April 16, 2009
In the introduction to their article “Play and Cultural Differences” (which is one of more than 90 articles in the new Exchange resource, Promoting the Value of Play CD Book), Elizabeth Jones and Sharon Cronin observe…
“Culture — a people’s way of behaving, being in, and understanding the world — is learned by each new generation through a process of enculturation. A culture’s solutions and life strategies are acquired by children as they watch and listen — and reinvented as they imitate, talk, and play. Language, including both words and art forms, is central to the unity of a culture.
“In the first five years of life, children learn to ta lk their people’s language and play their people’s daily life scripts — homemaking and going places, talking to friends and buying and selling, making and fixing, singing and dancing, and storytelling and celebrating rituals. Children’s imitative and playful grounding in their culture is the foundation for identity development and for trust in the world as a predictable and meaningful place.
“For many children, this learning process is disrupted by racism and other biases that devalue their home culture, or by sustained discontinuous experiences that ignore it. A child in out-of-home care will be aware both of differences and of the unspoken values attached to these differences: Are my language, my hair and skin, my games — myself — welcome here? Am I expected to change in order to be acceptable? Child care can be an alienating experience — or an affirming one.
“If no one in the child care program speaks the child’s language, if none of the toys recreate home, if no familiar adult is present in a caregiving role, the young child is thrust into the confusing but all-too-common experience of stranger care — of long days in a setting which doesn’t resemble home and whose people will have no lasting relationship with the child’s family. In such a setting, it’s hard to play and learn.”
Taken from ExchangeEveryDay, a free service of Exchange Magazine.
