4.2 Development and Enculturation

Development and Enculturation

Psychologists distinguish between human development and enculturation or socialization. Human development is viewed as the changes in physical, psychological, and social behavior experienced by individuals across the lifespan, from conception to death. Enculturation, also called socialization, is the process by which an individual becomes a member of a particular culture and takes on its values and behaviors. Neither human development nor enculturation stops. It is a lifelong process with accelerations and delays, changes in direction, sudden transitions, and long-term conversions. Human development is growth, decline, and modification (Shiraev & Levy, 2013).

So, how are such cultural behaviors learned? It turns out that cultural skills and knowledge are learned much the same way a person might learn to do algebra or knit. They are acquired through a combination of explicit teaching – being aware of rules, customs, and regulations within the culture and consciously sharing these with their children; and implicit learning – aspects of culture frequently unrecognized by people but that give direction to behaviors.

Read the scenario below:

Cultural teaching can take many forms. As discussed in Lesson 2, social learning occurs when behavior is taught or modeled to another. In child development, cultural shaping begins with the parents or caregivers. Caregivers teach their children, directly and indirectly, or by example, how to behave and how the world works. They may encourage children to be polite, reminding them, for instance, to say “Please” and “Thank you.” They teach kids how to dress in a way that is appropriate for the culture. They introduce children to religious beliefs and the rituals that go with them. They even teach children how to think and feel! This uniquely human form of learning, where the cultural tools for success are passed from one generation to another, is what is known as enculturation.

Enculturation Agents

Think back to an emotional event you experienced as a child. How did your parents react to you? Did your parents get frustrated or criticize you? Did they act patiently and provide support and guidance? Did your parents impose many rules on you or let you decide independently? Why do you think your parents behaved the way they did? Enculturation agents are individuals and institutions that shape individual adaptations to a specific culture to ensure growth and effectiveness.

As previously mentioned, parents and caretakers are the primary enculturation agents for their young. Psychologists have attempted to answer questions about the influences on parents and understand why parents behave the way they do. Because parents are critical to a child’s development, a great deal of research has been focused on parents’ impact on children. Parenting is a complex process in which parents and children influence one another.

The multiple influences on parenting are still being explored. Both caretakers and their children bring unique personality traits, characteristics, and habits to the parent-child dynamic that ultimately impact the child’s development. Culture also influences parenting behaviors in fundamental ways. Although promoting the development of skills necessary to function effectively in one’s community is a universal goal of parenting, the required specific skills vary widely from culture to culture. Parents have different goals for their children that partially depend on their culture (Tamis-LeMonda et al., 2008).

Other Enculturation Agents: Ecological Systems Theory

Bronfenbrenner’s Ecological Systems Theory (YouTube)

Contextual characteristics, such as the neighborhood, school, and social networks, also affect enculturation, even though these settings don’t always include both the child and the parent (Bronfenbrenner, 1989). For example, Latina mothers who perceived the neighborhood as more dangerous showed less warmth with their children, perhaps because of the more significant stress associated with living in a threatening environment (Gonzales et al., 2011). Urie Bronfenbrenner was a Russian-born American developmental psychologist most known for his ecological systems theory of child development. His scientific work and assistance to the United States government helped form the Head Start program in 1965.

Bronfenbrenner’s research and theory were key in changing the perspective of developmental psychology by highlighting many environmental and societal influences on child development. Bronfenbrenner saw human development as being shaped by the interaction between an individual and his or her environment. The specific path of development results from the influences of a person’s surroundings, such as their parents, friends, school, work, culture, etc. According to Melvin L. Kohn, a sociologist from Johns Hopkins University, Bronfenbrenner was critical in making social scientists realize that “…interpersonal relationships, even [at] the smallest level of the parent-child relationship, did not exist in a social vacuum but were embedded in the larger social structures of community, society, economics, and politics.”

Nature and Nurture – Internal and External Factors of Enculturation

Nature vs. Nurture: Behaviorism or Genetics? (YouTube)

The most basic question about child development is how nature and nurture together shape development. Nature refers to our biological endowment, the genes we receive from our parents. Nurture refers to the social and physical environments that influence our development, everything from the womb in which we develop before birth to the homes in which we grow up, the schools we attend, and the many people with whom we interact.

The nature-nurture issue is often presented as an either-or question: Is our intelligence (for example) due to our genes or to the environments in which we live? However, every aspect of development is produced by the interaction of genes and the environment. At the most basic level, without genes, there would be no child, and without an environment to provide nurture, there also would be no child. The nature-nurture debate concerns the relative contribution of genetic and environmental influences on human development. The concepts discussed in this section apply to these two developmental influences.

How nature and nurture work together can be seen in findings on visual development. Many people view vision as something that people are either born with or purely a matter of biological maturation. Still, it also depends on the right experience at the right time. For example, the development of depth perception, the ability to actively perceive the distance from oneself to objects in the environment, depends on seeing patterned light and having normal brain activity in response to the patterned light in infancy (Held, 1993). Suppose no patterned light is received, for example, when a baby has severe cataracts or blindness that is not surgically corrected until later in development. In that case, depth perception remains abnormal even after the surgery.

Adding to the complexity of the nature-nurture interaction, children’s genes elicit different treatment from other people, which influences their cognitive development. For example, infants’ physical attractiveness and temperament are influenced considerably by their genetic inheritance, but it is also the case that parents provide more sensitive and affectionate care to easygoing and attractive infants than to difficult and less attractive ones, which can contribute to the infants’ later cognitive development (Langlois et al., 1995; van den Boom & Hoeksma, 1994).

Also contributing to the complex interplay of nature and nurture is the role of children in shaping their cognitive development. From the first days out of the womb, children actively choose to attend more to some things and less to others. For example, even 1-month-olds choose to look at their mother’s face more than at the faces of other women of the same age and general level of attractiveness (Bartrip et al., 2001). Children’s contributions to their cognitive development grow as they age (Scarr & McCartney, 1983). When children are young, their parents largely determine their experiences: whether they will attend daycare, the children with whom they will have play dates, the books to which they have access, and so on.

In contrast, older children and adolescents choose their environments to a more considerable degree. Their parents’ preferences largely determine how 5-year-olds spend time, but 15-year-olds’ preferences largely determine when, if ever, they set foot in a library. Children’s choices often have enormous consequences. To cite one example, the more children choose to read, the more their reading improves in future years (Baker et al., 2000). Thus, the issue is not whether cognitive development is a product of nature or nurture but how nature and nurture work together to produce cognitive development.

Watch the two videos below, which explain both nature—the biological processes of the brain in normal development—and nurture—enculturation agents and the cultural environment.

Experiences Build Brain Architecture (YouTube)

Serve & Return Interaction Shapes Brain Circuitry (YouTube)

As these videos illustrate, both biological and cultural processes are at play in a child’s development, especially during the early stages of life. Both nature and nurture combined lead to healthy development.