Abstract
Using the concept of “cultural models,” this chapter presents a framework for researching daily life in family child care. Photo-stimulated interviews were used to identify cultural models or cognitive schema for how to care for children. These cultural models both guided everyday practice and were the standards against which providers evaluated everyday life. Providers varied in how much they valued, enacted, and assessed/documented (1) ensuring that children experience love, fun, and affection as important in and of itself, (2) school readiness, or (3) both. Whereas the first cultural model – love, fun, and togetherness – may afford babies and toddlers more opportunities to construct the close relationships essential for early development, the second, school readiness, model may activate more technical aspects of professionals’ work at the expense of close relationships. Similarly, the first model frames babies as being, whereas the second emphasizes babies as becoming. Thus, the process of producing and reproducing these cultural models through daily practices may afford babies and toddlers different opportunities for learning and development. Because these are only two of many possible cultural models relevant to child care, this approach may be important for better understanding the contexts of babies and toddlers.
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Acknowledgment
The research in this chapter would not have been possible without the family child care providers who shared their homes and their stories with us or the research lab participants from California State University Northridge, including Ivanna Ayala, Lidia Corral, Emerson Stidham, Jeannette Torres, and many others who gave their time to conduct, transcribe, and code these interviews.
Portions of this research were presented at the biennial meeting of the Society for Research in Child Development and the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association.
This research was supported by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Research Infrastructure in Minority Institutions (RIMI) from the National Institute of Minority Health and Health Disparities, P20 MD003938, and the Child Care Research Partnership Grant Program, Grant Number 90YE0153, from the Office of Planning, Research and Evaluation, Administration for Children and Families, and US Department of Health and Human Services. Its contents are solely the responsibility of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official views of the NIH; the Office of Planning, Research and Evaluation; the Administration for Children and Families; or the US Department of Health and Human Services.
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Tonyan, H., Paredes, E. (2017). Family Child/Day Care Homes as a Cultural Context or World for Babies and Toddlers. In: Li, L., Quiñones, G., Ridgway, A. (eds) Studying Babies and Toddlers. International Perspectives on Early Childhood Education and Development, vol 20. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-3197-7_7
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