This study was the first of its kind in China to examine early childhood education experts' perspectives on the urgent educational needs of preschool-aged children. Twenty-one nationally and regionally recognized experts, including university professors, practitioners and government officials, participated in interviews. They offered critical evaluations of early educational needs, pointing out the difficulties in socializing young children in the context of dramatic socioeconomic changes, the country's single-child policy, labor migration in urbanization, and other societal forces. This study adopted a conceptual framework from cultural anthropology to present and interpret the experts' perspectives in terms of the survival, economic and cultural goals of socialization. The experts' perspectives suggest that early Chinese socialization should emphasize health, the acquisition of healthy habits, the development of well-socialized personalities, skills for future economic success, and the preservation of cultural beliefs and values, especially Chinese cultural emotions. These experts' explanations constitute a call for adaptive early Chinese socialization and parenting, and offer a widely shared Chinese response to complex societal transformation in globalization.
Background Young children's risk-taking behaviors are likely to lead to unintentional injury (Zeedyk and Wallace 2003). As they reach preschool age, children become more independent and receive less direct parental supervision than before (Boles et al. 2005; Morrongiello et al. 2016). Numerous injuries have been reported when preschoolers were left unsupervised while engaging in injury-causing risky behaviors (Morrongiello and Lasenby 2007). The decreased parental supervision requires an increased agency of young children to understand risk-taking behaviors, which in turn influence their decisions for or against taking risks (Cui and Xu 2007; Morrongiello et al. 2010, 2016). Identifying what may contribute to young children's risk-taking behaviors can help prevent their physical injuries (Lasenby-Lessard et al. 2013). The current study focuses on two related but distinct aspects of children's understandings of risks: their evaluation of risk-taking and their general safety knowledge. Evaluation is based on children's perceptions as presented in the Health Belief Model (Janz and Becker 1984): the perception of injury vulnerability (e.g., children perceive themselves as vulnerable and likely to get hurt in a given situation) and the perception of potential
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