PEDIATRICS Vol. 91 No. 5 May 1993, pp. 1056-1062
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Culture, Ethnicity, and Bicultural Competence: Implications for Children With Chronic Illness and Disability

Geraldine Kearse Brookins PhD1

1 From the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis

The examination of culture and child and human development is not a new venture. There has been a fascination with how culture shapes human behavior over decades.1-4 Generally, whenever the terms "culture" and "child development" were invoked, they referred to work that was conducted in faraway places and compared to middle-class European-American children and families as the standard or norm.

For so long, studies of development focused on the generic human child—white and middle class. LeVine5 noted that many psychologists seemed to have a deep-seated metaphysical conviction that humans everywhere, all those that counted, at least, were the same in all respects. Cultural variations were merely external details not unlike malnutrition. Importantly, to the discipline's credit, views of child development have changed from the examination of development via a perspective that implied that the human organism existed in a vacuum without context, to the recognition that our understanding of the complexity of individual development is greatly enhanced by focusing on the child in context. Among developmental psychologists, there is a general consensus that a broad spectrum of maturational factors undergirds human development. Even so, human behavior manifests itself in differentiated arrays across cultural settings.

Rogoff6 suggests that variability is intrinsic to the developmental process and this variability is structured by those events and conditions within the ecological environs that serve to promote and constrain human endeavor. She notes that ". . . the inherent variations in development that occur with different groups and circumstances are ordered in their own terms, with progress toward developmental goals across the course of life."6(p30)




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