Childhood in Turkey: social class and gender differences in schooling, labor and play

Abstract

The sociocultural approaches to the study of child development have aptly illustrated that dominant Western theories do not take into account variations in childhood and thus lead to ethnocentric characterizations of children of the non-Western world. This is due to the fact that patterns proposed for Western children’s development are seen as universal standards, and deviations from such patterns are interpreted as deficits or idiosyncrasies of the children of comparison in question. Examples of this stance can be seen easily in many different lines of research. For instance, previous cross-cultural research on children’s pretend play interpreted some non-Western children’s relative lack of involvement in this activity as an indication of children’s deficit rather than a result of the conditions of context within which children grow up.