CHAMPAIGN, Ill. -- Adults think they understand what it's like to be a child in today's world, but they really don't, a University of Illinois education professor says.
Today's kids are being influenced and molded, for good or ill, by several "unplanned national experiments" in child-rearing, said Daniel Walsh, a professor of early childhood education. Most preschoolers are in some form of childcare, for instance, and many school-age kids are enrolled in programs and activities that put them under constant adult surveillance, unlike the experience of children in previous generations.
Yet little effort is made, and not enough research is done, to discover what those experiences are really like for children, what they mean to them, or how they might be affected by them, he said.
"My concern is that the world for children is not the way it seems," Walsh said. "Given the amount of [research] focused on children, it is surprising how little we know about their lives," he wrote in a new book, "Studying Children in Context" (Sage Publications), which he co-wrote with M. Elizabeth Graue, a professor of education at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
In their book, Graue and Walsh argue for more and better research on children "in context," meaning in their real-life environments. "One must go out and look and listen and soak and poke and then do it all again and again," Walsh wrote in the introduction.
Too much research on children has focused on the individual child in a controlled environment, rather than on groups of kids interacting in the places where they live and play and go to school, Walsh said. And too much research has focused on trying to quantify childhood behavior through numbers, thereby ignoring important realities that cannot be quantified.
Research on children has become broader in perspective in recent years, Walsh said, but he thinks it has not moved nearly far enough.
Using daycare as an example, Walsh noted that a lot of research has been done on what constitutes quality daycare -- in terms of facilities, staffing, and other factors. "But we know very little about the challenges children face when suddenly they have to deal with lots of other children, in what's often a relatively unsupported situation, for long periods of time from a very early age."
Pointing to a study cited in the book, Walsh described how a researcher spent time observing a small cluster of children in a daycare. On the surface, the children appeared to be like any other play group there, but she discovered they actually played very little together. She finally realized that they were castoffs not accepted by any of the other cliques already formed by the children.
One reason for their problem, Walsh said, was likely a lack of necessary social skills -- but social skills "that a generation ago a 3-year-old kid didn't have to have."
To Walsh, it's just one example of "challenges facing kids today that we're failing to recognize."