EARLY CHILDHOOD STUDIES AND ANALYTIC COMMENTARY
Introduction
According to Lareau, (2011, p.12), unequal childhoods refers to the discrepancies in the opportunities available to the children during their upbringing due to social status and societal beliefs. Children’s inequalities and traditional norms have been globally recognized to be barriers that prevent children from thriving in society. Some of the inequalities arise due to gender preference whereby the male gender is preferred and hence given more opportunities than the female gender. Some of the traditional practices make children unable to access the necessary support that they need. In some societies, especially in the African set-up, gender discrimination and male gender preference, restrict girls from pursuing their dreams (Tran, Luchters, and Fisher, 2017, p.426). Throughout a child’s developmental stages, gender bias impacts self-esteem greatly. This makes these boys and girls differ in childhood experiences and upbringing. This paper aims at analyzing some of the main social, political, cultural factors that contribute to the inequality of childhood issues globally.
Social Factors that Leads to Unequal Childhoods
It is worth noting that unlike the olden days, children growing up in the twenty-first century are provided with a range of fantastic opportunities (Li, 2019, p.66). However, the availability of these opportunities also creates a lot of pressure among the children. Although there are no harmonized ideas describing what childhood should be like, there are child development researches that have been conducted globally about what childhood should be like for over a hundred years (Li, 2019, p.65). The various ideas that have been gathered over this are commonly referred to as discourses of childhood. The whole idea of childhood is thus derived from the complexity discourses (Li, 2019, p.57).
Some discourses are predominant than others, which appear at different times. For instance, most of the contemporary childhood researches have shown that a child growing up in African society are disadvantaged than their counterparts in Westernized regions. This is due to social characteristics that define the western societies which defer from the African societies. These include the discrepancies in the societal beliefs and the laws that govern the upbringing of the children. In her book, Lareau (2011, p.12) argue that irrespective of the diversity in the races, socio-economic stratification determines how children grow up and adopt various skills along the way.
Currently, children take a lot of things for granted, like having new clothes which in the past was a sign of great luxury, especially in Africa American societies. The social status of the family set up determines the behaviors and opportunities that will be available to the child when they grow up. It is worth noting that factors that affect a child’s early childhood development have evolved over the decades (Garcıa, Heckman, Leaf, and Prados, 2017, p.67). The. One of the major social factors that have affected the modern child upbringing is the adoption of modernization by the parents. This has resulted in changing attitudes in children over things that were held either so sacred or to be in the parent’s domain to decide in the past (Li, 2019, p.87).
More positive parental interactions between parents and children have promoted childhood development in the current world since these interactions can largely influence a child’s character either positively or negatively. Today, parents are able to spend time with their children either playing or teaching them about various social values, something that wasn’t happening in the past in the African American societies (Merkel-Holguin, 2017, p.88). However, there are families with retrogressive parents who still believe that children do not have an opinion about the matters decided by the parents. Studies have shown that the majority of African families do not believe in dialogue with their children. Hence, the children are given instructions, and they obey.
Children brought up by these two deferring families are likely to have different socialization techniques when they grow up (Li, 2019, p.48). Children who are given room to speak and air their views are likely to be more confident than the children who are shutdown. Changes in the Children’s learning environment have also influenced the attitudes regarding childhood development in children (Britto, Lye, Proulx, Yousafzai, Matthews, Vaivada, Perez-Escamilla, Rao, Ip, Fernald, and MacMillan, 2017, 63). Today, children are surrounded by appropriate learning environments from homes and even daycare facilities, which are very informative and help instill the appropriate values and exposure. However, it is worth noting that the educational institution that the child is taken depends on the social, economic status of the parent.
This is because a child’s socialization is mainly influenced by their immediate environment within their primary social associations. For instance, children who are taken to private schools have been documented to have a better command of language and confidence that their counterparts taken to public schools. Consequently, African American neighborhoods and schools have been documented to have a high number of children violence and drugs because of the nature of the learning environment and the friends that the child socialization with (Li, 2019, p.58). The school environment influences child skills and way of thinking because children spend the majority of their time in schools. Children from wealthy backgrounds have been documented to have better opportunities for attaining higher education irrespective of poor grades.
References
Britto, P.R., Lye, S.J., Proulx, K., Yousafzai, A.K., Matthews, S.G., Vaivada, T., Perez-Escamilla, R., Rao, N., Ip, P., Fernald, L.C. and MacMillan, H., 2017. Nurturing care: promoting early childhood development. The Lancet, 389(10064), pp.91-102.
Lareau, A., 2011. Unequal childhoods: Class, race, and family life. Univ of California Press.
Li, A., 2019. Unequal Childhoods Revisited: Examining the Causal Effects of Concerted Cultivation in Elementary School.
Garcıa, J.L., Heckman, J.J., Leaf, D.E. and Prados, M.J., 2017. The life-cycle benefits of an influential early childhood program. University of Chicago, Department of Economics.
Merkel-Holguin, L., 2017. A history of child welfare. Routledge
Tran, T.D., Luchters, S. and Fisher, J., 2017. Early childhood development: impact of national human development, family poverty, parenting practices and access to early childhood education. Child: care, health and development, 43(3), pp.415-426.