Children

For children, community is defined as the social and physical arena in which daily life takes place. Community is the place in which children first negotiate friendships, attend school, play organized or spontaneous sports games, develop an idea of who they are outside of home, and encounter an array of adult and peer influences. Children begin the complex process of transitioning from home to neighborhood and eventually [Page 133]to wider community contexts early in their development. In industrialized Western nations, regular interactions with people and places outside the home are routine by eight years of age. By fifteen to sixteen years of age, people and places in the community emerge as a central focus of life. Thus community, as the “territory of childhood” (Garbarino 1982, p. 150), has important developmental implications for children.

In the 1980s and 1990s, researchers in the United States devoted increasing attention to understanding how the community, or more immediately the neighborhood, shapes the daily lives and developmental outcomes of children. That research culminated in the publication in 2001 of Does It Take a Village? Community Effects on Children, Adolescents, and Families, edited by Alan Booth and Ann Crouter. While presenting the definitive research to date on the topic, the authors concede that despite the reemphasis on place, a precise measure of the effect of community on human development and well-being continues to elude social scientists. Empirical associations between community and child outcomes are often weak, contradictory, or overly specific to one particular place, group, or developmental epoch. To date, although there is widespread agreement with the African proverb “It takes a village to raise a child,” no specific models of how the village shapes human development or why the village appears to matter so much have successfully been generalized over place and time. Still, strong hints of the mechanisms through which community influences child development emerge from the research.

Three theoretical streams dominate the study of children and community in industrialized Western nations. The first emphasizes the importance of structural features, such as the demographic composition of community; the second underscores the significance of the social processes of place; the third focuses on family management strategies as a key factor in children's experiences in community. Each stream of research yields different insights into the intricate role the whole village can play in raising a child.