Article Link: http://exchangepress.com/article/play-and-cultural-differences/5012546/
Culture - a people's way of behaving, being in and understanding the world - is learned by each new generation through a process of enculturation. A culture's solutions and life strategies are acquired by children as they watch and listen - and reinvented as they imitate, talk, and play. Language, including both words and art forms, is central to the unity of a culture.In the first five years of life, children learn to talk their people's language and play their people's daily life scripts - homemaking and going places, talking to friends and buying and selling, making and fixing, singing and dancing, and storytelling and celebrating rituals. Children's imitative and playful grounding in their culture is the foundation for identity development and for trust in the world as a predictable and meaningful place.
For many children, this learning process is disrupted by racism and other biases that devalue their home culture, or by sustained discontinuous experiences that ignore it. A child in out-of-home care will be aware both of differences and of the unspoken values attached to these differences: Are my language, my hair and skin, my games - myself - welcome here? Am I expected to change in order to be ...