Anthropological approaches to human development have been oriented primarily to the socialized adult, at the expense of understanding developmental processes. Developmental psychology, in contrast, has traditionally been concerned with a decontextualized, 'universal' child. After a brief historical review, the 'developmental niche' is introduced as a framework for examining the cultural structuring of child development. The developmental niche has three components: the physical and social settings in which the child lives; the customs of child care and child rearing; and the psychology of the caretakers. Homeostatic mechanisms tend to keep the three subsystems in harmony with each other and appropriate to the developmental level and individual characteristics of the child. Nevertheless, they have different relationships to other features of the larger environment and thus constitute somewhat independent routes of disequilibrium and change. Regularities within and among the subsystems, and thematic continuities and progressions across the niches of childhood provide material from which the child abstracts the social, affective, and cognitive rules of the culture. Examples are provided from research in a farming community in Kenya.

Culture is usefully conceived for developmentalists as the organization of the developmental environment. This definition makes available to scientific scrutiny the processes by which culture affects the course of development, that is, how it generates the relationships and meanings of variables that are more familiar, individually, to traditional developmental scientists. One framework for parsing the environment is the ''developmental niche'', which identifies three operational subsystems – the physical and social settings, the historically constituted customs and practices of child care and child rearing, and the psychology of the caretakers, particularly parental ethnotheories which play a directive role and are, by definition, shared with the community. Three organizational aspects of the niche create particularly important developmental outcomes: contemporary redundancy, which is the mutually reinforcing repetition of similar influences from several parts of the environment during the same period of development; thematic elaboration, which is the repetition and cultivation over time of core symbols and systems of meaning; and chaining, in which no single element of the environment is sufficient in kind to produce a particular outcome, but the linking of disparate elements creates a qualitatively new phenomenon. In addition, there is a more complex set of second-order effects; sex and temperament, for example, are characteristics whose meaning and consequence are organized by features of the environment. Finally, it is argued that theoretical recognition of variable relationships between development and the environment represents our discipline''s growth toward abstract thinking.

Asian and Euro-American parents of preschool-aged children were interviewed concerning their beliefs about the nature and purpose of play; they also completed two questionnaires and a diary of their children's daily activities. The children's teachers were interviewed and provided information about the behaviour of the children in preschool. The Euro-American parents were found to believe that play is an important vehicle for early development, while the Asian parents saw little developmental value in it. On the other hand, the Asian parents believed more strongly than the Euro-Americans in the importance of an early start in academic training for their children. These contrasting beliefs were instantiated in parental practices at home regarding the use of time and the provision of toys. At preschool, the Asian children were similar to the Euro-Americans on a standardised behavioural measure but they were described by their teachers as initially more academically advanced than the Euro-American children, and as showing different patterns of play and social interaction. The implications of these results for home-school relations and the design of early education programmes are discussed.

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