The importance of understanding children’s lived experience
Introduction
In this article we argue that the field of developmental research needs to focus more on understanding children’s lived experience and practices in the everyday settings of their lives, as participants in cultural communities. Children’s development occurs within and through their everyday experiences, which, for all children everywhere, are cultural experiences. It is important to understand the learning opportunities and the societal organization that are involved in what they know and do.
In developmental psychology, not much attention is given to studying children living their lives, in the places that they live their lives. Our stance is that the portfolio of our field needs a course-correction. To understand child development requires deepening and updating our understanding of what children are up to in their everyday lives, in the variety of cultural settings that they navigate. A key question that emerges is how they manage their navigation across settings.
Even for the cultural group that serves as the primary research sample and basis of most of what is in introductory developmental textbooks — the people and practices of middle-class, highly schooled communities — not much is known about their everyday lives. Middle-class children’s ways of life represent one (very interesting, though unusual) way for childhood to occur but even for middle-class children there are few studies of lived experience and cultural practices (with some exceptions, such as Arnold et al., 2017, Kusserow, 1999, Ochs and Kremer-Sadlik, 2013, Rogoff et al., 1993, Lareau, 2003, Whiting and Whiting, 1975).
The theoretical and empirical importance of understanding children’s everyday lives was illustrated by Bruner, in his 1983 autobiography, critiquing his own early language research:
Imagine dragging mothers and their year-olds... into a great, dazzling white laboratory building, ... leading them down corridors to a ‘natural’ playroom entered through an outer room crowded with video screens — and then asking them to play with a set of standard toys, etc! Well, that was how we started. ...
Communicative behavior — prelinguistic as well as linguistic — is very context sensitive and our Rube Goldberg laboratory setting doubtless produced a great deal of stilted talk and action.” (p. 166-7)
Eventually, when Bruner and his team moved to observing children’s everyday lives, they noticed the extent to which children and mothers were intent on getting things done with words and other communicative means.
We went native. We took portable cameras to the children’s homes and observed what they did when a psychologist was not imposing tasks on them. What was very soon plain was that mother and child were negotiating their respective intentions through communication: using whatever conventional means could be brought to bear and inventing conventions where none had yet been established....
The situations in which they were operating, moreover, were loaded with familiarity. Communication was linked to those familiar routines, those familiar settings. (p. 167)
Bruner’s move to observing everyday life led to his important work on how ‘language was being mastered for the uses to which it could be put’ (p. 167). By studying children’s everyday lives, he developed his well-known argument that language development builds on familiar formats such as greetings and book reading, together with fine-tuned responding, which scaffold children’s learning.
All theories of how children develop contain assumptions, hypotheses, and implications about children’s everyday lives (Dahl, 2017). All too often, implicit and explicit claims about childhood derive from untested intuitions, leaving major theoretical debates unresolved. Researchers’ or theorists’ intuitions about children’s everyday lives — likely based on their own cultural experience — are often assumed to be the ‘normal’ form of human childhood, compounding the problems of ignorance about children’s everyday lives.
We argue that developmental psychology needs to broaden the research portfolio to include more research that examines children’s lived experience, in company with other approaches such as laboratory and experimental studies. Research that directly studies children’s everyday lives needs to be more welcome in developmental psychology journals, as it makes a substantial contribution to understanding human development. This welcome seems to have shrunk across a few decades in developmental psychology journals.
In addition to the direct contributions to developmental psychology from research describing children’s lived experience, this information is important to individual researchers across this field. Developmental researchers need information about children’s everyday lives in order to design and interpret research of all sorts. For example, to design laboratory procedures and interviews that mean what the researchers think they mean and to interpret findings based on the realities of the participants requires a body of research revealing children’s lived experience.
A great deal of research on children’s lived experience is available in other fields, such as anthropology, sociology, the learning sciences, and communication. Greater interdisciplinary connection would benefit developmental psychologists. But we also want to urge developmental psychology to encourage research that examines children’s lived experience by going where children spend their time and noticing the circumstances in which they learn and develop, as well as by asking them and their companions questions that illuminate how the phenomena in which the field is interested take place in children’s everyday lives.
In what follows, we first describe a sociocultural theoretical perspective that focuses on children’s development in terms of their participation in the everyday practices and settings of their lives. Then we put our call for greater attention to children’s lived experience in the context of the field’s efforts over the past half-century to understand children’s lives in context. We argue for broadening the field’s portfolio of research by
examining (rather than assuming) generality of findings across situations and populations, interpreting findings based on knowledge of children’s lives rather than researchers’ intuitions, and studying child development in the ecologies in which it occurs.
We conclude with a brief discussion of an important new question that has emerged from research on children’s lived experience: How do children learn to navigate across the practices common to the distinct settings of their lives?
Section snippets
Children learn and develop through everyday participation in cultural practices: a theoretical perspective
There are a number of theoretical perspectives that focus on people’s lived experience, since the early work of Bartlett and of Barker and Wright and before. Our call for developmental psychology to pay more attention to children’s lived experience builds from a broad sociocultural/historical practice perspective, which posits that learning and development occur in the process of people’s participation in the activities and events of their cultural communities (Callanan and Valle, 2008, Cole,
Still working to integrate contextual and cultural aspects of children’s lives in the study of development
Our call for greater attention to children’s lived experience (which includes the “cultural nature of human development,” Rogoff, 2003) continues a discussion that heated up a half-century ago, about the importance of context (including cultural context) in understanding human psychology. In the meantime, some attempts have been made to examine human development more contextually (and culturally), and theoretical progress has been made in considering the relation of individuals and their
Generality across communities and across situations: an empirical matter
Developmental psychology’s ignorance of children’s everyday lives frequently leads to overgeneralization, based on the limited populations and situations that are sampled. This is apparent in the continued widespread lack of attention to cultural differences in research populations and in the continued overgeneralization from one cultural group to humans in general (e.g., Nielsen, Haun, Kärtner, & Legare, 2017).
This is the case despite decades of evidence of the unusualness of the usual samples
Theories based on knowledge of children’s lives rather than researchers’ intuitions
All theories of development need research on children’s everyday lives. Developmental theories inevitably make claims about everyday life because most of development takes place in everyday life. That is, all theories of how children develop contain ecological commitments (Dahl, 2017): assumptions, hypotheses, and implications about children’s experiences and activities in everyday life. Theories could be committed to saying that children lack certain experiences in everyday life, that they have
Situating child development in the ecologies in which it occurs
As in other sciences, the general principles of developmental psychology are bound to be contextually grounded -- describing people-in-activities/circumstances, not people separate from contexts. We argue for the importance of describing people’s lived experience holistically and ecologically as functioning processes, along with Vygotsky, 1987, Leont’ev, 1981, Dewey and Bentley, 1949, Gibson, 1979, and the Laboratory of Comparative Human Cognition (1983) before us.
The study of childhood
How do children navigate across the distinct ecologies of their lives?
Children’s learning to distinguish or apply the approaches that they have learned in one setting when they become involved in another setting is an important phenomenon that has become recognized based on studies of children’s lived experience. Skill in navigating across settings is especially clear and crucial for children whose home practices are distinct from the practices that are common in schools, such as children from communities in which schooling has not been prevalent. How do children
In sum
To understand child development requires psychology to attend closely to children’s lived experience. Studying children’s everyday lives entails attention to cultural similarities as well as differences among the different communities of the world. It is important even for understanding contemporary childhood practices in the middle-class European American communities that have for too long been treated as generic, normal ways of growing up, rather than fitting very interesting and specific
Acknowledgments
We are grateful for the conversations with our colleagues and students that have helped us develop the ideas of this article.
Preparation of the article was supported by the UCSC Foundation Professorship in Psychology (to BR).
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