INTERPRETIVE REPRODUCTION IN CHILDRENS PEER CULTURES

This paper addresses the lack of theoretical work on young children in sociology by presenting an interpretive approach to childhood socialization. This approach extends traditional psychological views of human development by demonstrating that socialization is a collective process which occurs in a social rather than a private realm. The interpretive approach argues that children, through their participation in cultural routines, creatively appropriate information from the adult world to produce their own unique peer cultures. This process of interpretive reproduction enables children to become a part of adult culture-that is, to contribute to its reproduction and extension-through their negotiations with adults and their creative production of a series of peer cultures with other children.