ch2.txt

Talia and Jim’s fear of helping 7-year-old Anselmo with his homework, lest they create a dependent, immature child, is a peculiarly Western—and profoundly American—preoccupation. American middle-class parents typically regard young children as dependent beings who must be urged toward independence. In response to researchers’ queries, they frequently say that babies should be trained to be self-reliant from the first few months.1 Consequently, they place a high value on children’s learning and doing on their own. Repeatedly relying on others for assistance is construed as weakness, uncertainty, and lack of capacity. In keeping with this view, many American parents worry that if their children seek help, they may become dependent. 
A similar view permeates traditional classrooms, where an individualistic value system prevails. Children must “do their own work.” In the most intensely individualistic of these settings, conferring with your neighbor is worse than dependency; it is cheating, and teachers go so far as to set up barriers between pupils, such as upright books and cardboard screens, to prevent it.
This emphasis on independent accomplishment is not broadly accepted around the world. Indeed, adults in some non-Western cultures regard American parents as rather merciless in pushing their young children toward independence—for example, when they insist that infants sleep alone rather than with their parents, or when they take pleasure in the earliest possible mastery of motor skills, such as crawling and walking, long before the child has acquired the reasoning powers to avoid steep staircases and busy roadways.2
Diverse non-Western peoples and American ethnic minorities stress interdependence—that children must feel intimately linked to others to become competent and self-reliant. Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, Guatemalan-Mayan, eastern Kentucky Appalachian, and many other cultural groups regard newborn infants as psychologically separate beings whose most important task is to develop an interdependent relationship with their community—an emotional and social foundation that is crucial for survival and learning.3 Witness the following conclusion by a researcher who compared American with Japanese infant rearing practices: “An American mother–infant relationship consists of two individuals . . . a Japanese mother–infant relationship consists of only one individual, i.e., mother and infant are not divided.”4 These contrasting parenting perspectives reflect underlying family and community values. Japanese parents and other ethnic minorities adhere to a collectivist worldview, in which people define themselves in terms of their relationships with others.
Collectivist values also alter the way teachers and children think about classroom learning. Were you to visit a school on an Israeli kibbutz (cooperative agricultural settlement), you would find an explicit emphasis on cooperation and avoidance of pupil comparisons, and a far more positive attitude toward children who seek help than is common in American schools. When asked why children look at each others’ work, kibbutz pupils mention the importance of connecting with others to acquire new skills. They explain, “If your picture looks crooked, you would want to see your friend’s paper to learn how to make it straight,” or “If you aren’t sure what you’re supposed to do, then you should check.” To the same question, American and Israeli urban children typically respond, “I would want to see whose picture was the best,” or “I might be wondering whether she got more right than I did.”5 


from interdependency to autonomy

Vygotsky, who studied and wrote about children’s development in Russia in the early twentieth century, was deeply interested in how interdependency—children’s close ties to their community—can pave the way to competence and autonomy. His sociocultural theory has thoroughly collectivist cultural roots. Vygotsky stressed that children need social interaction and meaningful activities to develop, and he regarded high intrinsic motivation and mature, independent functioning as arising from the support granted by cultural experts as children attempt ever more challenging tasks. The child’s mind, Vygotsky pointed out, “extends beyond the skin” and is inseparably joined with other minds. Out of this interconnection springs mastery, proficiency, and self-confidence.6
Nevertheless, a deeply ingrained American belief is that satisfying a young child’s desire for social contact and assistance will be habit forming, leading to a clingy, spoiled youngster. Much evidence verifies that this is not ordinarily so.
Consider the early attachment bond that builds between caregiver and baby during the first year of life. By age 6 to 8 months, infants single out their parents and other stable, loving caregivers for expressions of joy and turn to them for comfort when anxious and afraid. An overwhelming consensus of research shows that sensitive caregiving—responding to the baby’s cries for physical care and stimulation promptly, consistently, and appropriately—supports the development of a secure attachment relationship.7 Securely attached infants actively seek contact with and are easily consoled by their familiar, responsive caregiver. Yet such infants are not destined to become immaturely dependent! Rather, by the end of the first year, their exploration of the physical world is confident, persistent, and complex. And they are less likely to cry and more likely to use gestures and words to express their desires than are infants whose parents delayed or failed to respond to their calls for help.8 
Sensitive care builds an interdependent relationship between parent and baby—one in which physical and emotional closeness becomes the context for encouraging more mature behavior. Attachment serves as the springboard for a great many capacities that make their first appearance in the second year—self-confidence, compliance and cooperation; awareness of others’ needs and desires, and empathy and sympathy (emotions that enable us to feel for and help others in need).9 But the parent who fails to respond promptly and predictably, intervening only after the baby has become extremely agitated, teaches the infant to rise rapidly to intense distress. The baby has learned that only when he is distraught will the parent reliably come to his aid. As a result, he is more dicult to soothe, to encourage to communicate in ways other than crying, and to guide in acquiring other vital competencies.10
An analogous circumstance exists at older ages, as Anselmo’s interactions with his parents reveal. Jim’s refusal to help Anselmo with his homework, in hopes of instilling independence, is counterproductive. Anselmo’s crying and pleading accelerate, to the point that anxiety prevents him from focusing on the task. Denying Anselmo assistance yields precisely what it was intended to prevent—a dependent, doubting child. As Anselmo’s parents refrain from helping, they fuel his anger and demandingness, and ultimately his sense of helplessness. When Talia finally responds, she does so out of desperation—to stop Anselmo’s agitated appeals, which are about to escalate beyond control. Consequently, Talia assists inappropriately, by doing the task for him.
Anselmo’s resulting disorganized behavior and dependency prompt additional parental vacillation—sometimes refusals to help, at other times maladaptive helping—along with exasperation and criticism. Talia and Jim can be heard saying impatiently, “You aren’t any good at this!” “Can’t you do anything?”11 Soon a barrier forms between Anselmo and the task he had previously wanted to master, and his motivation wanes.
In classrooms, the same sequence of events prevails. Teachers’ communication plays a vital role in children’s eort and learning. Consider a recent study, in which 1,600 elementary- and middle-school pupils were followed over a 3-year period. Those who viewed their teachers as warm and as providing helpful learning conditions—by making expectations clear and checking that the child understood—worked harder on assignments and participated more in class. Eort and participation, in turn, predicted better academic performance, which sustained the child’s willingness to try hard in the future. In contrast, children who regarded their teachers as unsupportive were more likely to disengage, stop trying, and show declines in achievement. These negative outcomes led children to doubt their own ability, which perpetuated their reduced eort.12
How can adults build interdependent relationships with children that foster the development of culturally meaningful skills and mature, autonomous behavior? To answer this question, Vygotsky proposed a special concept: the zone of proximal development. Keeping it in mind can help parents and teachers interact with children in ways that lead their development forward. 


the zone of proximal development

Take a few moments to list five or six competencies of a child you know well. If you are a parent, do so for your own child; if you are a teacher, choose a child in your class. Perhaps your list looks much like this one, recorded by Jessica, mother of 3-year-old Tyrone: 

Just learned to cut paper with scissors.
Counts to four.
Looks at picture books and names many pictures.
Remembered two of the animals we saw at the zoo last Sunday. 
Puts together puzzles with eight pieces.
Can sort shapes into categories.
Now indicate whether the skills on your list are ones that the child can do by himself, or whether they are ones that the child displays only when assisted by another person. Jessica, like most parents and teachers completing this exercise, limited her list to Tyrone’s already acquired abilities—ones he can do alone. 
Vygotsky pointed out that we are used to thinking of the child’s capacities in static or “fossilized” terms—as finished achievements. In doing so, we look toward the past. What we should do, he advised, is to move beyond what children can do by themselves to what they can do with expert assistance and, therefore, have the potential to learn. In this way, we focus on the future—on the cognitive processes of today or tomorrow rather than those of yesterday, which are already mastered.13 
Vygotsky defined the zone of proximal development as the distance between the child’s actual development (the tasks the child can do individually) and the child’s potential development, “determined through problem solving under adult guidance or in collaboration with more capable peers.”14 The “zone,” as I’ll call it from now on, is the dynamic region in which new capacities form as children tackle culturally meaningful tasks with a mentor’s assistance. Had Jessica been thinking about Tyrone’s “zone,” she might have framed the items on her list this way: 

Just learned to cut paper with scissors. If I hold the paper while he cuts and prompt him, he can cut along straight or curved lines. He cut out a square and a circle with help today. I asked him which animals we saw at the zoo, and he mentioned girae and zebra. When I reminded him of the bird and pachyderm houses, he remembered a lot more: the flamingos, parrots, swans, elephants, hippos, and rhinos.

For Vygotsky, a crucial aspect of parenting and the central aim of education is to provide children with experiences in their “zone”—activities that challenge them but that can be accomplished with sensitive adult guidance. Consequently, parents and teachers carry much responsibility for ensuring that children’s learning is maximized—for actively leading them along the developmental pathway. Rather than transmitting ready-made knowledge to a passive child or giving a child tasks for which he or she already has the requisite skills, the adult’s role is to engage in dialogue with the child—by observing, conversing, questioning, assisting, and encouraging. During that dialogue, the adult continually assesses the child’s progress and creates the “zone” by keeping the task “proximal”—slightly above the child’s level of independent functioning. In this way, the adult “rouses to life” those cognitive processes that are just emerging in the child,15 sustaining them socially so they can be refined and internalized as part of the child’s psychological world.


creating the “zone”

What features of adult–child shared activity forge the “zone”? Research documents several communicative ingredients that consistently foster development, in children of diverse ages and across a wide range of tasks.

Shared Understanding

For information, ideas, and skills to move from the social-interactive plane to the internal-thinking plane, the adult and child must strive for a common approach to the situation. They must desire genuine communication and work toward attaining it. 
In sociocultural theory, this joint, mutual focus is called intersubjectivity, or shared understanding.16 As the word suggests, each participant in the dialogue strives to grasp the subjective perspective of the other, an eort that results in a “meeting of minds,” in which the partners’ thoughts make contact, connect, and coincide. Intersubjectivity reaches its pinnacle in a love aair, where shared understanding is readily achieved through a glance, a touch, or a comment. Lovers in close psychological contact grasp one another’s meanings quickly because each is on the lookout for and tries to satisfy the other’s needs.17 The opposite of intersubjectivity is total misunderstanding. In a failed love aair, widely divergent views of the same experiences cause people to say, “You don’t understand me. You’ve become a stranger. We can’t find common ground. We’ve grown apart.”
The image of lovers communicating helps us appreciate the circumstances in which intersubjectivity is most likely to occur: in close relationships. Children most often attain it with parents, other family members, teachers, and eventually in friendships with peers. Of course, partners in teaching and learning do not need to attain the intersubjective heights of lovers to accomplish their goals. But a certain degree of intersubjectivity is necessary for any dialogue to be successful, and the love aair analogy reminds us that joint understanding, whether established in face-to-face interaction or as individuals work on a common task, combines both verbal and nonverbal cues. Sensitive emotional messages conveyed through gestures, facial expressions, and tone of voice are basic to it.18 
Intersubjectivity is itself a developmental process. Since infants and young children are still acquiring communication skills, the younger the child, the greater the adult’s responsibility for making mental contact and sustaining the interaction. Nevertheless, children of all ages actively join in, striving for a shared view of the world. Their participation results in gains in thought, language, and social skills. Gradually, the child takes increasing responsibility for attaining intersubjectivity, until both parties make similar contributions to the shared mental state that fuels children’s learning in the “zone.”19 Let’s see how, with adult support, the child’s intersubjective competence increases. 

infancy and toddlerhood.  Some researchers believe that the infant’s capacity to share meaning with others is innate. Others think it is learned—that parents respond to infants’ facial expressions, vocalizations, cries, and body movements as if they have meaning, and out of those responses infants pick up the meanings and expressive rhythms of human signals.20 But all experts agree that subtle, sensitive, and mutually rewarding exchanges between parent and baby serve as the earliest context for intersubjectivity. 
From the start, infants are equipped with capacities that draw adults into social exchanges with them. Newborn babies, for example, can make eye contact, and they prefer to look at people and to listen to human voices—especially their mother’s familiar voice, to which they became accustomed during the months before birth.21 Newborns also have a rudimentary ability to imitate facial expressions, opening their mouths or pursing their lips after an adult does so.22 Their responsiveness encourages parents to look at, talk to, and imitate in return. Between 4 and 6 weeks of age, babies begin to smile at people, an irresistible signal that evokes smiles, cuddles, pats, and friendly, gentle verbalizations from their social world.23 As cooing and babbling appear in the first half-year, adults again respond in kind, vocalizing and waiting for the baby to vocalize back.
By age 3 months, a complex communication system is in place in which parent and baby each respond in an appropriate and carefully timed fashion to the other’s cues. As a result, babies experience and practice the give-and-take of human conversation. Disrupt this exchange of signals, and young babies’ striving for connection with others becomes crystal clear. In several studies, researchers had the parent assume either a still-faced, unreactive pose or a depressed emotional state. Infants tried all manner of signals—facial expressions, vocalizations, and body movements—to get their mother or father to respond again. When these eorts failed, they reacted to the parent’s sad, vacant gaze by turning away, frowning, and crying.24 American, Canadian, and Chinese 3- to 6-month-olds respond to a parent’s still face identically, suggesting a common, built-in protest response to caregivers’ lack of engagement.25
When parents are attentive, patient, and interested in the baby’s activities, their social signals sustain the infant’s attention, essential for a shared focus. Around 4 months, infants begin to gaze in the same direction adults are looking, although their initial eorts are imperfect. Parents follow the baby’s line of vision as well, often commenting on what the infant sees. This joint attention to objects and events fosters early language development. Mothers who maintain high levels of it during play have infants who comprehend more language, produce meaningful gestures and words earlier, and show faster vocabulary development between 1 and 2 years of age.26
Between 9 and 15 months, the capacity for intersubjectivity takes a giant leap forward. Toddlers use gestures to share their experiences with others. They touch an object, hold it up, or point to it while looking at another person to make sure he or she notices. Or they try to get another person to do something—to hand them an object or help them perform a task—by reaching, pointing, and making sounds at the same time.27 
Look closely at these behaviors, and notice how toddlers intentionally try to establish common ground with another person by combining their interest in objects and events with communication.28 When adults respond to their reaching and pointing gestures and also label them (“That’s a kitty, isn’t it?” “Oh, you want a cracker!”), toddlers learn that using language can quickly lead to a joint focus and desired results—the pleasurable object or experience the child wanted.29 Soon the child utters words along with gestures, the gestures recede, and language is under way.

early childhood.  Spoken language brings vastly expanded potential for attaining intersubjectivity because it allows much greater clarification of purpose between participants in a dialogue. When a toddler points and reaches but cannot say what he means, the adult may need to search for the child’s meaning, as this exchange between a mother and her 14-month-old son, Jordan, illustrates: 

Jordan: (Points to one of the objects on the counter)
Mother: “Do you want this?” (Holds up milk container) 
Jordan: (Shakes his head “no”; continues to point; two more tries) 
Mother: “This?” (Picks up sponge) 
Jordan: (Leans back in highchair, puts arms down, tension leaves body)
Mother: (Hands Jordan sponge)30
As language competence increases, shared meaning is established quickly, as when the child says, “Get the sponge, Mom. I need to wipe this up!” Then a joint focus becomes the springboard for achieving greater understanding, with children playing a strong, contributing role. This is evident in the impressive conversational skills of even young preschoolers. By 2 to 3 years, children take turns, make eye contact, and respond in a timely and relevant fashion to their partner’s remarks.31
These capacities improve with conversational experience. Children become better at taking the perspective of their partner, especially a partner who adjusts his or her communication to the child’s level and observes the child closely to assess his or her comprehension. By stretching up to grasp the adult’s viewpoint, children acquire new knowledge, the basis for further growth. And with age, children exert greater eort to understand another person, a capacity first cultivated in adult–child interaction and then extended to peers. For example, in the following conversation, notice how 4-year-old Sammy assists his friend, Leah, in attaining intersubjectivity:

(Leah tells the teacher that she caught a fish while on vacation, when Sammy enters the conversation.)
Teacher: Did you have to scale the fish as well?
Leah: No, we eated them. (The child misunderstands the meaning of the word “scale.”)
Sammy: You need to peel them . . . peel them. (Sammy tries to clarify.)
Teacher: (Confirming Sammy’s meaning) You need to take the scales o, don’t you?
Sammy: You can’t do it with your hands; you need a peeler.
Teacher: Or a knife . . . a really sharp fishing knife.
Leah: They peeled the fishes with a fork. (Leah now shares meaning with the teacher and Sammy.)32

Between 3 and 5 years of age, preschoolers increasingly strive for intersubjectivity in dialogues with peers. They more often arm playmates’ messages, add new information to playmates’ ideas, and make contributions to ongoing play to sustain it further.33 They can also be heard making such statements as, “I think [this way]. What do you think?”—clear evidence of a willingness to share viewpoints, which assists preschoolers greatly when conflicts arise that must be resolved for play to continue.34 
As the excerpts we have considered illustrate, participants in a dialogue may not attain intersubjectivity on a first try, and interaction between most people, whether adults or children, is not perfectly “in sync.”35 But by the preschool years, children can take a more active role in helping a partner reach a state of shared thinking and in correcting “misses” when they do occur.36
The communicative competence inherent in intersubjectivity blossoms within a zone of proximal development in which parents and other significant adults are “stimulating, attentive, confirmatory, interpretive, and highly supportive.”37 Parent–child intersubjectivity makes a vital contribution to the development of attachment, attention, language, and understanding of others’ perspectives. These capacities, in turn, ease the task of establishing an intersubjective connection, and that connection provides the platform for the creation of additional “zones,” enabling children to master complex, culturally adaptive skills. 

Building a Support System for Acquiring New Knowledge and Skills

Intersubjectivity makes possible a second essential ingredient for creating the “zone”: a support system that oers new ways of thinking about a situation. The quality of adult support varies with the type of joint activity. As we will see, a helpful parent or teacher interacts dierently when assisting the child with tasks having clear learning goals, such as working a puzzle or mastering a homework assignment; when engaging the child in an open-ended conversation; and when enlisting the child in duties and routines of everyday living. But regardless of the activity, the adult adapts his or her support so the child can make use of it. As the child gains competence, adult support changes accordingly, granting the child a larger role. 

creating a scaffold.  The metaphor of a scaffold has been used to describe eective adult support as children work on tasks that teach culturally valued concepts and skills.38 The learning goal might be built into the task materials, as when a child turns a crank to make a jack-in-the-box pop out, puts together a puzzle, or builds a structure out of blocks. Alternatively, the parent or teacher might specify the goal, as in matching shapes and colors, solving an arithmetic problem, or batting a ball. 
In scaolding, the child is viewed as a building—actively under construction. The adult provides a dynamic, flexible scaold—or framework—that assists the child in mastering new competencies. To promote development, the adult varies his or her assistance to fit the child’s changing level of performance, with the goal of keeping the child in the “zone.” This is usually done in two ways: (1) by adjusting the task so the demands on the child at any given moment are appropriately challenging, and (2) tailoring the degree of adult intervention to the child’s current learning needs.39 
When a task is very new, the child may not yet be aware of its goal and need to be shown what to do, through demonstration. Consider, for example, a 9-month-old infant who has never before seen a jack-in-the-box. At first, the adult tries to capture the child’s attention by working the toy and, as the clown emerges, exclaiming, “Pop! What happened?” Gradually, the adult redirects interaction toward how to use the jack-in-the-box. When the infant reaches for the toy, the adult guides the child’s hand in turning the crank and pushing the clown down in the box. As motor, cognitive, and language skills improve in the second year, the toddler intentionally tries to turn the crank, looking at the adult or otherwise beckoning for assistance. The child’s greater knowledge and communicative competence permit the adult to reduce her physical directiveness. Now the adult can help from a distance by using verbal instructions (“Turn, just a little more!”) and gestures, such as a rotating hand resembling a turning motion, while the toddler tries to make the toy work.40 
As children move into the preschool years, scaolding becomes increasingly verbal and takes on the advantages of language—more ready attainment of intersubjectivity; flexible, ecient representation of meanings; and a powerful tool through which minds meet and the child adopts meanings into mental life. To illustrate, let’s listen in as a father assists his 5-year-old daughter, Sydney, in putting together a dicult puzzle:

Sydney: I can’t get this one in. (Tries to insert a piece in the wrong place)
Father: Which piece might go down here? (Points to the bottom of the puzzle)
Sydney: His shoes. (Looks for a piece resembling the clown’s shoes but tries the wrong one)
Father: Well, find a piece that looks like this shape and matches this color. (Points again to the bottom of the puzzle)
Sydney: The brown one. (Tries it and it fits; then attempts another piece and looks at her father)
Father: There you have it! Now try turning that piece just a little. (Gestures to show her)
Sydney: There! (Puts in several more pieces while commenting to herself, “Now a green piece to match,” “Turn it [meaning the puzzle piece],” as the adult watches)
Father: Now, Sydney, watch. Suppose I put this piece here. Will that work? (Places a blue piece next to a second blue piece, but the space is too small and the wrong shape)
Sydney: You can’t do it that way. The piece is too big.
Father: What should I do?
Sydney: (Places the piece in the correct space, using both color and shape as a guide.)

Sydney and her father’s interaction contains all the components and goals of eective scaolding:

1. Joint Problem Solving, Aimed at Keeping the Child in the “Zone.” Sydney and her father collaborate in overcoming obstacles that Sydney encounters. In doing so, father and daughter jointly work toward successful puzzle solution. 
Sydney’s father keeps the task within Sydney’s “zone” by temporarily reducing the diculty of the puzzle. He does so by breaking the task into smaller units, focusing Sydney’s attention on the lower section—the part with the largest and most easily matched pieces. Then he assists with a general prompt, “Which piece might go down here?” 
When Sydney’s father observes that this suggestion is not sucient for her to succeed, he oers additional support, “Find a piece that looks like this shape and matches this color” and “Turn it.” His statements contain strategies (attending to color and shape, patiently adjusting pieces so they fit) that Sydney can use in future attempts. When Sydney experiments with the color-matching strategy and succeeds in placing the brown piece, she internalizes the technique. She applies it in subsequent eorts, regulating her behavior with self-directed language resembling her father’s communication during joint problem solving. Consequently, Sydney begins to move toward independent solving of the puzzle.
Notice how, in scaolding Sydney’s puzzle solving, her father adapts the instruction he oers to Sydney’s momentary competence. When Sydney has diculty, he fortifies the scaold, providing increased direction. Once Sydney starts to take over strategies generated during joint problem solving, her father pulls back, reducing the assistance provided.
Scaolding provides parents and teachers with a sensible solution to the often-raised dilemma: Is it better to be directive or nondirective when helping children learn? As the scaolding concept shows, this question has no pat answer. Rather, the intensity of adult support depends on where the task falls within the child’s “zone.” When a task lies at the outer edge of the child’s current capabilities, more direct guidance is necessary to bring it within range of mastery. As the child’s understanding and performance improve, less intervention is required. 
How much assistance a child needs depends not just on cognitive maturity but also on other child characteristics. A temperamentally distractible child, an emotionally reactive child, or a fearful, inhibited child requires an especially sturdy scaold—extra support and, at times, considerable adult perseverance to sustain a joint focus and keep the child engaged. Children who are good listeners, persistent in the face of diculty, socially skilled, and therefore adept at attaining intersubjectivity need less adult vigilance and direction. At the same time, eective scaolding can improve a dicult child’s behavior, since it oers the child knowledge and procedures for solving problems, the security of adult support as long as it is needed, and the satisfaction of overcoming obstacles and mastering culturally valued skills. 
2. Self-regulation. An important goal of scaolding is to promote self-regulation—the capacity to use thought to guide behavior. The self-regulated child follows social rules; makes deliberate, well-reasoned choices and decisions; and takes responsibility for his or her own learning and behavior. Although self-regulation improves gradually throughout childhood and adolescence, early childhood is a crucial period for its development—a time when children learn to overcome impulses by thinking before they act.41 Indeed, self-regulation is so important for children’s cognitive and social development that we will return to it repeatedly in later chapters when we consider how other experiences—children’s self-directed language, make-believe play, and learning in school—contribute to it. 
How does scaolding nurture a self-regulated child? It does so in two interrelated ways: (1) by providing children with strategies for working toward goals, and (2) by relinquishing adult control and assistance as soon as the child can work independently.42 
In scaolding, the adult encourages the child to grapple with questions and problems and, thereby, to contribute significantly to the dialogue. In this way, the adult evokes from the child his or her current knowledge and, on that basis, can scaold more eectively. The parent or teacher intervenes only when the child is truly stuck, granting the child as much opportunity to master his or her own behavior as possible. Unless it is clear that the task is so new and obscure to the child that a demonstration would be helpful, the adult refrains from giving immediate answers to momentary diculties. As our consideration of Anselmo and his parents revealed, doing the task for the child severely reduces learning and self-regulation.43
When adults ask children questions and make suggestions that permit them to participate in the discovery of solutions, then transfer of useful strategies to the child is maximized. By introducing language as a mediator of the child’s activity, the adult’s questions and prompts prevent the child from responding impulsively. They encourage the child to step back from the immediate situation and consider alternatives—in essence, to think. 
Look at Sydney and her father’s dialogue once again. When he asks, “Which piece might go down here?” he evokes Sydney’s present strategic thinking, finding that it is still tied to immediate objects in the situation. Sydney looks for the clown’s shoes but fails to find them. Then her father introduces a special form of strategic thinking called distancing. This method helps children move beyond concrete objects by looking for higher-order relationships—in Sydney’s case, categorizing puzzle pieces by color and shape. Once Sydney succeeds in using color, her father encourages further distancing from the most obvious features of the clown image.44 He places a piece incorrectly (by matching only on color) and queries, “Will that work?” In doing so, he helps Sydney analyze an error, consider how to correct it (by matching on both color and shape), and try out her conjecture. Sydney gains practice in applying strategies flexibly—in generating ideas to overcome obstacles. As a result, she acquires reasoning skills and can take initiative when faced with future problems.
3. Warmth, Responsiveness, and Encouragement. To work well, the emotional tone of scaolding must be warm, sympathetic, and responsive. Children who experience warm adult relationships want to preserve that spirit of aection and cooperation—by joining in dialogues with adult partners and acquiring culturally valued skills.45
The standards for maturity parents set for young children vary widely, in ways that reflect family and cultural values. For example, Chinese-American immigrant parents report spending nearly ten times as much time as do Caucasian-American parents scaolding their school-age children’s mastery of reading, math, music, and drawing skills46—teaching that is undoubtedly a strong contributor to Chinese children’s high achievement in both academic and artistic endeavors. Influenced by the Confucian belief in strict discipline to nurture socially desirable behavior, many Chinese and other Asian parents expect a great deal of their children and structure their time extensively.47 But research indicates that their demands are imbued with warmth and caring—with deep concern for and involvement in their children’s lives. 
In a study of parenting in 180 societies, anthropologists Ronald and Evelyn Rohner found that warmth combined with at least moderate expectations for mature behavior and accomplishment is the most common child-rearing style around the world.48 Why do so many cultures mingle concern and aection with guidance and control—a blend known as authoritative parenting in the child-rearing literature? Certainly because they sense its eectiveness, borne out by decades of research. 
Authoritative parenting, whether assessed through direct observation or older children’s ratings of their parents’ communication, is linked to many aspects of competence. In early childhood, it predicts positive mood, self-confidence and independence in mastery of new tasks, cooperativeness, and resistance to engaging in disruptive behavior.49 And in middle childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood, it is related to high self-esteem, social and moral maturity, academic achievement, and educational attainment.50
A major contributor to these favorable outcomes is the fuel that warmth grants to adult expectations. Warm, caring adults oer explanations and justifications for their demands. In doing so, they invite children to judge the appropriateness of their requirements. When children view demands as fair and reasonable, they are far more likely to heed and internalize them. A warm, involved adult is also more likely to be an eective reinforcing agent, praising children for striving to meet high standards. And when children stray from goals that a parent or teacher regards as important and it is necessary to be firm and disapproving, a warm adult has a much greater chance of changing the child’s behavior than does an adult who has been indierent or negative. Children of involved, caring parents find the interruption in parental aection that accompanies a reprimand to be especially unpleasant. They want to regain their parents’ warmth and approval as quickly as possible.
In sum, scaolding is a warm, sympathetic collaboration between a teacher and a learner on a challenging, goal-directed task that the adult helps bring within the child’s “zone.” Observations of adult–child pairs reveal that the diverse ingredients of scaolding—matching the adult’s assistance to the child’s changing needs, suggesting eective strategies, posing questions that encourage children to think about higher-order relationships, and interacting warmly and praising children for competent performance—consistently relate to children’s task engagement and learning.51

the power of conversation.  The instructional mode of communication inherent in scaolding is well suited for tasks with clearly defined goals. Conversations, in which adult and child reflect on everyday events, are more free-ranging. They can dwell on virtually any aspect of experience—of living and working together. This makes them an especially powerful tool for assisting children in building an internal mental life infused with a cultural worldview.
When people converse with one another, they engage in a form of dialogue called narrative—a storylike mode of communicating, composed of a sequence of events with people as main characters. In the narrative, which may be real or imaginary, characters’ roles and mental states—feelings, intentions, beliefs, opinions, and knowledge—are revealed.52 
To illustrate, suppose someone asked you to “tell the story of your life.” In forming a spontaneous autobiography, people link together smaller stories about incidents and occasions, with the self at their center and other influential people in supporting roles. The narrator arranges the stories sequentially, to conform to a culturally accepted organization of time. And he or she not only recounts, but justifies the stories—that is, makes them comprehensible by explaining why they happened as they did.53 
The mini-stories in our life narratives focus on exceptional experiences—events that stand out against the backdrop of ordinariness in our daily lives.54 For example, a move to a new neighborhood, a first date, a high school graduation, an important job interview, a wedding day, the birth of a baby, and special achievements or failings are likely to be included. The various entries are derived from our social interactions, at the time the events occurred and thereafter. When others join with us in celebration, approve or disapprove of our actions, or convey information or opinion that changes our outlook, they bestow special meaning on the events. And so we include those events in our autobiographies, elevating them to lifelong significance. 
In everyday conversation, the events discussed resemble the mini-stories of our spontaneous autobiographies. For example, in recent narrative exchanges, I talked with a friend about her daughter’s sudden breakup with a fiancé; with my husband about a controversial play we had seen; and with one of my students about how she might handle a troublesome roommate. Each narrative focused on a relatively exceptional personal experience. And in each, my partners and I addressed the legitimacy of characters’ intentions, weighing personal desire against socially acceptable behavior. 
For example, referring to her daughter’s breakup, my friend complained, “It wasn’t that she did it but how she did it. She shouldn’t have promised she’d join him in Chicago and then reneged. His mother called a few days later and said how betrayed the young man feels. You can���t back out like that, with no warning, no explanation, after he had already rented the apartment.” 
“The whole family knew the relationship had problems,” I countered. “She’s paying him for the apartment. Doesn’t that lighten her obligation?” 
During the conversation, my friend and I exchanged a wealth of cultural meanings about how relationships should be and about the maturity and morality of the daughter’s behavior. The telling of the narrative also invited reconstruction of what might have occurred between the daughter and her fiancé, thereby placing the event in a wider context of possibilities. In the process, the dialogue highlighted characters’ internal states—the daughter’s motivations, her boyfriend’s feelings, and my friend’s struggle to make sense of the breakup.
Readiness for Narrative. Our narrative dialogues with young children have the same features as do our narratives with adults, only in simplified form. In these conversations, we arrange events in logical, sequential order, and we focus on explaining unusual, hard-to-interpret occurrences, often by dwelling on characters’ intentions and perspectives.
Even before they begin to talk, children display a readiness to participate in narrative.55 After an adult describes and demonstrates some activity (for example, putting a teddy bear to bed), 1-year-olds who as yet have little language can easily reproduce the main steps in correct sequence with toys.56 When toddlers begin to speak, their main interest is in talking about what people do and the consequences of their behavior. Listen to the two-word utterances that appear between 15 and 24 months of age, and you will find many expressions like these: “Tommy hit”; “Get cookie”; “Mommy truck” (meaning “Mommy push the truck”); “Daddy outside”; and “My dolly.”57 At the end of the second year, children begin to label their own and others’ internal states with words, such as “want,” “happy,” “mad,” “think,” and “pretend.”58 These assertions about human action, desire, emotion, and perspective are the stu of which narratives are made.
Early on, children are sensitive to yet another feature of narrative. At birth, they are captivated by unusual events, perking up their eyes and ears when something new and dierent happens. In keeping with this innate bias, the first narratives children produce focus on making sense of the atypical. “Look, the sun is sleepy, going to bed,” said 2 1/2-year-old David while watching the sun disappear below the horizon at the end of a day at the beach. At the sight of a woman with her leg in a cast, 3-year-old Rachel remarked, “Mommy, that lady got a big cut. The doctor sewed up her leg.” (Rachel’s brother had cut his leg a few days earlier and returned from the doctor with stitches and a bandage.)
An early armament of narrative tools enables children to quickly and easily comprehend and contribute to the narratives of expert members of their culture.59 In families in which parents and children spend much time together, the flow of stories recreating personal experiences is abundant.60 Through them, adults help children construct increasingly elaborate images of themselves and teach them culturally accepted ways of organizing and interpreting their experiences. As a byproduct of participation, children gain a rich understanding of their own and others’ mental lives—powerful tools in predicting and explaining human behavior and, therefore, in getting along with others. And in enabling children to practice and perfect narrative skills, adult–child conversation provides crucial preparation for literacy. Let’s take a closer look at these diverse benefits of narrative conversation.
Forming an Autobiographical Self. Consider, once again, the narrative task posed earlier, to relate “the story of your life.” Think back to the earliest event you can remember. At what age did it occur?
For the large majority of people, memory for autobiographical events begins around age 3.61 Practically none of us can retrieve happenings at younger ages—a phenomenon called infantile amnesia. What causes this early memory blackout, and how is it that after age 3, certain events dierentiate themselves from a multitude of everyday experiences so they stand out for a lifetime?
Some researchers conjecture that growth of the cerebral cortex and other brain structures is necessary before children can store experiences in ways that permit them to be retrieved many years later.62 Similarly, several psychological explanations focus on changes in the nature of memory during the preschool years—from an unconscious, automatic, and nonverbal system to one that is conscious, deliberate, and verbal.63 Perhaps the second system cannot access events stored by the first, making the earliest events of our lives forever irretrievable.
Yet the idea of vastly dierent approaches to remembering at young and older ages has been questioned. Children 1 1/2 to 3 years old can describe their memories verbally.64 And sometimes they even recall events that happened to them as preverbal infants! For example, while walking past a distinctive house with a fenced-in front yard, 22-month-old Lisa said to her mother, “Scary doggy!” Nine months earlier (before the child could talk), the family had taken the same walk. On that occasion, Lisa had seen a ferocious dog barking behind the chain-linked fence. Over time, neither the family walk nor the scary dog will be part of Lisa’s personally relevant memory. Yet the train trip across the country she will take at age 3 1/2 and her first day of kindergarten at age 5 may still be memorable when she is 80.
A growing number of researchers believe that rather than a radical change in the way experience is coded into memory, two other milestones lead infantile amnesia to give way to memory for personally significant experiences: 

1.A Psychological Self. To build an autobiographical memory, children must have a well-formed sense of self—as a person who, despite changes in appearance (a new haircut, becoming taller and more mature looking), remains the same on the inside over time. Once constructed, this persisting psychological self serves as an anchor for unique experiences, which are retained easily as long as they become personally meaningful.65 A psychological self is not firmly in place until age 3 or 4. 
2.An Autobiographical Narrative. Besides a firm sense of an inner self, autobiographical memory depends on organizing personal experiences in narrative form so they become part of a life story. How do children learn to structure memories as narratives during the preschool years? Much evidence indicates that they acquire this skill through conversations with adults.

As early as 1 1/2 to 2 years, children begin to talk about the past, guided by adults who prompt them and expand on their fragmented recollections. At first, parents provide most of the content and structure of the story. But very soon, children’s contribution increases, as can be seen in this short excerpt of a mother talking with her nearly 3-year-old daughter about a recent Halloween celebration:

Child: Once on Halloween the kids was over and I had a princess dress on me.
Mother: You had a princess dress on? Did you get any candy? Did you go door to door? What happened?
Child: We went treating.
Mother: You went treating! And who took you?
Child: Andrea’s mother took us. And my mom . . . and we brought a pumpkin too.
Mother: What did you do with the pumpkin?
Child: We lighted it.
Mother: What did it look like? Was it scary?
Child: Uh-huh. Dad made cuts in it with a razor. He made a face too. That was funny.66

Notice how the mother provides details and, by asking “who” and “what,” encourages her young daughter to enrich the narrative. As children participate in these dialogues, they adopt the narrative thinking generated in them and retain many details about past events, made personally meaningful in the context of parent–child conversation.
Observations of parent–child interaction reveal that parents vary in how they engage children in narrative talk. Some, like the mother in the conversation just given, use an elaborative style, in which they pose many, varied questions; add information by building on children’s statements; and volunteer their own evaluations of events, as in “Was it scary?” Other parents use a repetitive style. Appearing rushed, impatient, and inattentive to the child’s comments, they contribute little information and ask the same short-answer questions over and over: “Do you remember Halloween?” “What costume did you wear?” “Do you remember what you wore?” The elaborative style is considerably better at fostering preschoolers’ narrative skill, since 2- and 3-year-olds who experience it produce more coherent and detailed personal stories when followed up 1 to 2 years later.67
Children’s conversations with elaborative-style parents increase in complexity as language development proceeds, creating a zone of proximal development in which narrative competence expands. Between 3 and 6 years, children’s descriptions of special, one-time events—a family excursion, a grandparent’s visit, a first trip to the dentist—become better organized and more elaborate. Spurred by adult prompting, older children also add more background information—“when” and “where” the event took place and “who” was present. By including these details, children place personally significant experiences in the larger context of their lives. 
Finally, between 4 and 6 years of age, evaluative statements, which help to clarify “why” an event is personally meaningful, become common. Older children more often embellish their descriptions with modifiers, such as “My mask was ugly” or “The kite flew high.” At times, they even add drama by intensifying these expressions, as in “The kite flew very, very high” and “Grandma ate a huge bowl of oatmeal for breakfast!” And like the autobiographical and everyday narratives that adults generate, children’s narratives increasingly focus on people’s internal states—their desires, feelings, and beliefs: “She wanted it so much” or “I felt bad.“ 68 Furthermore, the richness of 6-year-olds’ evaluative remarks can be predicted from their mother’s evaluative statements in an adult–child conversation 3 years earlier69—a finding that underscores, once again, parents’ vital role in creating a “zone” for narrative development. 
In sum, as children share memories, mark them as personally meaningful, and begin to create their life story, the people to whom they are close become vigorous contributors to their self-constructions. From the beginning, the child’s sense of self is not isolated, encapsulated inside the head. Rather, it is shaped by and situated in children’s everyday social experiences—in the dialogues with parents, teachers, and other cultural experts within families, preschools, schools, and communities.
Acquiring Cultural Beliefs and Values. Through dialogues with adults, the child derives not just a self, but a self imbued with culture. The stories, both real and fictional, that parents and teachers relate to or jointly construct with young children are laced with cultural beliefs and values. They have profound socializing implications.70
At times, adults tell children stories that carry important self-relevant lessons. For example, recently I listened in as a father and his 5-year-old son waited in the foyer of a synagogue for a Jewish New Year service to begin. The father wove an animated tale about a boy named Chaim, who had great diculty remaining quiet during the holiday service. Little Chaim had a brand new whistle in his back pocket, and he badly wanted to play it. With great eort, he resisted, turning and twisting in his seat until, finally, when the Rabbi blew the shofar (ceremonial ram’s horn), Chaim could bear it no longer! A moment later, the clear, high-pitched sound of the whistle could be heard over the Rabbi’s final shofar blast. Everyone in the sanctuary turned toward Chaim, who cringed with embarrassment. But much to Chaim’s surprise, all the congregants cheered and thanked him for making the shofar ritual more beautiful than ever. And Chaim’s father praised him for sitting quietly, almost to the end of the service.
Five-year-old Mark listened to his father’s story with rapt attention, asking questions and adding personal comments: “Where did Chaim sit?” “Did he (like Mark) bring a book to read?” “Was Chaim allowed to get up and go to the bathroom?” “Was the Rabbi angry at Chaim?” The story disclosed that adults realize a long service is hard for a small boy to sit through, but exercising self-restraint and participating in communal rituals bring praise and acceptance from the community. The analogies Mark drew between his own life and Chaim’s suggest that he had (as his father intended) experienced the story from a personal vantage point, identifying with its events and applying them to himself.71 
Systematic research reveals both cultural similarities and dierences in adult–child narratives. In an intensive observational study of daily storytelling in two communities—six middle-class Chinese families in Taipei, Taiwan, and six middle-class American families in an Irish-Catholic neighborhood in Chicago—Peggy Miller and her colleagues72 found that preschoolers and their family members routinely narrated past experiences. Most often, they created joint accounts of pleasurable holidays and family excursions—birthday parties, the fair, the zoo, and McDonald’s for the American children; the night market, the zoo, and riding on trains and horses for the Chinese children. Both groups also talked about times the children were ill, sad, or frightened. 
In a smaller set of narratives, the topic addressed—either directly to the child or to someone else while the child listened—was the child’s misbehavior. These stories, more than any others, seemed deliberately aimed at teaching social and moral standards. Chinese parents, however, were far more likely to initiate these tales of misdeeds than were Americans. In fact, 35 percent of Chinese adults’ narratives with or in the presence of 2 1/2-year-old children focused on past transgressions, whereas only 7 percent of American narratives did.73
Furthermore, interpretations of children’s misbehavior diered between the two cultures. Consistent with the Confucian parental obligation, “The deeper the love, the greater the correction,” Chinese mothers’ “misdeed” stories were much longer than those of the American mothers—in fact, the most lengthy and elaborate of all Chinese narrations. Sometimes they occurred right after the child committed a transgression; at other times, they reminded the child of earlier improper behavior. Chinese mothers typically corrected the child repeatedly: “What did you say?” “So, what would you say?” “Then how would Mom have reacted?” And in line with the Confucian reliance on formal stories with moral lessons, these informal narratives often ended with direct teaching of how to act: “Saying dirty words is not good,” and (after the child agreed) an expression of aection—a hug, a tender touch.
In instances in which American stories referred to young children’s misbehavior, mothers frequently deemphasized these acts, attributing them to the child’s spunk and assertiveness. This does not mean that American parents seldom instruct their children in social and moral rules. They often do so, largely through guiding remarks that accompany children’s ongoing actions, as in “Don’t grab. Share the toy.” “Hold hands when crossing the street.” “You hurt Johnny. Say you’re sorry.”
As Miller notes, the way social and moral lessons are integrated into narratives aects children’s frameworks for judging themselves and interpreting their social experiences. Through everyday stories, the Chinese adults personalized moral lessons and stressed obligations to parents and other authority figures. They also reminded children of the impact of their transgressions on others—an element dramatically illustrated in one mother’s recounting of her 2 1/2-year-old’s disruption of his older sister’s music lesson: “Ai, you made Mama lose face. . . . I wanted to dig my head into the ground. Right? [Child smiles, shakes head]”74 American narratives rarely dwelt on misdeeds and, at times, even recast children’s oenses as strengths—as indicative of quick thinking and an active, spirited disposition. 
Miller describes the generally high self-control the Chinese children in these families displayed—listening attentively to elders and complying without reminders. For example, even at age 2, they waited patiently to open a small gift until a guest had departed—proper etiquette in Chinese culture. Of course, this does not mean that Americans ought to change their child-oriented narratives to be just like those of the Chinese. The socializing impact of a particular narrative style is strengthened by its consistency with a family’s and community’s way of life. Also, the narrative variations we have considered tap only a small slice of cultural diversity in adult–child storytelling. The most important lesson we can take from Miller’s provocative findings is that when parents and teachers take time to construct narratives with and about the young child, they create a “zone” that spurs children to weave moral and social rules into their self-definitions and to behave accordingly.
Understanding People as Mental Beings. We have seen that talking about mental states is a major focus of narrative conversation. In narrative, we express the “folk psychology” of our culture—our deeply ingrained assumptions about human desires, emotions, and beliefs, and our judgments of certain ones as more acceptable than others. Indeed, violations of our folk psychology are a major impetus for engaging in narrative.75 Through conversing with others, we try to make puzzling events and behaviors understandable.
Because people’s desires, feelings, and beliefs often dier, conversations are full of social negotiations—attempts to reconcile dierent versions of reality. Recall how I suggested to my distraught friend that her daughter’s breakup with her fiancé might have been defensible, given problems in the relationship and the daughter’s willingness to compensate the young man for his monetary losses. Similarly, a 2-year-old who says that the sun disappearing below the horizon is “sleepy” is likely to receive an alternative explanation. And as parents recount the misdeeds of their children, the children gain access to others’ evaluations of their egocentric, inconsiderate acts. 
According to psychologist Jerome Bruner, learning to negotiate diering viewpoints through narrative is a crowning achievement of human development.76 Conversations about personal experiences are prime sources of social stability. When out-of-the-ordinary events occur and we experience clashing views, we often look for a good listener—a friend or a loved one we can talk to. By collaborating with this partner in conversation, we talk out our perspective, seek our partner’s view, search for meaning in seemingly chaotic events, and try to reconstruct a comprehensible world. In these conversations, we may not agree with our partner’s point of view, but we usually acknowledge that we comprehend and appreciate it—and our partner generally does the same. 
By joining in conversation and listening to the narrative dialogues of others, children develop an understanding of their own and others’ rich mental lives. Children with a good grasp of mental life can detect the likely inner causes of another person’s behavior and use that information to anticipate what that person might do next. Such children are also more adept at empathizing—reading others’ emotions and vicariously experiencing them—a response that increases the chances that they will react with sympathetic concern and help others in need.77 As early as 3 to 5 years of age, emotion knowledge—awareness of the circumstances that prompt dierent emotional reactions and the social consequences of expressing one’s feelings—is related to friendly considerate behavior, willingness to make amends after harming another, and peer acceptance.78
Research verifies that the more families talk about inner states, the greater children’s knowledge of them. For example, mothers who frequently label and explain emotions have preschoolers who use more emotion words in conversation. Maternal prompting of emotional thoughts (“What makes him afraid?”) is a good predictor of 2-year-olds’ emotion language. Later in the preschool years, explanations (“He’s sad because his dog ran away”) are more predictive.79 Consistent with Vygotsky’s concept of the “zone,” sensitive parents adjust the way they talk about emotions to fit children’s increasing competence. And in line with what we have said about narrative as a vital context for negotiating diering viewpoints, discussions in which family members disagree about feelings seem particularly helpful in prompting children to step back from the experience of emotion and reflect on its causes and consequences.80
Attaining a Subtle Grasp of Mental Life. Around age 3 to 4, children’s understanding of mental life undergoes a profound transformation. Older preschoolers realize that people’s beliefs, not just their desires, aect their behavior. This advance is apparent in children’s awareness that people can hold false beliefs. 81 To test for a child’s grasp of false belief, researchers present situations like this one: Show a child two small closed boxes, one a familiar Band-Aid box and the other a plain, unmarked box. Then say, “Pick the box that you think has the Band-Aids in it.” Almost always, children pick the marked container. Next, ask the child to look inside both boxes; when she does, contrary to her own belief, she will find that the marked one is empty and the unmarked one contains the Band-Aids. Finally, introduce the child to a hand puppet and explain, “Here’s Pam. She has a cut, see? Where do you think she’ll look for Band-Aids? Why would she look in there?” Only a handful of 3-year-olds but many 4-year-olds can explain why Pam would look in the marked box: “Because she thinks there’s Band-Aids in it, but there aren’t any.”82
Mastery of false belief shows that children regard beliefs as interpretations, not just reflections, of reality. It marks the transition toward a more complex, active view of the mind, which will flourish over the next few years—the realization that people can engage in a great many inner activities, from concentrating, remembering, and understanding to guessing, comparing, and inferring.83 Before age 4, most children assume that physical experience determines mental experience—that if Band-Aids are in the unmarked box, everyone will just know where they are. But preschoolers who grasp false belief recognize that people can, on the basis of prior knowledge and experience, interpret the same event dierently—an understanding that is invaluable for social life. Children who are good at detecting others’ points of view are better at thinking of eective ways to handle dicult social situations.84 Rather than just asserting their own desires, they try friendly persuasion. Or they suggest that a conflict be solved by creating new, mutual goals.
Like emotion knowledge, preschoolers’ grasp of false belief grows out of conversations that touch on the mental lives of others. Without those conversations, this level of insight is slow to develop. The Junín Quechua language of the Peruvian highlands is unique in lacking words that describe mental states, such as “think” and “believe,” so Quechua adults refer to mentality indirectly. For example, they use the phrase, “What would he say?” in place of, “What would he think?” Junín Quechua children have diculty with false-belief tasks for years after children in industrialized nations have mastered them.85 Furthermore, clear evidence exists that preschoolers who frequently interact with more competent cultural members—parents, extended family members, neighbors, older siblings, and older peers—are advanced in false-belief reasoning.86 These social encounters oer children many opportunities to hear people refer to their own mental states and those of others and, therefore, to observe dierent points of view. When 3- and 4-year-olds use their newfound capacity to talk about mental states during play with friends, their understanding of false belief improves further.87 
Finally, as children participate in narratives and listen to those of others, they acquire culturally accepted ways for negotiating clashing viewpoints. This equips them with skills for engaging in conversation without confrontation and persistent conflict—competencies that are crucial for sustaining warm, pleasurable social relationships. Gratifying social ties, in turn, serve as vital contexts for further cognitive and social development. 
Preparing for Literacy. Most parents hope that during the preschool years, their children will develop the knowledge, skills, and attitudes that prepare them to read and write in elementary school. This interest in literacy is well founded. Reading and writing are not just crucial for success in academic endeavors and later life. They are thoroughfares to vast realms of knowledge, enjoyable leisure pursuits, and contact with others at a distance—even in dierent historical time periods. Once children can read and write, they can explore the insights of countless authors and partake in their rich array of experiences. With those authors, they can forge highly varied and vastly expanded “zones” for learning.
Children can become competent readers and writers without being trained, pushed, or goaded into literacy learning in early childhood. As we saw earlier, preschools and kindergartens that emphasize drill on academic skills are detrimental. This way of teaching induces inattentiveness, restlessness, disengagement from challenging activities, and poorer achievement during the first few years of elementary school. Young children who are enthusiastic and self-confident about learning and who achieve at their best in the early grades have acquired literacy-relevant knowledge informally—through exposure to books and other reading materials at home, in preschool, and in child-care environments; through observing adults reading and writing in everyday life; and especially, through narrative conversation. 
Literacy-related behaviors emerge in these contexts; consequently, early childhood educators refer to preschool competencies that lay the foundation for reading and writing as emergent literacy. Indeed, no clear dividing line exists between prereading and reading. As literacy experts Grover Whitehurst and Christopher Lonigan put it, “Reading, writing, and oral language develop concurrently and interdependently from an early age from children’s exposure to interactions in social contexts in which literacy is a component, and in the absence of formal instruction.”88
Research consistently demonstrates that language development in early childhood is strongly related to later reading competence—and to academic achievement in general during elementary school.89 Furthermore, both language progress and an array of emergent-literacy skills can be predicted by the sheer amount of verbal interaction in the home during the first few years of life—a relationship that holds for children of all socioeconomic levels. Conversations with adults are especially powerful contributors to early childhood language proficiency and, in turn, to literacy development.90
A strong language foundation is vital for becoming literate because people read to extract meaning. Children can more easily derive meaning from the printed page when their vocabularies are large and they have come to think in ways that resemble the narrative styles on which the large majority of written texts are based. By repeatedly listening to and participating in narrative conversation, children develop mental scripts for the way narratives are typically organized. Then, when they start to read, the organization of text material readily makes sense to them, and they extract meaning more easily. 
One of the clearest indicators of young children’s understanding of stories, and other prereading skills, is the extent to which they can give elaborate, detailed accounts of past events.91 Children sharpen this competency through conversing with adults, who add information, ask questions, and prompt children to increase the sophistication of their descriptions and explanations—in essence, who use an elaborative style of narrative talk. Whitehurst and his colleagues have encouraged parents and teachers of young children to integrate the elaborative narrative style into shared adult–child storybook reading, an approach called dialogic reading.92 
Typically, an adult reads while a child listens—a format that is beneficial to early literacy development93 but that cannot guarantee the child’s attention, involvement, and comprehension. In dialogic reading, the adult encourages the child to become a participant in the narrative, even a storyteller. Using books with pictures that convey a story line but that have limited text so the adult is less likely to revert to straight reading, the parent or teacher has the child relate much of the story. The adult assumes the role of an active listener—querying, encouraging, and expanding on what the child has to say. As in other narrative talk, the adult increases the complexity of his or her questioning to fit the child’s language progress. For 2- and 3-year-olds, questions focus mostly on describing events, actions, and objects. For 4- and 5-year-olds, questions more often address narrative organization (“What happens next?” “How does the story end?”); analyses of characters (“Why did the little girl want a teddy bear?”); and connections between the book and the child’s everyday life (“Have you ever seen a fire engine on its way to a fire?”). 
When parents and teachers use dialogic reading consistently over several weeks to several months, children show gains in language development, print knowledge, and writing progress that are still present six months to a year later.94 Although children dier widely in intrinsic interest in reading activities, shared reading can spark the interest of children who seldom seek out literacy-related pursuits on their own. Aspects of adult behavior—warmth, dramatic quality, and attempts to get the child to participate actively—heighten children’s interest and involvement in reading.95 An interested child is more likely to request shared reading times, notice features of print that are important for reading, ask questions about them, and (later on) read on his or her own. 
As older preschoolers begin to attend to features of print, adults can combine shared book reading with scaolding of children’s knowledge of letter names, letter–sound correspondences, and print conventions (for example, that books are read from left to right and top to bottom of the page, that spaces are used to separate words and periods to end sentences). Adults can also assist young children as they become interested in writing by responding positively to their writing-like creations and helping them attain their writing goals in daily activities and play—printing their name or a message, making a storybook, or adding items to a shopping list. Along with general language and narrative competencies, relaxed informal teaching of basic reading and writing skills—in limited doses and without excessive feedback about right and wrong—fosters emergent literacy and aids the process of learning to read and write after children begin school.96 
In sum, adult–child conversation—in book-reading and other contexts—is the best way to prime young children for becoming interested, accomplished readers and writers. Shared reading with parents is particularly influential—more so than reading with teachers. In one study, Lonigan and Whitehurst compared shared reading with teachers at preschool, shared reading with parents at home, and a combined condition. All three groups gained in oral language skills compared to children receiving no intervention. But children experiencing home reading improved the most.97 Parents seem to be in the best position to read to their child often and to tailor their dialogues to the child’s interests and abilities.

Other Contexts for Joint Adult–Child Engagement 

When parents and children spend time together, opportunities for scaolding of new skills and for conversation are nearly limitless. Parents who capitalize on these moments ensure that their children internalize the history, values, knowledge, skills, habits, practices, and understandings of their families and communities. We have already seen how academically related tasks, family celebrations, family outings, and adult–child storybook reading are excellent focal points for adult–child engagement. Make-believe play is yet another. Indeed, joint participation in make-believe with more expert cultural members is so important for development during early childhood that I devote an entire chapter to it. Other vital contexts for adult–child engagement include everyday routines and duties, mealtimes, and television viewing. Each of these settings has distinct and highly significant developmental benefits, as long as adults take time to enter into them and mentally connect with children. 

everyday routines and duties.  By participating in everyday routines and duties at home and in preschool, children develop a sense of responsible participation in family and community life. At the same time, they acquire practical skills and a wealth of knowledge about their physical and social surroundings. The parent always in a hurry—who says, when the child desires involvement, “There isn’t time,” or who fails to insist that the child join in household tasks in keeping with his or her capacity—severely limits the child’s learning.
In preindustrial times, children spent most of their day alongside parents as they went about housekeeping and earning a livelihood. As a result, children became deeply familiar with adults’ daily activities, picking up many skills through observation and direct participation. (Recall John Ise’s account of family life on a rural Kansas homestead, described in Chapter 1.) Greater parent–child togetherness throughout the day is also common in tribal and village societies, where adults spend less time supporting children’s learning through verbal scaolding because children have so many opportunities to observe and participate directly in the work of adults.98
Because fine-tuned scaolding is seldom required, adult–child participation in everyday routines and duties—preparing a meal, washing dishes, raking and bagging leaves in the garden, buying groceries—oers extra time for conversation, with all its attendant benefits. In addition, many informal learning opportunities arise that will serve children well when they get to school. An astute mother I observed in the grocery store had her 3-year-old son, Ricky, reach for items on the shelf and put them in the cart. When at the checkout counter Ricky became restless and whiny, his mother handed him her credit card and directed him to watch closely for the moment the clerk would need it. As the boy turned toward the register, the mother pointed out how the price of each item appeared on a screen. Ricky alternately named the numbers he recognized and counted items as they passed through the checkout. Awed by the responsibility of handing over the credit card, a task he had seen performed only by adults, Ricky complied eagerly—and also saw numerical concepts in action! Although grocery shopping with Ricky might take 10 or 15 minutes longer than otherwise, it has wide-ranging benefits for his development.
Children, as parents and teachers well know, are not always eager to perform chores that adults set for them. But they are more willing when they see adults engaged in those duties, when adults explain why it’s fair that everyone help, and when their relationship with those adults is warm and gratifying.99 These communicative ingredients motivate children to join in with a cooperative spirit, which demonstrates that they have moved beyond the adult’s position to one of their own—that is, internalized social norms with conviction.100 In doing so, young children demonstrate once again their strong desire to become part of cultural life.

mealtime conversations.  Mealtimes—usually dinner—are special social contexts for families in complex societies. They are among the few occasions in which parents and children regularly gather after spending most of the day apart and in which the main family activity is relating to one another. Hence, mealtime talk overflows with opportunities for socialization. 
Mealtimes and similar occasions for family togetherness open special conversational doors. Because all family members are present, dinner talk can convey to children a sense of family coherence and identity.101 Most of us can still recapture the stories our parents told us, in which social and moral lessons were powerful and abundant. Here is one my mother told me, recalled in vivid detail nearly a half century later: “Once, when your grandfather was 16 years old, he came home weeping, his hands all bloody from working in the factory. His mother, your great grandmother, wiped away his tears and said, ‘Don’t cry, one day you’ll own that factory.’ And by the time he was 30, he did.”
Dinnertime recaps of daily events also permit today’s children, isolated from the adult world of real work, to gain access to their parents’ daily lives. I learned much about my father’s experiences as a retail merchant through stories he related to my mother at dinnertime: “Sofie, you’ll never believe the customer who came into the store today. She complained so vehemently about a perfectly correct bill that it took two of us to escort her to the door.” 
Family mealtime conversations, whether children participate directly or listen to the exchanges of others, also provide special instruction in discussion skills, since they are among the few routine occasions in which children are permitted to enter an adult conversational world.102 When meals are shared with children, parents can model and teach cultural rules regulating conversation—appropriate topics and politeness (“We don’t say food is disgusting at the table”) and subtle conversational strategies that children become proficient at only after much practice, such as how to enter a conversation and link with other participants’ statements.
Finally, and perhaps most important, mealtimes allow parents to enter into their children’s world and hear about the many facets of their lives, ranging from what the child did at school that day to reflections on how to solve peer or sibling problems.103 Consequently, they serve to reinforce not just socialization but parental caring and support. The numerous benefits of this rich communal context are lost when family mealtime rituals diminish or disintegrate into frequent eating on the run or split adult–child meals. 
The importance of family mealtimes is underscored by the fact that the most widely used research instrument for assessing the quality of young children’s home environments asks parents whether the child eats at least one meal a day with a parent.104 Scores on that instrument consistently predict early childhood mental development, no matter what the child’s socioeconomic or ethnic background.105

television viewing.  In Chapter 1, I noted that according to current survey findings, American adults spend over one-third of their free time—about 15 hours per week—watching TV. Estimates for children are even more ominous. Regular TV viewing typically begins between 2 and 3 years of age, consuming about 10.5 hours per week, or nearly 13 percent of the child’s waking hours. It rises steadily over early childhood until it reaches an average of 28 hours per week for school-age children, or about 30 percent of the child’s waking hours.106 When we consider how much the set is on during school holidays and summer vacations, children spend more time watching TV than they do in any other waking activity, including going to school and interacting with family members or peers. 
These statistics are averages; children dier in their attraction to television. For example, parents who watch a lot of TV tend to have children who do the same. Excessive TV viewing is associated with family and peer diculties, poor school achievement, and serious health concerns—specifically, overweight and obesity as a result of hours of being sedentary and eating high-fat snacks while viewing.107 Parents with stressful, unhappy lives often escape into television, and their children may do so as well.
It is crucial that parents exercise their gatekeeper role with respect to TV, limiting how much and what young children watch—to about an hour to an hour-and-a-half a day and to programs that are child-appropriate and informative and that teach positive social attitudes and behaviors. In addition, as much as possible, parents should watch with children and engage in joint conversation about televised information, helping them understand what they see. Parental oversight and involvement in children’s TV viewing are essential for two reasons. 
First, preschoolers easily misunderstand televised material. For example, at ages 2 and 3, they do not discriminate TV images from real objects; they say a bowl of popcorn on TV would spill if the set were turned upside down!108 When a child believes that all people, objects, and events on TV are authentic, violence—so pervasive on American TV—becomes particularly terrifying. Although by age 4 children know that not all TV programming is real, they judge TV reality according to whether the images resemble people and objects in everyday life. Not until age 8 do children fully grasp the unreality of TV fiction—that characters do not retain their roles outside the TV show.109 
Furthermore, prior to this age, children have diculty inferring characters’ motives and connecting contradictory TV scenes into a coherent story line. They cannot appreciate why a character who at first seemed like a “good guy” but later behaves aggressively is really a “bad guy.” They evaluate such characters and their actions much too favorably.110 For example, psychologist Sharon Purdie showed second graders a complex dramatic program in which an accused kidnapper, who had at first appeared friendly, tried to shoot a prosecution witness and got arrested during the attempt. Children who failed to grasp the kidnapper’s motive and the reason for the arrest judged him to be “good,” not “bad.”111
Second, weak government regulation of American TV means that without parental controls, child viewers are exposed repeatedly to antisocial attitudes and behaviors. The average American child finishing elementary school has seen more than 100,000 televised violent acts that provide “an extensive how-to course in aggression.”112 Television also hardens children to violence, making them more willing to tolerate it in others.113 Furthermore, although educational programming for children is highly sensitive to issues of equity and diversity, entertainment programming often conveys ethnic and gender stereotypes—minorities as villains and victims of violence and in subservient roles; men as dominant, powerful, and competent and women as attractive, emotional, and submissive. The more children view, the more likely they are to endorse such stereotypes. 114 Finally, as many parents are aware, television advertising manipulates children’s beliefs and preferences. Although children can distinguish a TV program from a commercial as early as age 3, below age 8 they seldom grasp the selling purpose of the ads.115 Rather, they think that commercials are well-intentioned eorts to be helpful to viewers.
These worrisome findings are not an inherent part of the TV medium. Instead, they result from the way it is used in American culture. In actuality, television has as much potential for good as it does for ill. For example, TV content depicting acts of cooperating, helping, and comforting encourages these behaviors in children.116 But most of the time, programs mix benevolent and hostile intentions in the same character. Unfortunately, children are riveted by a character’s aggression and miss the caring message. Television promotes positive social behavior in young children only when it is free of violent content.117
Despite widespread public concern about the impact of TV on children’s development, many parents do little to regulate or guide their children’s viewing. When parents do make an eort, preschoolers watch less TV, find educational programs more appealing, and more often view shows with their parents.118 Parent–child co-viewing creates conditions in which adults can raise questions about the realism of televised information, assist children in making sense of the story line, and express disapproval of negative on-screen behavior and commercial messages, thereby teaching children to evaluate TV content rather than to accept it uncritically.
Interestingly, parents who are warm, communicative, and firm but appropriate in their expectations have children who are less drawn to TV, particularly violent TV.119 Very likely, these parents set an example through their own TV viewing, watch with their children whenever they can, and use TV programs in constructive ways, helping children move away from the set into worthwhile activities. A program about animals, for example, might spark a weekend trip to the zoo, a visit to the library for books about animals, or new ways of observing and caring for the family pet. Parents who intervene in their child’s TV viewing so it is in keeping with the “zone” transform the TV medium from a negative to a positive force in the child’s mental life, and they promote favorable cognitive and social development in many other ways as well. 


dialogues with children: larger implications

Compared to two or three generations ago, contemporary parents and children less often engage in the development-enhancing, joint activities discussed throughout this chapter. In 1970, long before parents became preoccupied with the “time bind,” psychologist Urie Bronfenbrenner reflected that children “used to be brought up by their parents.”120 Although the family, Bronfenbrenner noted, continues to have primary responsibility for children’s character development, it lacks the strength needed to do the job because parents and children no longer spend enough time together. Ours is a split society—adults in one world, children in another. Too many families have separate adult–child living areas, each equipped with its own TV and other leisure pursuits so that parent–child dialogues seldom take place. When parents and children spend most of their time apart, the result is a profound dampening of parents’ socializing power. 
In the past, extended family members or adults in the neighborhood more readily stepped in when parents, for one reason or another, could not invest enough time in their children’s lives. Today, neighborhood experiences are much more restricted. Housing enclaves where families know each other well and interested adults are available to “mind children’s business” are rare. Children who live close to their grandparents benefit greatly, enjoying aectionate, playful relationships with them at early ages and looking to them for information, role models, family history, and values later on. But greater family mobility means that more children live a considerable distance from grandparents and other relatives. And parental divorce, which will aect 50 to 60 percent of American children born in the current decade,121 lessens contact with the noncustodial parent’s extended family. In childhood, physical distance makes for a psychologically distant relationship.
Remove parents and other adults from active participation in the lives of young children, and the vacuum may be filled by unsupervised and ill-behaved peers and the moral vagaries of American TV fare. Continued disengagement of adults from children’s lives, Bronfenbrenner prophesied, will result in greater alienation, indierence, antagonism, and violence on the part of young people from all sectors of society—a prediction that came to pass in the form of rapidly escalating youth crime between the 1970s and 1990s, with an increasing number of oenders from privileged homes.122 
As media analysts try to make sense of the most heinous of these acts, including the recent spate of family, school, and neighborhood murders and maimings, parental retreat from a troubled child’s life almost invariably surfaces as a contributing factor. Parents of these youngsters often appear to be good people, having provided their children with material comforts and having responded with anguish, remorse, and attempts to do the right thing in the face of their child’s previous and current grievous behavior. But the cases suggest that stepping in only in at times of crisis cannot compensate for providing the ongoing togetherness and haven of a family. Such togetherness aects a child’s development in countless ways, even through what appear to be trifling pursuits—help with homework; outings to the grocery store, the park, and the local library; dinnertime conversations; discussions of exciting or scary TV shows; and bedtime stories. Yet these are the key experiences of childhood, through which children appropriate mental tools from more capable and discerning social partners, become enculturated and, thereby, human—intelligent, responsible, and caring. 
Of course, most youngsters with preoccupied parents do not become antisocial and violent. Yet over and over, commentary in the media and in the psychological literature confirms that too many of our youth are disaected in less intense ways—self-absorbed, disgruntled, and lacking a clear sense of direction and purpose. In the words of psychologist William Damon, they are demoralized,123 a term that suggests a break with their social world, a deficiency in internalization of worthwhile values and goals. 
A provocative question is whether a craving for connection with family and community is at the heart of the floundering of many of today’s youth, manifested in academic problems, poor peer relationships, low self-esteem, depression, angry, acting-out behavior, and—with the arrival of young adulthood—inability to make vocational commitments, attain financial independence, and forge healthy intimate relationships. Research documents that these diculties are magnified two to threefold in children and adolescents who have been exposed to marital discord and divorce,124 circumstances in which parents—at odds with one another—all too often are diverted from investing in their children’s day-to-day lives. 
Yet a certain number of children and adolescents, despite exposure to severe family adversity, escape these diculties and adjust well. A common element in the lives of such resilient youngsters, as I noted in Chapter 1, is an unusually warm, positive relationship with at least one parent or a close tie with an adult outside the immediate family.125 What happens within these alternative relationships that shields the young person from problems or restores eective functioning? Although little systematic evidence exists on the precise ingredients of such ties, I recently became familiar with the bond forged between Hannah, a 21-year-old college student, and her Aunt Eva and Uncle Charlie, two of my university colleagues. Hannah’s parents divorced when she was 9 and her older sister Sarah was 15. Hannah related the story of her childhood and the genesis of her relationship with Eva and Charlie, who oered insights as well. What they had to say is enlightening. 
“I can’t remember much family togetherness when I was a kid,” Hannah remarked. “Our parents couldn’t talk things out with each other, and they rarely talked things out with us. Mom took Sarah and me to Girl Scouts, swimming, piano, and other lessons. We enjoyed the activities and the friends we made, but they couldn’t compensate for what was missing: warm, family time. We almost never sat down to a meal together or went places together; we each went our own way. Our dad started going o on vacations by himself when holidays rolled around, so family get-togethers were rare. 
“When our parents split up, we moved with our mom from Arkansas to Seattle. Mom worked all week, weekends, and most evenings. She had to get a career going so there’d be money to live on and to send us to college. Sarah hung out with another family in the neighborhood. A couple of times a week, she had dinner and went to church with them. Looking back, I’d say they were her substitute family; she ‘adopted’ them, and they ‘adopted’ her. I was too young to go o on my own that way. When I didn’t have after-school activities, Mom insisted that I come home and do chores and homework. Sometimes I got to go to a friend’s house to play, but many nights I’d open a can of spaghetti and have dinner by myself. I spent hours daydreaming and looking at old pictures of Mom, Dad, Sarah, and me.”
On finishing high school, Sarah chose a religiously aliated college of the same denomination as that of her “alternative” family. The year after her college graduation, Sarah married a devout classmate, entering into a culture in which family life was pivotal. Six years later, Hannah started college, but for her the road to maturity was rough. She had diculty concentrating, earned uneven grades, and accumulated so many incompletes in courses that the university prohibited her from reenrolling until she wrapped up her “unfinished business.” Frustrated with Hannah’s undirectedness, her mother withdrew financial support and insisted that she get a job. Hannah’s full-time waitressing soon became both an obstacle and an excuse for lack of progress in her studies. “I was at sea,” Hannah recalled. “I didn’t have any confidence in myself, and I didn’t think I could do anything. So I started visiting Aunt Eva and Uncle Charlie, who lived three hours away.”
“We hadn’t known Hannah well while she was growing up,” Eva continued, “so we were surprised but delighted when she started coming on weekends. It didn’t matter what we were doing—birthday celebrations, dinner with friends, outings to movies and plays, shopping excursions, or leisurely breakfasts; Hannah hungered to be part of our family. During those times, she asked lots of questions about our work and home lives, and also about her parents, especially their early history: ‘Was my mom close to her mom?’ ‘Did you know my mom and dad when they were in college?’ ‘What was my parents’ wedding like?’ I described these and many other earlier events. We also did our best to convince Hannah that believing in herself grows out of trying hard, taking risks, and following through. We talked about how important it was for her to return to school, helped her think through a change of major, and advised on time management and study skills.”
Hannah completed her degree the following year. In a letter she wrote to Eva and Charlie shortly after her graduation, she attributed her turnabout in motivation and self-confidence to the connection, forged through dialogue, with her aunt and uncle:

Thank you for everything you have provided, the time and eort you shared with me and the confidence you showed in me. It definitely enabled me to relocate all of that within myself this year and even be pleasantly surprised by how each accomplishment facilitates the next one. This, and you, are among the greatest gifts I have ever received. The change in my ability to focus on my courses and the personal rewards have been immense. THANKS.126 

What factors contributed to Hannah’s turnabout? Shared understanding (intersubjectivity) between adult and child, scaolding of new competencies, narrative conversations prompting a redefinition of self, and joint engagement in culturally meaningful activities—the diverse experiences we have considered that create the zone of proximal development—appear to be at the heart of her success story. Indeed, Hannah’s tale suggests that young children denied these supports can still profit from them later, if such supports are available and they have the fortitude to capitalize on them. But not all young people are as fortunate as Hannah. Some remain profoundly impaired by inadequate adult investment in their childhoods. And even those who fare reasonably well may carry with them inner wounds—a sense of emptiness and regret at having missed self-defining, confidence-inducing early experiences that cannot, in the final analysis, be recaptured.
Experts asked to reflect on the malaise and problematic behavior of children today repeatedly comment that they lack sucient adult guidance and involvement.127 We have seen that children come into the world marvelously prepared to enter into partnerships with parents and other caregivers. In the course of this chapter, I have had much to say about just how parents and teachers can capitalize on children’s natural propensities. Vygotsky’s concept of the “zone” clarifies for us the meaning of true “quality time.” What must we do to keep young children in the “zone,” motivated, involved, and ever advancing to new heights? Here is a brief recap of the communicative principles we have considered:

•Forge an adult–child relationship based on shared understanding, or intersubjectivity—one in which the adult strives to “connect” with the child by “stretching down” to his or her point of view, thereby helping the child “stretch up” to the adult’s more mature perspective. Intersubjectivity is essential for all successful dialogue.
•Oer a scaffold for mastery of tasks that teach culturally valued concepts and skills. Adjust the task to an appropriately challenging level, and tailor teaching and assistance to the child’s changing needs. While supporting the child’s eorts, ask questions and suggest strategies that help the child generate ideas and distance his or her thinking from the immediate features of the task. Turn over responsibility for the task to the child as soon as he or she can master it without assistance. Adult–child collaboration through scaolding promotes self-regulation and independent accomplishment.
•Communicate with high warmth, using a positive emotional tone and providing explanations and justifications for your expectations. When adult–child relationships are sympathetic and caring, children want to acquire skills and behave in ways that preserve those gratifying ties. They are also more willing to work toward goals that are rational and reasonable. Authoritative parenting, which combines the motivating power of warmth with the guidance inherent in scaolding, predicts many aspects of children’s competence.
•Engage children in narrative conversation about personal experiences, using an elaborative conversational style that poses many varied questions and that expands on the child’s statements. Through narrative, children build an autobiographical self permeated with cultural beliefs and values; come to understand that people have rich mental lives and may view the same events dierently; and acquire negotiation strategies for resolving disputes and getting along with others. Narrative conversation also fosters language development and emergent literacy, which greatly ease the task of learning to read and write when children get to school. 

Through dialogues with children, adults play a formative role in the development of children’s self-conceptions, sensitivity to others, cognition, academic knowledge, morality, social skills, and capacity to use language to gain control over thought and behavior. Can parents and teachers actually witness young children undergoing these social-to-psychological transformations? Let’s turn now to a consideration of children’s inner mental lives, as manifested in the dialogues they carry on with themselves. In the next chapter, I address a question that has long intrigued child development theorists and puzzled many parents and teachers: Why do children talk to themselves?