The Culture of Child Care

Attachment, Peers, and Quality in Diverse Communities

Edited by Kay E. Sanders and Alison Wishard Guerra

Child Development in Cultural Context

Presents an innovative theory that integrates cultural practices of children, families, and teachers with definitions of child care quality and children's experiences in child care
Discusses a new approach to thinking about quality in early education, especially for ethnic minority and low-income communities
Crosses disciplinary boundaries by linking psychological and educational theories to the question of improving children's development and experiences within child care for children who are dual-language learners, African American, Asian, or Latino
Evaluates whether the definitions of quality held by the traditional early childhood canon including models of adult-child and peer relationships in the child care context are accurate and relevant given the increasingly ethnically diverse population in the United States

The Culture of Child Care

Attachment, Peers, and Quality in Diverse Communities

Edited by Kay E. Sanders and Alison Wishard Guerra

Child Development in Cultural Context

Description

As societies are experiencing increasing levels of immigration from contexts outside of the Western, industrialized world, child care programs are experiencing, simultaneously, increasing diversity in enrollment. A question that has been raised by early childhood advocates and practitioners is whether the former articulations regarding definitions of quality, models of relationships, and peer relations in the child care context are accurate and relevant within the increasing racial, linguistic, and ethnic diversity of the United States.

The Culture of Child Care provides a much-needed integration of research pertaining to crucial aspects of early childhood development— attachment in non-familial contexts, peer relations among ethnically and linguistically diverse children, and the developmental importance of child care contexts during early childhood. This volume highlights the interconnections between these three distinct bodies of research and crosses disciplinary boundaries by linking psychological and educational theories to the improvement of young children's development and experiences within child care. The importance of cultural diversity in early childhood is widely acknowledged and discussed, but up until now, there has been little substantive work with a cultural focus on today's educational and early child care settings. This innovative volume will be a unique resource for a wide range of early childhood professionals including basic and applied developmental researchers, early childhood educators and advocates, and policymakers.

The Culture of Child Care

Attachment, Peers, and Quality in Diverse Communities

Edited by Kay E. Sanders and Alison Wishard Guerra

Child Development in Cultural Context

Preface
Acknowledgments
About the Editors
Contributors
Part I: Laying the Groundwork: Connecting Social-Cultural Context, Teacher-Child Attachment, and Peer Relations in Child Care
Chapter 1: Children and child care: A theory of relationships within cultural communities
Carollee Howes
Part II. Quality and Context in an Ethnically Diverse Society
Chapter 2: Understanding child care quality and implications for dual language learners
Sadie L. Hasbrouck and Robert Pianta
Chapter 3: "But Mommy doesn't do it like that": Considering cultural congruency between home and child care in the development of African American children
Kay E. Sanders
Chapter 4: Where the children are: Exploring quality, community, and support for family, friend and neighbor child care
Eva Shivers and Flora Farago
Part III. Relationships in Child Care: Beyond Risk and into Resilience
Chapter 5: The fourth 'R': Relationships, shifting from risk to resilience
Jennifer A. Vu
Chapter 6: Relationships and social trust in early childhood programs: The importance of context and mixed methods
Tom Weisner
Part IV. Peer Interaction as a Cultural Practice in Early Childhood
Chapter 7: Young children's peer relations with cross-ethnic peers: Implications, limitations, and future directions
Linda Lee
Chapter 8: Playing pretend and ready to learn: Peer play as a scaffold for development among low-income Latino children
Alison Wishard Guerra
Chapter 9: The first peers: Sibling play interactions across African American, Latino and Asian childhoods
Nora Obregon
Chapter 10: Preschool peer play interactions, a developmental context for learning for ALL children: Rethinking issues of equity and opportunity
Rebecca J. Bulotsky Shearer, Christine M. McWayne, Julia L. Mendez, and Patricia H. Manz
Part V: Methodological Implications for Applied Research on Child Care as a Context for Early Childhood Development
Chapter 11: Large-scale evaluations of child care as a context for development: Implications for research and practice
Margaret Burchinal
Chapter 12: Observation and interview methodology in ethnically diverse contexts: Methods and measurement of the contexts of early childhood development
Allison Sidle Fuligni
Part VI: Conclusion and Commentary
Chapter 13: Putting the horse before the cart: Why diversity must be at the forefront of early education policy, and not remain a tagline on the back of the policy wagon
Karen Hill Scott
Chapter 14: Concluding commentary: The long & winding road towards a culture of excellence in early care and education
Kay E. Sanders and Alison Wishard Guerra
Index

The Culture of Child Care

Attachment, Peers, and Quality in Diverse Communities

Edited by Kay E. Sanders and Alison Wishard Guerra

Child Development in Cultural Context

Author Information

Edited by Kay E. Sanders, Associate Professor of Education and Child Development, Whittier College, and Edited by Alison Wishard Guerra, Associate Professor, Education Studies, University of California, San Diego

Kay Sanders, PhD, is an Associate Professor of Child Development at Whittier College. Dr. Sanders' research examines cultural and racial socialization practices in community-based child care programs. In particular, she examines how racial/ethnic socialization in child care programs contributes to child care quality, relationships, and children's social and emotional school readiness skills.

Alison Wishard Guerra, PhD, is an Associate Professor in the Department of Education Studies at the University of California, San Diego. Dr. Wishard Guerra's research examines culture and development in early childhood, with particular focus on Latino children from low-income families. She examines the intersection of language and social development through an investigation of narrative interactions, social pretend play, attachment relationships as they relate to the development of critical school readiness skills among children growing up in poverty and in diverse communities.

Contributors:

Rebecca Bulotsky-Shearer Ph.D.
Associate Professor
Department of Psychology, Child Division
University of Miami

Margaret Burchinal Ph.D.
Frank Porter Graham Child Development Institute
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

Flora Farago
Doctoral Candidate
Family and Human Development
Arizona State University

Alison Guerra Wishard Ph.D.
Associate Professor
Education Studies
University of California, San Diego

Sadie Hasbrouck M.Ed.
Doctoral Student
Clinical and School Psychology
Curry School of Education
University of Virginia

Karen Hill Scott Ed.D.
Co-founder and Chair Emeritus
Crystal Stairs, Inc., Los Angeles, CA

Carollee Howes Ph.D.
Research Professor
Graduate School of Education & Information Science
Human Development & Psychology
University of California, Los Angeles

Patricia Manz Ph.D.
Associate Professor
Lehigh University

Christine McWayne, Ph.D.
Associate Professor
Tufts University

Nora Obregon Ph.D.
Assistant Professor of Child Development
Education & Child Development Department
Whittier College

Bob Pianta Ph.D.
Dean
Curry School of Education
University of Virginia

Kay Sanders, Ph.D.
Associate Professor of Child Development
Education & Child Development Department
Whittier College

Linda Shihui Lee Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
Department of Psychology & Education
Cal Poly State University

Eva Marie Shivers J.D.; Ph.D.
Institute for Child Development Research & Social Change
Indigo Cultural Center, Inc., Phoenix, AZ

Allison Sidle Fuligni Ph.D.
Associate Professor
Department of Child & Family Studies
California State University, Los Angeles

Julia Smith, Ph.D.
Associate Professor
University of North Carolina, Greensboro

Jennifer Vu Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
Human Development & Family Studies
University of Delaware

Tom Weisner Ph.D.
Professor of Antrhopology
Departments of Psychiatry (NPI Semel Institute, Center for Culture and Health) and Antrhopology
University of California, Los Angeles