A Study of Children’s Culture across 35 Societies

Abstract

Children are inherently different from adults. Yet, our understanding of their sociocultural contexts across countries is limited. This study uses survey data from 95,576 children from 35 societies and proposes a three-faceted cultural framework that covers the cultural dimensions of collectivism, power equivalence, and aggressiveness with respect to gender and contextual interactions. The study challenges the idea of a general transfer of parents’ values to children during the socialization process. The proposed framework has social and business relevance for diverse areas such as improving school experiences, speech-language intervention programs, and marketing to children.

Keywords:

• Adolescents
• childhood
• children
• culture
• preadolescence
• socialization
• values

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Data availability statement

The data used in this publication comes from the third wave of Children’s Worlds project: An international survey of children’s lives and well-being (www.isciweb.org). The views expressed here are those of the author, they are not necessarily those of ISCWeB.

Notes

1 In the context of training young children, Findlay (1906, p. 72) introduced the terms in- and outworld with respect to what children remember versus what they see. I suggest to use the term insphere for interactions with immediate family at home in analogy to inorganic chemistry. An inner sphere (or bonded) electron transfer is a chemical reaction that occurs between complexes via a bridging ligand. At least one of the complexes needs to allow the bridge to form. An outer sphere electron transfer occurs between complexes that remain separate and intact before, during, and after the transfer event (Douthwaite 2011). In geometry, the insphere (or inscribed sphere) of a solid is a sphere that is tangent to all faces of the solid, whereas the circumsphere (or circumscribed sphere) touches all the outer vertices of a solid.