Routines in the Peer Culture of American and Italian Nursery School Children

Although the importance of the influence of peers and the peer culture has long been seen as a central feature of the socialization process, there have been few direct studies of interactive processes in the peer culture. This article reports on a comparative study of nursery school children in the United States and Italy and identifies and discusses the importance of basic routines in the peer culture of young children for their development of communicative skills and social knowledge. The analysis explores the possibility of universal features of young children's peer cultures and develops an interpretive perspective of childhood socialization. From this perspective, the peer culture of preschool children is viewed as involving the children's continual communal attempts to grasp and control a social order that is first presented to them by adults but that eventually becomes their own reproduction.