Culture Structures the Environment for Development

Culture is usefully conceived for developmentalists as the organization of the developmental environment. This definition makes available to scientific scrutiny the processes by which culture affects the course of development, that is, how it generates the relationships and meanings of variables that are more familiar, individually, to traditional developmental scientists. One framework for parsing the environment is the 'developmental niche', which identifies three operational subsystems – the physical and social settings, the historically constituted customs and practices of child care and child rearing, and the psychology of the caretakers, particularly parental ethnotheories which play a directive role and are, by definition, shared with the community. Three organizational aspects of the niche create particularly important developmental outcomes: contemporary redundancy, which is the mutually reinforcing repetition of similar influences from several parts of the environment during the same period of development; thematic elaboration, which is the repetition and cultivation over time of core symbols and systems of meaning; and chaining, in which no single element of the environment is sufficient in kind to produce a particular outcome, but the linking of disparate elements creates a qualitatively new phenomenon. In addition, there is a more complex set of second-order effects; sex and temperament, for example, are characteristics whose meaning and consequence are organized by features of the environment. Finally, it is argued that theoretical recognition of variable relationships between development and the environment represents our discipline's growth toward abstract thinking.