Activities

Activities, Culture, and Development

Many types of activities contribute to development, including daily routines, regular culturally organized behaviors, and rituals. These activities are similar in that they are all socially structured and reflect the values and the goals of the culture. Participation in activities exposes people to cultural ways of thinking and acting. People are active learners in the process. They purposefully allocate their attention to learn about the activity, which developmental psychologist Barbara Rogoff calls “intent participation.” These efforts might include listening in on the conversations of other cultural members, asking questions about their behaviors, or imitating the behaviors observed.

With development, people’s skills and interests change, which affects the nature and extent of their activity participation. Children’s understanding of the societal expectations associated with activities also develops, and this knowledge feeds into the child’s emerging concepts of individual rights and responsibilities. More experienced cultural members support children’s involvement and learning in activities through instruction, modeling, scaffolding, guided participation, and collaboration.

All human beings have the same basic needs, and many activities focus on these needs. These activities, many of which pertain to hygiene, nutrition, sleep, and social interaction, are routine; that is, they repeat in the same way on regular, often daily, occasions. Oft-repeated experiences give people multiple opportunities (or trials) to practice new behaviors, see other people (models) engaging in them, and obtain feedback about performance. Participation in routines teaches people how basic practical activities are carried out in their culture, such as bathing customs, eating manners, sleeping arrangements, and patterns of social discourse and propriety.

Children quickly learn the behaviors and expectations associated with routines. As early as the second year of life, children notice changes in daily routines, and they can find these changes confusing and unsettling, which suggests children have a cognitive and emotional connection to them. With increasing age, children assume more responsibility for carrying out regular personal routines as well as those that contribute to the household. Involvement in domestic routines is common for children around the world, although the age and extent of this involvement varies considerably across cultures.

People also learn cultural ways of thinking and behaving through participation in practices that are less regular than routines but are also carried out in ways determined by culture. Cultural practices are courses of action, including ways of thinking, speaking, and solving problems that are valued by the culture and important for people to learn. These practices determine behavior in a vast array of cultural settings (e.g., home, school, community sites), compose a good portion of the experiential contributions to development, and are important to socialization.

Examples of cultural practices are classroom-related behaviors (e.g., school rules and demeanor, homework practices), social behaviors (e.g., visiting relatives, interacting with peers), and personal behaviors (e.g., church etiquette, bicycle safety). There is substantial variation across cultures in children’s participation in cultural practices. In developing countries, children spend much of the day in and around the home and local community, and most of the cultural practices they learn pertain to behaviors in these settings. In contrast, in Europe and the United States, children are in school for most of the day, and they learn much about the cultural practices that are important in this setting.

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