The Developmental Niche: A Conceptualization at the Interface of Child and Culture

Anthropological approaches to human development have been oriented primarily to the socialized adult, at the expense of understanding developmental processes. Developmental psychology, in contrast, has traditionally been concerned with a decontextualized, 'universal' child. After a brief historical review, the 'developmental niche' is introduced as a framework for examining the cultural structuring of child development. The developmental niche has three components: the physical and social settings in which the child lives; the customs of child care and child rearing; and the psychology of the caretakers. Homeostatic mechanisms tend to keep the three subsystems in harmony with each other and appropriate to the developmental level and individual characteristics of the child. Nevertheless, they have different relationships to other features of the larger environment and thus constitute somewhat independent routes of disequilibrium and change. Regularities within and among the subsystems, and thematic continuities and progressions across the niches of childhood provide material from which the child abstracts the social, affective, and cognitive rules of the culture. Examples are provided from research in a farming community in Kenya.