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Another Style Of Competence: The Caregiving Child, Carolyn P. Edwards

Department of Psychology: Faculty Publications

This chapter discusses child and sibling caregiving as an opportunity for the learning of nurturance and responsibility. The argument is based on case examples from ethnographic material, that children in multiage dyads or groupings negotiate constantly with one another and thereby reveal their reasoning about rational and conventional moral rules. The observational material is drawn from the work of Carol R. Ember (1970, 1973) who studied children in a Luo community of about 250 people in the South Nyanza district of Kenya. This community, referred to as Oyugis (actually the name of the market town 2.5 miles away, is one …