Abstract
Like many globalised urban cities, Singapore is a consumer society – a social system shaped by the production and consumption of commodities. Through a cultural studies framework, this article utilises ethnographic data of children’s peer culture to raise questions about the child–adult binary and developmentalism that tends to govern educational thought and practice in Singapore. Drawing from the talk and action of a group of 4- and 5-year-olds and parent interviews, this article sheds light on how a group of preschoolers and their families actively wrestle with similar processes of ‘being’ and ‘becoming’ within a consumer society, albeit in their own terms. In creating a peer culture of shared experiences, the children exchange personal facts and knowledge of cultural symbols, inadvertently including and excluding certain peers in such dialogues. This investigation reveals children’s creative appropriation of their family’s consumer culture in the process of connecting with peers. I pursue an argument emphasising the need for adults to acknowledge and respect young children as interpreters of societal culture and as agents in their own learning; to rethink assumptions of young children as ‘innocent’, ‘vulnerable’ and ‘incompetent’, and adults as ‘knowledgeable’ and ‘in control’.
Introduction
Singapore has provided an interesting case study of national human capital development through its multiple strategies of general education in schools and workforce training for adults (Osman-Gani, 2004). There is also a belief that ‘the right type of pre-school education can better produce educational outcomes with social and economic benefits in the longer term’, although early education should not be overly formalised (Ministry of Education, 2010). In a small country with little natural resource, all human beings, including children are constructed as human capital to be continually educated so that there will be a productive and relevant workforce to drive the country’s economy and to ensure its survival in the global marketplace (Goh and Gopinathan, 2008; Ministry of Education, 2010). Such a paradigmatic view assumes that without being developed and educated, children cannot contribute to society for they are considered immature and incapable. The government reminds its citizens regularly of the need to remain economically competitive through increased innovation, productivity and constant workforce skills upgrading and professional learning (Lee, 2014; Tharman, 2015). Thus, education generates income for individuals, for their families and for the country.
Within such an ideological context, many Singaporean families place a great deal of emphasis on their children’s educational attainment and achievement. Adults’ understanding of children’s needs is anchored in a developmentalist view. As the nation becomes more affluent, families’ demand for private tutoring has generated what Tan (2012) termed a ‘shadow education system’ and is an industry that earned more than SG $110 million in profit (Toh, 2008). Ebbeck and Gokhale (2004) reported that parents who enrolled their preschooler in ‘play-based early childhood programmes’ in a childcare centre or kindergarten also supplemented their child’s learning with academic-oriented enrichment programmes offered by commercial agencies. Recent findings from a survey study commissioned by the Early Childhood Development Agency (ECDA, 2014) indicated that 36% of 3800 parents had enrolled their child in at least one enrichment programme. 1 This demonstrates the general belief among Singaporean adults that young children must be prepared for the academic rigours of formal schooling. This belief has created an ‘educational arms race’ (Gee, 2012) that further divides rich and poor children years before they even enter primary school at age 7. In its concluding observations, the 56th session of the United Nations (UN) Committee on the Rights of the Child commended Singapore for the ‘sustained excellent level of health indicators’ (p. 11) and the ‘high level of academic excellence delivered by the school system’ (p. 12) but was also concerned that the ‘highly competitive nature of the education system may impose undue stress and prevent children from developing to their full potential’ (p. 12).
Singapore continues to positively negotiate and work towards developing a comprehensive national plan of action for the implementation of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC). But one of the most challenging and fundamental shifts in mindset remains necessary – for Singaporeans to think of young children as active persons who are also learning and participating as citizens. Warrier and Ebbeck (2013) have found that while children are frequently present in Singapore’s television advertisements because they capture audience attention, they are largely portrayed as passive subjects receiving nutrition, health and educational interventions. While it is undeniable that children need to grow healthily as biological beings, be cognitively challenged and emotionally secure, the act of reducing a child into a mere health or education project can limit our understanding of the child’s social agency and dynamically shifting needs as he or she interacts with the world in his or her own terms.
The typical Singaporean view of childhood is not unique. It has been influenced by a Western scientific developmental perspective which has tended to construct ‘child’ as inferior to ‘adult’: To the extent adulthood itself is valued as a symbol of completeness and as an end-product of growth or development, childhood is seen as an imperfect transitional state on the way to adulthood, normality, full socialization and humanness. This is the theory of progress as applied to the individual life-cycle. The result is the frequent use of childhood as a design of cultural and political immaturity or, it comes to the same thing, inferiority. Much of the pull of the ideology of colonialism and much of the power of the idea of modernity can be traced to the evolutionary implications of the concept of the child in the Western worldview. (Nandy, 1987: 57)
To counter such a narrow construction of young children, this article is framed by an interdisciplinary cultural studies lens that acknowledges young children’s agency in their everyday meaning making and social practices within cultural contexts that are influenced by mass-media, commercialism and consumerism (Buckingham, 2011). Such a cultural studies lens is aligned with scholarship originating from the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies which was known for its concern with the relationships between particular cultural practices and broader processes of social power (around race, class and gender) and how individuals and groups reproduce, resist and interpret cultural texts and practices (Hall, 1992). It is concerned with concrete everyday practices and involves the social creation of shared meaning(s). In this article, the focus is on daily consumption practices of children and adults. Such a cultural studies lens provides yet an opportunity to raise questions about the existing child–adult binary that governs much educational thought and practice (Cannella, 2002) especially in Singapore’s competitive consumer society. The next section provides more elaboration on this study’s particular cultural studies lens.
This article is based on an ethnography of children’s peer culture in a typical childcare centre 2 in Singapore. Data presented here emphasise the children’s self-initiated conversations while presenting excerpts from parent interviews. Together, these data aim to illustrate how young children and adults wrestle with similar processes of ‘being’ and ‘becoming’ within a consumer society, albeit in their own terms. The analysis and discussion adds to literature focusing on how young children as thinkers and citizens negotiate and participate in the social world (Corsaro, 2005; James et al., 1998). Refuting views that ascribe young children a lesser position as immature beings in society, this article calls for young children to be recognised for their participation as social actors who shape their own learning and development in the same complex world that we all negotiate as adults. Children take the initiative to actively make sense of the world by interacting with their physical environment, their peers and significant adults in their lives. And within particular socio-economic and cultural contexts, they negotiate issues that also trouble adults – such as, materialism, consumerism, illness, death, competition, failure, prejudice and discrimination.
In the field of early childhood education, numerous scholars in the reconceptualist movement (such as Beth Blue Swadener, Marianne Bloch, Gaile Cannella, Celia Genishi, Valerie Polakow, Gunilla Dahlberg, Jonathan Silin) have already discussed the limitations of creating or relying on ‘master narratives’ (Lyotard, 1984) informed solely by psychology and a narrow construction of child development. Instead, these scholars are in favour of building a constructive knowledge base that is informed by multiple disciplines to match the complex, dynamic and diverse nature of childhood(s). This article contributes to this effort by shedding light on an aspect of urban and globalised childhood that is not often discussed in the early childhood education literature – how children and adults live, learn and relate to one another in a material and consumer culture.
Children and consumer culture: A cultural studies approach
Singaporean children live in a society of material and consumer culture, in a nation with one of the highest Gini coefficients indicating a high level of income inequality (United Nations Development Programme, 2011). As the nation becomes more affluent, Singaporean families have increased their spending on goods and services. The most recent national household survey in Singapore showed that household expenditures for all income levels rose an average of more than 4% a year over the 5-year period between 2008 and 2013; in particular, middle-income families spent the most, mainly on better quality and more expensive products and services (Department of Statistics, 2014). New shopping malls are built every year, and the typical Singaporean family visits these air-conditioned malls as a weekly family ritual (Chua, 2003; ECDA, 2014). This is not a phenomenon that is unique to Singapore, Ritzer (2010) had coined the concept of ‘cathedrals of consumption’ to describe the brick-and-mortar mega-stores and malls that enchant American consumers. Despite a widening gap between rich and poor, Singaporeans use credit cards extensively (Euromonitor, 2008), are enthusiastic shoppers at home (Chua, 2003) and the wealthier ones shop overseas as well (Piron, 2002). Alongside window shopping and buying, Singaporeans who can afford to do so enjoy eating out and engaging in online purchasing activities (Henderson et al., 2011; Teo and Chan, 2015).
It is widely known that the rise of the modern consumer society runs parallel to the rise of capitalism, and these processes have fashioned a social system that is made up of producers and consumers (Arendt, 1998; Bauman, 1988; Slater, 1997). Consumption, therefore, is a daily reality of capitalism and is a natural part of life in many cities. And because contemporary childhoods are embedded in a world of commercial goods and services, children are consumers from birth, through their families’ expenditures (Buckingham, 2011; Cook, 2008). And yet, children have mostly been left out of academic research and theories on contemporary consumer and material culture (Cook, 2008; Martens et al., 2004). Instead, much of the early education research that exists is underpinned by a view of children’s growth and learning that is normative, universal and takes place apart from contextual material and consumerist influences. And traditional developmental psychologists and social psychologists that have investigated consumerism have largely focused on correlational or causal effects of the market on human behaviour or examined the socialisation of consumers. Academics who have studied consumer culture and the relationship between children and media have created a somewhat polarised view of these childhood phenomena (Buckingham, 2011). Some scholars have focused on producer-led approaches to investigate the power that marketers and corporations have over innocent children and youths, through the promotion of violence, sex, gender stereotypes and junk food (e.g. Linn, 2004; Postman, 1983; Schor, 2004). In contrast, other scholars have focused on consumer-led approaches that have underlined consumers’ creative agencies and presented an argument that regardless of age, consumers are not all that vulnerable or passive after all (e.g. Cook, 2008; Seiter, 1993).
Set apart from all this existing research, and framed by a cultural studies perspective, this article contributes towards an emerging third view – consumption as a socio-cultural practice (Buckingham, 2011; Nash and Basini, 2012; Pugh, 2009, 2011). Consumer culture, is therefore, understood as a meaning-making site where the adult/child binary is blurred because parents and children find themselves engaging and negotiating with the market and with their peers on a daily basis (Buckingham, 2011; Pugh, 2009). Regardless of age, human beings living in industrialised settings are likely to be surrounded by consumer culture. Within such a culture, individuals continually refine their own identities, find ways to differentiate themselves from others or find ways to belong to a peer group through the material goods they own; and they try to make sense of how to relate to one another within such a culture (Chin, 2001; Norris, 2006; Pugh, 2009).
Consumption is, therefore, not just expenditure or an instrumental act of buying what we need but an expressive act that allows individuals to continually shape and share with others their distinctive status (Bourdieu, 1984). The act of shopping, is what Miller (1987) considered a ritual of sacrifice in terms of time and energy and an act of thinking through the needs and wants of household members. Therefore, consumption is a natural part of parent and child relationships as well as children’s and adults’ peer relationships (Buckingham, 2011; Miller, 1987), but is relatively under-examined. Children’s purchase choices have been found to counter to their parents’ class-based style and tastes, as well as to legitimate gendered differences (Seiter, 1993). However, children as consumers are not a homogeneous social group who are all impressionable and inclined to be socially pressured by marketers or their peers. Rather, they are as diverse as adults in terms of developmental understanding, abilities, sense of agency and experience with material and consumer culture (Martens et al., 2004). Nevertheless, children often depend on their parents’ disposable income to be able to participate in material and consumer culture (Buckingham, 2011; Lindsay and Maher, 2013) and going by Bourdieu’s (1984) theory of how society reproduces itself through social, cultural and symbolic capital, children are likely to be influenced by their parents’ consumer and aesthetic choices. Pugh (2009) has highlighted how consumer culture creates inequalities in children’s peer culture. She studied how groups of children (aged 5–9) in three ethnically and economically different after-school programmes created and participated in what she termed ‘economies of dignity’ which had ‘their own scrip, or meaningful tokens, their own norms about managing children’s conversations, and their own processes of negotiating value’ (p. 52), and how they practised ‘facework’ as a strategy to remain connected to their peer group and keep up a dignified appearance in front of their peers even when faced with socio-economic inequalities and differences.
Along with the ‘interpretive reproduction’ that Corsaro (2005: 110) found in his study of preschoolers’ peer culture, this article aims to shed light on how a group of young children observe, listen, adapt, interpret and actively learn to connect with others and construct their own identities even when the larger material and consumer culture sometimes determines the children’s interactions and perpetuates social inequalities. Such a cultural studies and sociology of childhood approach focuses on the ways in which meanings are established and circulated, an extension from that of psychological research which focuses mostly on effects, behaviour and attitudes.
Methodology and research site
The data presented here are drawn from a larger ethnographic study of a group of preschoolers’ peer culture in a childcare centre. Childcare centres in Singapore cater to children from 18 months to 6 years old. I had chosen Twinkle Care Centre (TCC) because of the diverse demography that it catered to – it was located in a 30-year-old public housing estate and yet was within a 5-minute drive from private landed property and newly built condominiums. TCC therefore served a handful of children who were on maximum government financial assistance, the majority from middle-income families, and about 10% from high-income families. I observed a classroom of 24 children (aged 4–5) during a period of 6 months for 5 days a week, collecting field notes, photographs taken by the children, and audio recordings of conversations to document and analyse the children’s social interactions. The families of this group of children ranged from being unemployed to earning about SG $120,000 annually per household (top 20% of earners in the resident population).
On average, I observed for about 3–4 hours per day, mostly in the mornings and focusing largely on times unstructured by the teachers – child-initiated talk and activity during free play times, transitions, breakfast and lunch times. In order to observe the children’s play from as close a distance as possible, I chose to be a participant observer playing the ‘least-adult’ role (Mandell, 1988) and I employed a reactive strategy (Corsaro, 2003) that allowed me to join in the children’s activities only when they invited me to do so. Prior to the start of my daily observations, I had obtained informed consent from the teachers and parents, as well as assent from the children. The children knew I would have my jotter book, audio recorder and camera and understood that they had the freedom to tell me if they did not want to be photographed, audio/video-taped, or observed on any given day. They were receptive to having me around, and it was a privilege for me to have, within the first week of my daily appearance at the centre, the children called me jie-jie (‘older sister’ in Mandarin) and became comfortable having me listen in on their conversations and joining in some of their play. Throughout my fieldwork, I kept a researcher’s journal and focused on documenting whole episodes of the children’s conversation and action and these became the units of analysis. The start of an episode usually began when the children beckoned me to join them, and the end of episodes was usually indicated by a change of activity when the children physically moved away from one another.
Like many childcare centres, kindergartens and schools in Singapore, TCC required its children to put on a uniform. At this centre, it was a polo T-shirt for both boys and girls, with shorts for the boys and skorts for the girls. TCC offered a bilingual curriculum for the children, albeit only English and Mandarin. While Singapore has an ethnic Chinese population of more than 70% and Mandarin was self-reported as the most frequently spoken home language for over 35% of the residents aged 5 and above (Department of Statistics, 2011), the country is a multilingual and multi-ethnic nation with English as working language but not a first language for most families. TCC is a childcare centre catering to Malay, Indian and other non-Chinese families as well, but it did not have language teachers to cater to non-Mandarin speakers. The children in TCC were encouraged to use the English language as far as possible, unless they were conversing with the Mandarin language teachers. As a result, many of the children’s conversations were in informal Singlish (the creole version of English spoken in Singapore), sprinkled with Mandarin and Malay words.
Given the scarcity of local research on preschool children’s free play and peer cultures, the main focus of my study explored this key question, ‘How do the children relate to one another through self-initiated episodes of talk and play?’ Whenever the children let me in their self-initiated activities, I jotted down or audio-recorded their conversations, friendly repartee, jokes, confrontations, idle boasts, secret whispers, songs and chants. The jottings and transcriptions were expanded into memos and field notes with thicker description, to be coded and analysed (Emerson et al., 1995). To better contextualise the children’s in-school participation, I offered them access to a camera that they could take home and photograph whatever they wished to share with me. And I also individually interviewed parents that volunteered their time to speak with me about their parenting values, woes and aspirations.
In this article, I present a juxtaposition of children’s and parents’ consumer culture narratives to more clearly demonstrate how children and adults negotiate with peers in a society that revolves around commodities and paid educational services within Singapore’s commercialised early education landscape. These narratives are intended to be thought-provoking so as to encourage more educators to recognise the need for socially just approaches in centre-based early care and education settings that cater to children from diverse socio-economic and cultural backgrounds.
Analysis: Material and consumer culture in the children’s and adults’ lives
This section is organised around three sub-themes: (a) the children’s sharing of personal facts and cultural tokens, (b) inclusion and exclusion in a consumption culture, and (c) how parents negotiated consumption desires for and on behalf of their children. The children’s narratives are presented with parents’ interview data to juxtapose similarities and differences found in the children’s and adults’ negotiations with consumer culture.
Sharing personal facts and cultural tokens
Throughout my fieldwork, I observed this group of 4- and 5-year-olds exchange knowledge about popular culture through their pretend role play. And in their self-initiated conversations, they often talked about the material goods and out-of-school experiences that their parents provided for them. Material possessions included stickers, toys, bags, umbrellas, stationery, water bottles and other paraphernalia, as well as more expensive items such as the cars that their parents drove, birthday parties, Sunday breakfast at McDonald’s, holiday travels, weekend excursions, and various types of enrichment and tuition classes in which they were enrolled.
On a daily basis, popular superheroes and cartoon characters were enacted in their free play; they spiced up breakfast table chatter, and appeared in the children’s drawings. These characters were all derived from children’s television shows and movies – Batman, Spiderman, Fantastic Four, The Mighty Morphin Power Rangers, Smurfs, Power Puff Girls, Spongebob, Popeye the Sailor, and Dora the Explorer among others. In my fieldwork, I observed both boys and girls engaging in superhero play, particularly with the Power Rangers (both gender) and Power Puff Girls (just the girls) persona. While this article does not focus on the children’s fantasy play, my fieldwork confirmed what studies have already documented about children’s appropriation of commercial and popular culture in gendered and superhero play activity as well as their literacy learning (Dyson, 1997; Kostelnik et al., 1986; Marsh, 2000; Paley, 1984; Parsons and Howe, 2013).
Instead, I share in this article the children’s conversations that evolved around personal facts, cherished tokens and popular culture. Such conversations helped the children connect with one another and helped them create a shared peer culture surrounding popular culture – ‘the stuff of everyday sociability’ (DiMaggio, 1987: 444) and discussed by anthropologists as cultural objects with shared social meaning (Douglas and Isherwood, 1996). More often, it would be the girls who would chit-chat at the drawing table or breakfast table and ask at random about the things they had at home – these could be particular DVD titles or books, stickers, toys, or hair accessories; and the conversations could also revolve around how someone was waiting for her mother to buy her a different coloured hair band, preferably a ‘shiny one, like Princess Aurora’s’. Some conversations took place by the cubbyholes with children comparing and admiring school bags. On rainy days, the girls would talk about the kinds of umbrellas they had or wished to have – Barbie Doll, Dora, Nemo, Rapunzel and other Disney princesses. At times, the teachers had to mediate between children having a tiff over lost possession, or when a child accused a peer of taking her sticker or hairclip from the open cubbyholes. In particular, there was a group of four girls who were frequently involved in such disputes, and here is an instance when one of them came to me a day after she had lost a sticker: Walking into the breakfast room, Tania smiles at me, holds up the back of her right hand to show me a shiny blue and silver sticker stuck on her skin. See, 姐姐, I have Cinderella princess. Nice? I also have this at home. I have Snow White also. And Bubbles [of Powerpuff Girls]. You cannot take this, okay? Why I want to take? I have at home! If I drop this then I tell teacher and teacher will ask the person to give me back. I won’t cry one.
For Tania and four other girls, stickers were valuable currency, to be exchanged or given away on a regular basis. So conflicts would arise occasionally whenever one of them dropped or lost a sticker during the course of their day at the centre. And depending on how generous they felt on a particular day, these girls may give away stickers to any number of their peers, who may or may not appreciate them. For this group of girls, the most precious stickers were brightly coloured ones of princesses or the Power Puff Girls. A few of the girls even created pretend stickers out of little pieces of paper, with hand-drawn motifs comprising heart shapes and stars.
Of the 13 boys in this group, only Ethan was particularly fond of talking about the things his parents and grandparents had bought him. Ethan lived with his younger brother, parents, paternal grandparents, a live-in domestic helper, a brown Norwich Terrier and some Japanese koi in their garden pond. The family spoke mainly English at home and were part of just 6% of Singaporean residents who lived in a house (Department of Statistics, 2015), and both parents were university graduates and top 20% earners in the population. Here is an illustrative anecdote from my field notes, one of numerous occasions when Ethan volunteered information about what he owned: One Monday morning shortly after I arrived at the center, Ethan notices and dashes over to me offering the latest news in his life. 姐姐 [‘big sister’ in Mandarin], I have Incredibles bag! Oh good morning Ethan, how are you? So, you have a new bag? Yes, Incredibles bag. Mommy and daddy buy for me at the, at the market there (pointing in a direction). I also have the 小叮噹 [xiao-ding-dang originally known in Japanese as Doraemon] sop. Did you say ‘soup?’ Or ‘soap’ for washing? Yes, er … soap (he says it louder this time). Use to wash hand. You press and the, and the 小叮噹 hand will go like that (he raises both arms to the side). Oh, it’s in a bottle? Yes. (He smiles and then walks away, satisfied that he has conveyed the message to me).
From my first days at the centre, I remembered Ethan because he was the only child who introduced himself to me and said, ‘I have a Spiderman water bottle’. On another occasion, he whispered to me that he had an Incredibles handkerchief and said, ‘But my mommy ask me not to bring … but, but I will show you tomorrow, okay?’ Ethan really kept his promise and managed to sneak the handkerchief into his pocket before going to school, when his grandmother was not noticing. All through that day, Ethan kept pulling out his handkerchief to examine, touch and feel. It seemed to give him immense joy and satisfaction.
Ethan was one of nine children who voluntarily took my digital camera home over a weekend. When he returned on the Monday morning, he was eager to show me all the photographs he had taken. He did not talk much about each individual photo, wanting instead to keep clicking the camera to show them all to me as quickly as possible. A few other children came over to look at them with me, but somehow, they were not interested and walked away soon after. There were a few photographs of himself and of the adults in his home, but the majority of the photos were of objects. All the photographs were of things that he owned, food he ate, pets at home, and things he did – they included a close-up picture of a box of Honey Stars cereal, a few photographs of some eggs, peanut butter and bread, several of his tricycle, television screenshots of Kids Next Door, a photograph of Thomas and Friends cup and placemat, Lion King pictures on his bedsheet, posters of The Incredibles and Chicken Little on his bedroom wall.
While no other child was as verbal about his possessions, Ethan was not alone in wanting to share with me photographs of artefacts related to popular culture. A total of 45% of the 483 photographs that the nine children had taken with my camera were focused on symbols of their material childhoods and screen shots of television shows they watched at home. These photographs provided evidence of material and popular culture in their out-of-school lives – the stuff of contemporary childhood in Singapore’s consumer society.
Some of the children’s conversations were about what their parents owned. And these were again conversations that not all children were able to join in: Ivan looks over Candice’s shoulder to see what she is drawing. He decides not to comment, and instead, announces to the table, ‘My daddy buy a new car! It’s a, it’s a Toyota. Toyota Wish. Can sit six people!’ Candice looks up to clarify immediately, ‘You at home have six people?’ No, have five. But the car can have six people. Oh. What color [is the car]? It’s grey. No. It’s silver! My daddy’s car is also silver. VERY big with a TV inside – small TV. Ivan looks at her wide-eyed and decides not to utter another word, almost as if he is not sure what to say in response. He moves away to get something from the cupboard.
In this episode, Candice did not join in this particular conversation other than clarify if Ivan had six people at home because her parents did not own a car, she was an only child and her family only had three people. Candice’s parents had lower secondary education and their household income was below the median. Mimi’s and Ivan’s parents, on the other hand, were middle-income earners. Mimi was quick to dovetail Ivan’s fact-sharing because her family’s car was also silver in colour but it had an added feature of a video player, and surprised Ivan who remained speechless and moved away from the conversation. Notice that Ivan had replaced the word ‘grey’ with ‘silver’ because the children were generally enchanted by all things bright and shiny. A silver car certainly sounded much more pleasing and impressive than a grey one.
Inclusion and exclusion in consumer-driven peer culture
There were similar kinds of exchanges around enrichment and tuition classes that individual children attended on a weekly basis, usually on the weekends. Tim once brought his piano book to show his teachers and friends what he was practising. While none of his peers took piano lessons, a handful of them could share about other kinds of lessons – ballet, art, Mandarin language, and Chinese dance.
Singapore schools have emphasised the importance of all-round achievement in the name of children’s holistic development and respect for diverse abilities rather than just academic excellence. Many Singaporean families have bought into the need to expose their young child to a wide range of learning experiences alongside academic pursuits (Ebbeck and Gokhale, 2004; ECDA, 2014). The Prime Minister himself has even described tuition as a ‘minor national obsession’ with ‘parents and students still stressed about tests and key examinations’ (Lee, 2014). Consistent with such a competitive culture, enrichment classes are the kind of commercialised experience that some young children would encounter and therefore tell their peers. While these paid experiences are similar to the topic of a visit to the zoo, theme park, or science centre, weekly tuition classes become a regular feature of more affluent childhood(s). But like the children’s talk that is centred around consumer objects and popular culture, these extra educational experiences simultaneously include and exclude children in the creation of peer culture – those who share similar experiences are able to connect and exchange information while those who do not have these experiences are inevitably excluded. Unlike the older children in Pugh’s (2009, 2011) study, however, this group of preschoolers infrequently engaged in ‘facework’ to present a more dignified public self when faced with social difference and exclusion. Pugh (2011) expanded upon Goffman’s (1967) idea of facework, defining it as ‘the impression management that involves the presentation of an self’ (p. 10). In her ethnographic work with children of different social classes, Pugh (2011) reported five types of facework process: ‘bridging labour’, ‘claiming’, ‘patrolling’, ‘contesting’ and ‘concealing’ (p. 10). Five-year-old Rokiah used contestation (Pugh, 2009, 2011) as a form of facework to challenge the peer group’s dominant sense of aesthetics. Here is a description of her background and an anecdotal example of how she had introduced her peers to traditional Malay ethnic dress as a way to counter and contest their ideas of beauty and glamour: Rokiah was of Malay-Indian ethnicity and Muslim religious background. She was often seen listening in on the other children’s talk about princesses, material culture, and watching their superhero play with great interest but was unable to join in. She was one of three children in this group who were enrolled in a government-sponsored preschool and social services scheme for at-risk and low-income families. Comphonorableared to most of her peers, Rokiah came from a more complex family background. Both her parents had been afflicted by AIDS and her mother had passed away three months after she started attending childcare. Her father worked odd jobs and would sometimes drop her off in the mornings. Some of the other children would comment that her father looked ‘very skinny’. Mostly, Rokiah was seen with her grandmother, arriving and leaving the centre. She had a positive demeanor and patiently observed her peers. She always had a bright smile and frequently tried to communicate in the English language. She often sat on her own, drawing or playing, while observing the other children from the corner of her eye. She often asked me to read her a book, or played with Siti if she was at the centre. Rokiah and Siti were the only non-Chinese children in this particular group of 4-and-5-year-olds and they were rarely included in the other children’s talk and play. The teachers explained that this was possibly due to the fact that many of the other children had been together at the childcare centre since they were three years old, whereas Rokiah and Siti only just joined them, and were initially very irregular in their attendance. Both girls spoke less English than the other children and did not speak Mandarin. Here is an anecdotal account of a time when the children were supposed to be dressed in home clothes for a pretend birthday party celebration. It was Rokiah’s third month at the centre and she had grown more confident. With her cropped hair and often un-ironed uniform that a few of the other children noticed, she listened in frequently on some of the girls’ talk about princesses. On an occasion, one of the girls was dressed as Snow White for her birthday celebration at the centre and all the children could not take their eyes off her and kept praising her looks. A month later, the teachers asked the children to put on their home clothes for a pretend birthday party and Rokiah saw her opportunity to wear a conversation piece. It was an attempt to connect with the other children as well as contest the usual Disney ‘princess’ aesthetics: Rokiah is dressed in an ankle-length, pink-coloured, long-sleeved baju kurung [traditional Malay dress] and a big toothy smile on her face. ‘Jie-jie, nice?’ She walks past me, pointing to her dress. And she also asks her teachers and peers for their comments. ‘Nice!’ Jenny and Ching Yi both say admirably. ‘Don’t know’, Sam says in a nonchalant manner. And this tickles Rokiah who laughs. ‘Jie-jie, he don know! Sam don know!’ she quipped. ‘Eeee, not nice’, Tania says in a firm but quiet voice. ‘She don like, jie-jie’, Rokiah becomes visibly annoyed, walks away, rolls her eyes, and complains to me.
While Rokiah was unhappy with Tania’s comment about her traditional dress, she was unperturbed. Overall, Rokiah carried on with her day, generally pleased with her attempt to create an opportunity to bond with the other children, and to introduce her home culture. From my field notes, this incident was one of a few successful attempts on Rokiah’s part to be noticed and accepted by the other children. By the time my fieldwork ended, some of the other children had started including her in their play.
Petite in size with a pixie haircut, Tania had a particular taste for what she considered to be stylish and princess-like. She drew pictures of princesses with long hair and short-sleeved dresses decorated with heart shapes and flowers, she was the smallest eater in the group and often talked about eating less so she would be slim like her mother, and she was envious of friends who were allowed to have long hair. Tania’s parents were protective and anxious for her not to have any scratches or bumps in school. They were busy working parents who relied on a domestic helper to walk Tania to the centre and to walk her home at the end of the day. Tania’s family was among one in six Singaporean households that hired a live-in domestic helper (Ministry of Manpower, 2006). Tania was often one of the first children to arrive in the morning at 7 a.m. (opening time) and one of the last children to leave at 7 p.m., the centre’s closing time. In her peer exchanges and through her regular need to critique her peers’ looks and material possessions, Tania exhibited what Bourdieu (1984) considers as a bourgeois need for social distinction, to be achieved through an everyday cultivation of particular aesthetic taste and preference. In her learning to ‘become’ an adult, she had embraced very particular ideas of what it meant to become princess-like in her choice of food, drink, mannerism and clothing. In this way, commodities went beyond a utilitarian value to shape her thinking about culture and relationships (Douglas and Isherwood, 1996).
Parents’ desires
More than external regulators of their children’s purchasing desires, parents are partners in their children’s consumption because they buy things to show their care and affection, and sometimes out of guilt as time-pressed, working adults (Cross, 2004). Affluent and educated parents are not only in a better position to acquire material goods and enriching educational experiences for their children, they can purposefully shape the social context of childhoods (Pugh, 2009). Middle-class parenting style in the United States has been described as concerted cultivation of children’s abilities through the provision of a busy and expensive schedule of private tutoring and organised sports (Lareau, 2010). The teachers in my study had admitted to me that they were not always confident in facing parents who were more highly educated, knew what they wanted for their children and were more articulate than they were. Teachers mentioned that half the group had at least one enrichment.
While most of the parents that volunteered to meet with me spoke candidly about their desires for their children, they refrained from critiquing the centre’s staff or programme because most of these parents worked full-time and needed childcare service. Only one of the parents, Maggie, talked at length about her displeasure with the centre’s social environment because she felt that it had a negative influence on her daughter’s conduct and use of the English language: The teachers have to have the right level of [language] proficiency […]. I saw this thing in her exercise book that day […] It’s grammatically wrong! But I cannot tell the teachers [directly] it’s very sensitive. It is very sensitive. Also, even if I point it out, it won’t change the proficiency level of the teacher. It’s just one [error], there would be other things that they communicate to the child. Even at home, when I tell her sometimes, ‘No, you don’t say it like that’, and she retorts, ‘but my teacher says that!’ All these [incidents] are catalysts. All the negative incidents. I mean, I like [her friends] Ching-Yi and Jenny, and I find that they’re very cute and very active, very sociable. I think they’re pretty bright. They’re intelligent. But the class culture is such that there are Indian chiefs and followers. My daughter [is a follower and] has learned to kick people and she shakes her leg […] like a gangster, you know. She’s very unbecoming. I want her to be a lady as she grows up. […] I don’t know, I shouldn’t compare her with my peers’ children, but, I think she can do better. I guess I’m getting influenced by my peers because many of them are around my age, (also my husband’s peers have young children) so we’re comparing schools and all that.
Maggie eventually moved her daughter from TCC to a more well-known and commercial preschool. She represents many Singaporean families with the financial ability to act upon their desires for their children’s future. While she spoke respectfully of the teachers, families, and children at TCC, she implied that the peer culture, use of Singlish, and the teachers’ language competency were not what she had wanted for her daughter. As Singaporeans become more educated and affluent, their expectations for their children shift towards ideals that may differ from what typical not-for profit centres in public housing estates may offer. Such typical centres in Singapore tend to cater to a diverse mix of social classes, including children and teachers who are not likely to speak much English at home. While some families may be able to choose to pay more to enrol their child in more expensive commercial preschools with teachers who may be native English language speakers, many families may not have such a choice. And this is how social inequalities continue to widen among children and their families, perpetuated by Singapore’s privatised and largely commercialised early childhood landscape.
Candice’s mother, Mrs Lee, had slightly different concerns about her daughter’s education and character development, but she managed to find an intervention in the form of an out-of-school Chinese dance group to supplement Candice’s centre-based educational experience. Mrs Lee is less well-to-do than Maggie, but equally resourceful and determined to raise her child in accordance with her own values. This is an excerpt of the interview transcript, originally in Mandarin: I grew up in Malaysia. I find Singapore quite Westernised and liberal nowadays, and many families do not teach their children moral values anymore. I see how teenage girls behave on public buses with boys, it’s very scary. This is why I want to spend money to enrol Candice in a Chinese cultural dance class. It is not expensive. The teacher is in her forties or fifties, is from China and she not only introduces the children to Chinese culture and dance, she also teaches them moral values such as respect for elders, filial piety, modesty, how to collaborate with others in a group. And the Chinese dance culture is not like the western popular culture where girls move in sexy ways and put on skimpy dresses. I don’t want my daughter to become too Westernised.
Maggie and Mrs Lee, while of different educational backgrounds, both had the resourcefulness and the resolve to intervene in their daughters’ education. Of the two women, Maggie had higher educational qualifications, spoke comfortably in English and earned more while Mrs Lee was more conversant in Mandarin and was a Malaysian-born Chinese who grew up in a less urban environment and valued traditional Confucius thinking about filial piety and female modesty. Both wanted to create a social learning environment that was more aligned with their own parenting values – Maggie wanted her daughter to speak proper English and behave like a ‘lady’, and Mrs Lee wanted her daughter to learn traditional Chinese cultural values to counter Singapore’s ‘Westernised’ culture.
Other parents talked about other kinds of parenting struggles within a consumer society. Here is an excerpt of my conversation with Ethan’s mother, Ling: I think it’s society […] It’s the environment. Singapore is a first world nation. It is very much connected with the rest of the world. It’s modelled after western economic development model […] and that in itself is a key factor that shapes the environment around the children. What they are exposed to, in terms of the media, and how they interact with people around them. […] I was very surprised when Ethan, even at age three-and-a-half, exhibited a very nonchalant attitude towards [his] belongings […] he doesn’t seem to think that if you have something, you take care of it, and hopefully you will preserve it so it stays with you longer. He doesn’t have that. If it breaks, it breaks, and sometimes he makes it break because mummy and daddy will buy him something else […] he will say things like, ‘Oh it’s okay, you can buy me another one, right?’ […] We are getting a lot more conscious about this and we tell him, ‘No, it doesn’t mean that if you break this, we will buy you another one. You have to take care of it’. So that’s the approach we are consciously now doing on a consistent basis. And we are trying not to buy things for him so often now.
Within a consumption-driven culture, Ling was learning how to become a good parent by attempting to tame Ethan’s consumerist inclination. Not unlike Maggie and Mrs Lee, Ling also had an idea of what she thought was desirable for her growing child within Singapore society. She was surprised by his early conception of callous and wasteful consumption, and she was aware that her child had started associating his parents’ gifting of material goods as proof of their care and love for him. At the time of the interview, Ling felt it was important for Ethan to learn to treasure what he had and not take his material possessions for granted.
Discussion and conclusion
Consumption is an inevitable way for children and adults to participate in urbanised and globalised social worlds. In capitalist economies, all children are born into a world of commodities through their families’ desires and negotiations with consumer culture (Buckingham, 2011). And this phenomenon has been present for centuries (Cross, 2004) so there is no need to be pessimists blaming 21st-century marketers for invading innocent childhoods. The findings presented in this article have demonstrated how childhood in Singapore is regulated by consumption-driven peer culture within a competitive society and inevitably leads to unequal childhood(s). Children’s everyday chit-chat about material possessions and preferences can easily be taken-for-granted as mundane and mindless, but cultural studies scholars view these as an important part of how they interact with existing notions of social distinction and class (Bourdieu, 1984). While consumption is a daily necessity, ‘consumption is [also] about power, but power [that] is held and exercised in many different ways’ (Douglas and Isherwood, 1996: 62). And as Bourdieu (1984) posits, not everyone within a society has access to the very knowledge, experiences and tastes that will lead to success in schooling and careers.
The narratives in this article have demonstrated that young children’s peer culture is not so innocent when shaped by the material and popular culture that their families consume (Cross, 2004; Lindsay and Maher, 2013). This study’s data have shown that children’s consumption choices and desires reflected their families socio-economic status and values and individual children had the agency to act on their growing knowledge of social status and taste. For instance, one can see how Ethan’s affinity towards material things may have been influenced by a home with an abundance of possessions and well-to-do parents. Tania’s view of princesses could well have been shaped by a protective and comfortable home environment with a live-in domestic helper who walked her to and from school and always carried her bag for her. Candice and Rokiah, both from less privileged home backgrounds, were often unable to join in their peers’ conversations about family cars, newly bought possessions, weekend outings, and family holidays. In addition to her atypical family structure, her encounter with death in the family, and her non-Chinese cultural and linguistic background, Rokiah was especially new to all her peers’ conversations about stickers, bags, toys, princesses and popular culture. But she had the agency to make sense of her peers’ shared culture and to counter influence with her own cultural heritage. Consumer culture is in the air that children breathe and is at the heart of questions pertaining to what kind of society we are, in the ways in which we allow money and market relations to shape our everyday lives and human relationships. While it may seem mundane to some adults that young children’s peer culture is anchored in their own ‘scrip or meaningful tokens’ (Pugh, 2009: 52), it is important for educators to recognise how children’s peer culture-in-the-making relates to existing consumer culture and localised socio-cultural contexts. Children interpret and appropriate social and cultural processes found in society. With their peers, they use material objects and cultural tokens to co-construct their own social worlds, to fashion a peer culture that is communal and collective, yet is as inherently exclusionary and unequal as that which is found in adult-created society.
The parents’ interview transcripts have also shown us how adults in Singapore wrestle with becoming rational consumers as they learn to be ‘good parents’ to their children. These narratives extend from the dominant notions of child-as-human-capital, and child-as-immature beings to highlight how consumer socialisation is not a linear progression towards becoming rational consumers in adulthood. Adults in this study showed us how they had been regulated by consumerist culture, learning to consume educational services and products as they interpreted educational policies and primary school expectations, as well as responded to peer pressure and media messages that shaped assumptions about what being a responsible parenting in the Singapore context. As highlighted by Popkewitz (2003), ‘the successful parent is a pedagogical one’ (p. 53), and in Singapore, some parents clearly think they need to be savvy consumers in order to ensure their child’s educational success. In this study, parents with the means exercised their choice by transferring their child to another preschool. Parents who did not have the means to change preschools found other inexpensive ways to enrich their child’s learning and development according to their preferred values.
I conclude with two major points as implications for early childhood educators. First, early years’ curricula and pedagogies must regard and respect young children as social agents and consumers learning to ‘be’ and to ‘become’ (just like their parents). Second, understanding how children’s daily interactions and ongoing identity constructions are shaped by consumer culture broadens our traditionally one-dimensional developmentalist view of how they come to understand the world and connect with others.
By observing and understanding the ways in which marketisation has shaped family lives and contemporary childhood(s), we can become more attuned to the social inequalities that exist in children’s peer relations as they also occur within an adult-created consumer society. Educational processes involving young children and their families must include their present-day interests and concerns and not become disconnected from the tension and ambiguities that accompany human living and learning. We must see that consumption inequalities can lead to inequalities of children’s futures (Chin, 2001; Pugh, 2009). Thus, we must try to advocate for adults to understand children’s mundane, everyday struggles with a competitive and consumption-driven peer culture, and go beyond catering to a checklist of school readiness tasks.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
My heartfelt thanks to the children, teachers and families, without whom this study would have been impossible; and to Kaoru Miyazawa for many conversations. I would also like to thank the editors of this journal and two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.