ABSTRACT
These voices of children, drawn from studies in this volume, show children are already thinking in complex ways about issues of diversity and contexts along their developmental pathways:
Catherine R. Cooper University of California, Santa Cruz
Helen Davis University of California, Los Angeles
Celina Chatman University of Chicago
These issues are also on the minds of adults. In many nations, rethinking how diversity and contexts-economic, historical, political, cultural, and social-can be resources for children’s pathways has moved to the top of the agenda for scientists, policymakers, and practitioners in school and community programs. Demographic changes in the United States, as in other nations, have transformed our views of communities as stable, homogeneous, and equitable and of childhood as protected and innocent. We realize how much more we need to understand about the ways in which children’s life options differ from early on and the ways their own actions and those of the people around them can shape their pathways-for better or worse. To understand these issues, researchers are moving beyond static demographic categories and generic models of families, schools, or peers as good versus bad or matching versus mismatching to more refined models and measures of evolving systems that interact over time. Like mapping chain reactions, we are learning how each child’s evolving constellation of individual, relational, institutional, and cultural experiences becomes that child’s unique life trajectory. Our aim with this volume is to describe innovative approaches that social scientists are taking to understand contexts and diversity as resources in children’s developmental pathways through middle childhood.
