something we can act on, and miss the opportunity to create change.
An important part of cross-culturally examining child development is that it does not just mean collecting data from other cultures, but incorporating local communities and research perspectives. Understanding communities means listening to them, empowering them, and creating space for them 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.
