Children’s Initiative and Blending Agendas in the Home: Cultural Variation Across Two Mexican Communities

• In Event: Roundtable Session 59
  In Roundtable Session: Increased Schooling and Changes in Child, Family, and Community Life

Abstract

Objectives and Framework
This study examined cultural variation in Mexican mothers’ and children’s orientations to child participation in and responsibility for household work: as flexibly shared among family members with children’s initiative or contractually divided into personal tasks.

In many Indigenous communities of the Americas children’s initiative is central to their learning and development; children may be motivated by a desire to collaborate and reciprocate the contributions of others, along with a shared commitment to the work at hand (Alcalá et al., 2011; Coppens et al., 2011; Paradise, 2005; Paradise & Rogoff, 2009; Rogoff et al., 2007). By contrast, in highly schooled middle-class communities ideas about “fairness” may delimit children’s household work contributions, as exceptions require special circumstances and extrinsic rewards (Goodnow, 1988; Klein et al., 2009). Responsibility may be understood in terms of assignments, task ownership, and individually focused contracts (Goodnow & Delaney, 1989; White & Brinkerhoff, 1981).

Methods and Data
We interviewed 44 parents (usually mothers) and their 9- to 10-year-old children from two communities in Guadalajara, México differing in experience with Western schooling and Indigenous practices of the region (Najafi et al., 2007). Parents and children were interviewed separately by local, native Spanish speakers about the range, complexity, and voluntariness of their child’s contributions to various forms of family work, and their opinions regarding children’s involvement. Our main focus in this study is a subset of questions regarding whether it would be fair to ask a child to do various household work tasks.

Results and Significance
Preliminary results are based on 10 parent-child pairs in each community. In the Indigenous-heritage community, 100% of children and 60% of parents described children’s work contributions in terms of flexibly shared reciprocal responsibilities where children regularly contribute with initiative. For example, one mother in this community reported: “[my children] contribute by themselves, without anyone having to ask them.” This mother and several others (including some children) contested that “fairness” was inappropriate for justifying family members’ responsibilities.

Inversely, 50% of children and 70% of parents in the Cosmopolitan community justified fair work in terms of individually focused contractual arrangements – tasks are often assigned to children, and family members are specifically responsible for their own things and spaces. No mothers and just one child described fair work in terms of children’s initiative or flexibly shared reciprocal responsibilities. One mother in this community suggested a family member doing another’s work could be fair “if it had to do with a [previous] equitable distribution of work… is part of that person’s own tasks.” Findings in this community resembled a common pattern in middle-class European-heritage communities with similar levels of schooling.

Our findings indicate distinct cultural patterns in how children’s and parents’ understandings about responsibility relate to the ways that children are involved in household work. These patterns appear to vary or perhaps change with extensive experience in Western schools, and in the Indigenous-heritage community appear related to dynamic, long-standing traditions of children’s learning and development.

Authors

• Andrew Dee Coppens, University of California - Santa Cruz

• Lucia Alcala, University of California - Santa Cruz

• Barbara Rogoff, University of California - Santa Cruz