Abstract
Parents can strongly influence their children’s environmental experiences, as these examples illustrate. From the time infants become mobile, parents provide them with environments to explore, set the boundaries for exploration, structure the spatial layouts and objects provided in the home environment, encourage and discourage certain types of exploration and point out spatial locations and relationships. To the extent that they influence their children’s exploration and use of environments, parents probably also influence the development of their children’s cognitive mapping skills, that is, their skills for maintaining spatial orientation and solving spatial problems in large-scale environments.
[The] effective child-rearer makes the living area as safe as possible for the naive newly crawling or walking child and then provides maximum access to the living area for the child. This immediately sets the process of development off in a manner that will lead naturally to the satisfaction of and further development of the child’s curiousity; the opportunity to learn about the world at large. (White, Kaban, Shapiro, & Attonucci, 1976, pp. 150–151)
Davy’s father shares the route he chooses to take and consciously develops skills of observation in his son while they journey to his work places together. Both of his parents talk with their children continually wherever they drive; they impart curiousity about places....This is part of his father’s educational philosophy, one which can best be termed as an apprenticeship in practical education: Davy was being trained to be competent at hunting, finding objects and using them resourcefully and finding his way about. (Hart, 1981, p. 222)
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Hazen, N.L. (1989). Individual Differences in Environmental Exploration and Cognitive Mapping Skills. In: Lockman, J.J., Hazen, N.L. (eds) Action in Social Context. Perspectives in Developmental Psychology. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4757-9000-9_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4757-9000-9_7
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