Children's Street Work in Urban Nigeria: Dilemma of Modernizing Tradition

One of the important strategies of child socialization in Nigeria and other West-African countries from which African Americans originate is responsibility training. Responsibility training is defined as expectations and encouragement of the participation of children in household maintenance and domestic economy. The expectation that children should contribute to the welfare of their families is adaptive in subsistence and labor-intensive economies, as has been found in cross-cultural studies carried out in the 1950s and 1960s (Barry, Bacon, & Child, 1957; Barry, Child, & Bacon, 1959; Whiting, 1963; Whiting & Whiting, 1975). Subsistence economies necessitate the pooling of all available labor including that of children for agricultural and other kinds of work.