A Day in the Life: Secure Interludes With Joint Book Reading

A Day in the Life is an interdisciplinary study of thriving 2-year-old girls and their families in diverse communities around the globe. We understand development to be active participation in cultural systems of practice, and examine children's interactions with their caregivers, other companions, and the environment. We focus upon children engaged in their everyday activities, attending to the patternings of local interactions that constitute cultural activity, as well as inter-articulations between the values and understandings shaped and reshaped in the day with those formed in dialogue among research participants. A crucial element of the project is the full participation by local investigators. Our core methodology films a day in the life of each child, tracking the child through her landscape. We have observed nurturant interactions in all settings where we collected our data: Thailand, Canada, Italy, the United Kingdom (UK), Peru, the United States (USA), and Turkey. Likewise, we have separately examined the various joint book-reading experiences of the children in those settings. In this article, we observe the bidirectional place of affect in joint book-reading episodes of children with different adult partners, and inspect the potential for such emergent literate activities to contribute to strong affective relationships between the children and family members.