Encyclopedia on Early Childhood Development featured a research paper by a team of scholars from Lithuania, Finland and California exploring how children absorb culture and how this relates to and integrates with their early learning experience.

The scholarly paper, Culture and Early Childhood Learning¸ looks at research on the role of culture in how children make sense of the world during the period from birth to 5 years of age, emphasizing the critical role of play in early childhood development.

The paper draws on previous research in the field that has indicated that children, from birth or shortly thereafter, are extremely sensitive to contingencies in their environment, ranging from “learning characteristic patterns of activity to the differential responses of people in their environment to the contingencies among the phonemes in the language they hear that will form the basis of the grammar of their native language”.

There appears to be a “skeletal” form of understanding in specific areas such as arithmetic, physics and psychology, that allows infants to anticipate and express surprise if their anticipations are not realized (e.g., if two objects are hidden behind a screen but only one object can be seen when the screen is removed). They also demonstrate an ability to distinguish between intentional and mechanical causation, a building block for “learning the distinction between animate and inanimate objects”.

By about 9 months, children are noted to begin to create their own “cultures” and by the age of 5 years, have moved from being dependent on adult regulation of their social interaction to developing greater autonomy in peer group interactions.

The paper notes, “Different forms of play (object play, symbolic play, pretend role play) create different kinds of cultural environments for learning…. In societies where play is a valued cultural practice at the age, Poddiakov demonstrated how children carry out social experimentation with other persons in play and everyday life…. Vygotsky argued that distorting reality in play paradoxically reinforces learning applied to real life by changing children’s understanding of the relation between objects and meanings. Similarly, El’konin pointed out that through pretend role play, children assimilate the content of human moral norms and social relations.”

The paper references the work of Barbara Rogoff and her colleagues who have observed that “children from societies where schooling is either absent or very brief learn through a process of intent observation.”

Significantly, the authors of the study note, “There has been a historical, world-wide shift from local parenting traditions (ethnotheories) of child development and learning to a globalized/universal culture in raising children” and that the use of “deliberate instruction during the preschool years is one of the defining features of this universality. This approach to early learning is realized through deliberately designed instructional toys and games and the social networks often imposing ‘educational’ activities for families with young children much earlier before entering ECEC institutions.” They posit that, “Early childhood is no longer imaginable without digital/modern technologies embedded in the cultural contexts of today’s childhood through everyday practices transforming and reorganizing them”.

The authors of the paper posit that it is significant to develop early-childhood research “that considers the kinds of prior, home-based learning that each child comes to school with. It is a routine finding in research across many content domains that children learn more rapidly when asked to learn or solve problems based upon materials with which they are familiar or in ways that make ‘human sense’.

The paper ends with a warning note, “Misunderstanding the cultural character of early childhood learning has resulted in a situation where effective forms of learning and sense making that take place in a play context are eliminated from children’s life. The exaggerated emphasis on schooling and the targeted cultivation of narrow skills starting in early childhood through specific toys and games, including digital games, is also becoming a feature of today’s childhood culture. When learning is defined in terms of analytic understanding, children’s own subcultures and play forms are excluded.”