RULES AND ROUTINES

exchange JULY/AUGUST 2010

Reprinted with permission from Exchange magazine.

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Cultural responsiveness and routines:

When center and home dont match
by Janet Gonzalez-Mena

Janet Gonzalez-Mena
is an infanttoddler expert
with an MA
in Human Development
who studied with Magda
Gerber and in Budapest
at the Pikler Institute.
She wrote Honoring
Differences: Diversity in
Early Care and Education
and also Dragon Mom
about herself as a parent.
She is a co-author of
Infants, Toddlers, and
Caregivers.

The center is always talking about time! complained

a Native American mother to me when I was visiting
the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque.
What do you mean? I asked, eager to understand.
Well, they have this schedule up on the wall and its
all about time. First theres breakfast time, then circle
time, then snack time, then outdoor time. . . . See what
I mean?
Oh, I said waiting for more.
And they always announce it that way Nap time!
they say to the children. Or Its time to go outside.
That doesnt feel comfortable to you, I said, hoping to
hear what the problem was.
Well, thats not the way we organize our lives at home.
Its more of a rhythm, a free flow and has nothing to
do with time. She paused, We just do what we feel
like and we dont have a schedule. We dont go by the
clock! Whenever I look at the paper on the wall, Im
thinking that Im supposed to have a schedule at home
like they do in the center and that just doesnt work for
me or my family!
I wasnt able to pursue this issue further, but I urged
the mother to talk to the director; I hope she did. Perhaps they were able to sort things out between them.
I didnt observe in the program so I wasnt able to see
if there was pressure to stick to the schedule. I dont
know if teachers kept referring to the clock on the
wall, or their watches. I dont know if they really did
expect the mother to have a schedule at home as she
had suspected. Its possible that what she perceived
as a problem was just an issue of a language difference.

This same issue came up when I was working with a

Spanish-speaking staff member back at the beginning
of my career. As the English-speaker on the staff who
was trained in ECE, I was the one with the terminology
and it all had to be translated into Spanish. We ran
into difficulty because the routines of the program all
had the word time connected to them and this didnt
make any sense in Spanish.
These two incidents got me thinking about time and
how it works in my culture European-American
culture. Then I discovered Edward T. Hall who wrote a
whole book about cultural differences in time called
The Dance of Life: The Other Dimension of Time
(1984). It occurred to me that the problem was that
my culture puts a strong focus on time not just on
clocks, but on the concept of time as a commodity
as something real that can be lost or saved. I spend
time like I spend money. Sometimes I waste it, too.
Not everybody in the world looks at time that way.
The very title of Halls book gives a clue to the way the
mother I talked to saw time as a dance of life. What
we call routines and add the word time to them
was for her a rhythm, a dance her daily life!
As a person especially interested in infant/toddler
care and education, Ive done a lot of thinking about
routines, schedules, and rhythms. I have been writing
about infant-toddler caregiving for a long time and
am pleased that I can now recognize areas of cultural
specificity - that is, specific to my culture areas that
the field pretty much agrees on. We dont see the standards and regulations of the field as culturally based,
but they are. We think of our profession as based on
research and the basic ideas as universal. We may
also consider cultural differences, but we dont think
of the whole profession as culturally specific. Ive
learned to ask the question, who did the research and
on whom?

PHOTOGRAPH BY BONNIE NEUGEBAUER

42

Beginnings
Workshop

Certainly as a mother I thought my children needed

some kind of schedule; if not by the clock, at least
a sequence of happenings that made a routine we
could predict and depend on. I thought they needed
a sense of order to give them security, and if they
didnt have it naturally, it was up to me to give it to
them. As a preschool teacher, I learned I was right: It
is important for childrens cognitive development that
they learn about sequence. What I didnt learn was
that different cultures have different ideas about time,
clocks, routines, and maybe sequence.
So the question with the mothers concern over the
centers schedule, as compared to the routine she
had at home, was perhaps resolved by the director
and the mother sitting down and talking to each other,
exploring their different concepts of routine, schedule,
and the relationship to time and clocks. Its quite possible that they could come to some kind of understanding that didnt involve compromise. Perhaps the
words were getting in the mothers way, and maybe
if she had observed she would have seen the day as
more of a rhythm or a dance than she thought.

RULES AND ROUTINES

43

JULY/AUGUST 2010 EXCHANGE

This quote from Ruth

Anne Hammonds new
book, Respecting Babies:
A New Look at Magda
Gerbers RIE Approach,
gives us a way to look
at a daily routine that
doesnt mention time.
Hammond sees daily
routines as a structure
rather than a schedule
and explains, Routine
provides a framework so
that each day need not
be a new invention, but
is an opportunity to fine
tune ones orientation to
the world. It takes on the
spirit of beloved ritual
which nurtures relationships as much as bodies
(2009, p. 43).
I wonder if the mother in the opening scene had
talked to Ruth Anne, would she have gotten a different perspective? Is it possible for a center to conceive
the daily routine as beloved ritual even though theres
still a schedule posted on the wall? It might be. Can
the director convey the message? Of course, if the
teachers are always looking at their watches and then
at the schedule, the message is a different one.
The word routine comes from the same root as route,
meaning a traveled way. So far I have been using the
word to mean what happens every day. But the word
can also mean the different activities that happen
during the day. Lets look at one particular routine
nap or rest time. This is one routine that has a variety
of cultural perspectives, but for many of the European-American culture the idea of the independence of
the individual is intertwined with sleeping.
In a workshop at one of the World Forums where
many of the participants came from outside the
United States, the discussion was about sleeping
practices. I was curious to know how naps look when
independence isnt a strong cultural mandate and
co-sleeping is common practice. I said to the group,
In the United States there are strong pressures to get
children to sleep alone from infancy on. Regulations
require that children nap alone in child care programs
in the United States. Then I asked the group what

Beginnings
Workshop

That doesnt mean that were all in agreement on the

question of schedules and routines for babies and
young children. That issue has long been debated
among people of my culture, but in general most
programs have some kind of schedule, even if they
allow babies and older children their individual
rhythms within it.

The word
Pull
Quote ?
routine comes
from the same
root as route,
meaning a
traveled way.

RULES AND ROUTINES

exchange JULY/AUGUST 2010

Beginnings
Workshop

44

I always
appreciate
when early
childhood
staff and
administrators
can suspend
judgment
long enough
to try to
understand
a perspective
that may not
be theirs.

they did in child care programs when children werent

used to sleeping alone at home. There was silence in
the group. Someone murmured the word licensing. Another mentioned sanitation. Finally, a man from Japan
explained that in his program the children all slept on
futons on the floor. And then he kind of grinned and
admitted that if they pulled the futons together the
teachers didnt pull them back apart.
Its sometimes hard to talk about cultural differences
in some routine caregiving activities because of the
standards, rules, regulations, best practices, and
health concerns that those trained in ECE know about
(and are judged on).
Eating is another routine where accepted practice
emphasizes independence and self-help skills over
neatness, manners, and not wasting food. When
in a workshop I show a picture of a baby in a high
chair feeding himself with his hands (and making a
big mess) sometimes people in the group will make
a disgusted face or laugh nervously. But when I ask
them to make a list of what this mother would say
about why this is a good way to feed her baby, they
can offer up to 20 advantages to
this approach. Then when I show a
mother spoon-feeding her four year
old, they gasp and are silent. I ask
the same question, What would this
mother say about why this is a good
way to feed her child? The response
is quite a contrast to their response
to self-feeding. Some people suggest
that the child is severely disabled and
cannot feed herself. I assure them
she has no disabilities. Others will
hesitantly throw out some guesses
like, Maybe the relationship is important. Sometimes participants cant
hold back a critical tone when they
say, Well, its neater! Ive discovered that even the people who were
spoon-fed themselves (one person
admitted up to second grade) know
that it goes against best practices,
so they hesitate to take the mothers
point of view and explain the cultural difference. Only once in a while
will someone speak up and give a
number of reasons that this is a good
practice in some cultures.

I always appreciate when early childhood staff and

administrators can suspend judgment long enough to
try to understand a perspective that may not be theirs.
Thats an important first step to getting in tune with
families. Thats not to say that one must throw out
judgments forever. Some practices are indeed harmful. However, it may be difficult to determine whats
truly harmful to a particular child in a particular family
from a culture that may be different from ones own.
Of course, some practices are illegal and we all have
the responsibility to follow the law. Still, theres usually
some wiggle room above the bottom line. Through
further conversation it may be possible for a program
to increase its cultural responsiveness so that the routines of the center match better with the ones at home.

References
Hall, E. T. (1984). The dance of life: The other dimension of time. New York: Anchor Books.
Hammond, R. A. (2009). Respecting babies: A new look
at Magda Gerbers RIE Approach. Washington, DC:
Zero to Three.