ABSTRACT
Within my own discipline of child development, parents, carers and key adults in children’s lives are seen as the main agents of socialization and mediators of culture, and as such, their attitudes and behaviour have been examined in order to assess their impact on their children. Many of the more recent volumes are cross-cultural and refer to the range of variation of styles of parenting, and these styles are explained partly as a matter of cultural adaptation to the required norms of the society (Belle 1989; Goodnow and Collins 1990; Bornstein 1991; Harkness and Super 1996). Mostly these studies are undertaken from the stance that parents shape and critically determine their children’s lives, particularly in early childhood, rather than exploring how children may be active agents and arbiters of their own lives. This kind of psychological analysis also focuses on individual performance; that is these studies do not view children as a social group subject to certain political and social pressures by virtue of their childhood.
