Growing up Global: Economic Restructuring and Children's Everyday Lives Book

It is written by a faculty at CUNY who travels to a small village in Northern Sudan and also observes children's lives in Harlem. Her distinctions between the two cultures are really interesting, specifically surrounding the idea of environmental knowledge. In a small village in Sudan and something I noticed in The Gambia, children don't really ask 'why' questions the way they do in industrialized cultures. In these children's lives in this small village, there is no such thing as abstractions- children learn about the environment from their everyday experiences. Whereas children in the U.S. learn about nature and the environment through abstract ideas and teaching methods.

The book is also a fascinating insight into how capitalism can rapidly change a culture, and how it opens up entirely new standards of wealth that weren't there before. I saw this in The Gambia too. Who had the nicest cell phone, the bigger house- it was not so different all of a sudden, from life in America. A fascinating finding was that counterintuitive to what one might think, family wealth is not related to child labor, in fact children of families who have higher wealth oftentimes do more labor, as poor families lack resources to keep children working. The biggest barrier to children attending school (which again is what I saw in Gambia) was that it takes away from family labor contributions.

Another interesting observation which really sticks with me is that of children's play and work. In the small village, children's work was very playful and childrens play was very serious. I noticed this exact same pattern in The Gambia. The two overlap so that they become indistinguishable. In play children learn about the social world. Often in play children would play "house" - like cook or wrap a baby on to their back. Similarly, the children in The Gambia would often pretend to be professional drivers often yelling out the stops- 'Brikama! Westfield!'

The book is a powerful insight into globalism and capitalism. But more than anything, I loved her descriptions of childhood in Northern Sudan.