Development of infants and toddlers in ethnoracial families

✍ Scribed by Hiram E. Fitzgerald; Tammy Mann; Natasha Cabrera; Michelle Sarche; Desiree Qin

• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 2009
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 76 KB
• Volume: 30
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0163-9641
• DOI: 10.1002/imhj.20222

✦ Synopsis

Culture is often defined as the shared language, values, norms, traditions, customs, history, arts, folklore, and institutions of a group of people. Despite what is shared, every ethnoracial and cultural group in the United States is itself richly diverse. A number of analyses of the literature on child development have drawn attention to the lack of focused consideration to the study of child development in cultural context. During the past two decades, many important volumes on African American, Latino American, and Asian American families have been published, but few of these volumes have specifically addressed issues related to the earliest years (Fitzgerald et al., 1999;Ramsey, 2008). Findings on how within-group variation exerts its influence on early development (Garcia-Coll et al., 1996) are even more poorly represented in the core knowledge base of human development (Fitzgerald, 1999).

In contemporary American society, increasing numbers of children are reared in multicultural, multiracial, and multiethnic families. In such families, does one cultural tradition prevail, or are efforts made to blend cultural traditions? Race and culture are linked at macro levels, but within a particular ethnic group there is rich cultural diversity. What effects do racially and culturally diverse family structures and processes have on child development during the earliest years (Hill & Tyson, 2008)? What role do grandparents and other extended kin play in the promotion and maintenance of respective cultural traditions? How do conflicts linked to grandparental ethnoracial diversity influence the quality of parent-child relationships and the