Children's thoughts and attitudes in China and Sweden: impacts of a restrictive versus a permissive environment

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Abstract
– With a restrictive‐permissive hypothesis as a frame of reference, the aim of this explorative study is to obtain knowledge about the socialization process, i.e. how children in Sweden and China come to behave in accordance with cultural values and what the price is of this development. 273 school children (about 11‐12 years old) from six cities and 49 preschool children (age 6‐7 years old) from 10 cities in China are compared with a Swedish sample (329 and 48) from a single community. The Swedish school children came from both outskirt and central areas. Despite acknowledged limitations, the overall findings confirm two hypotheses: 1) Chinese children learn to a higher extent to control their emotions than Swedish children, and 2) Chinese children learn to orient towards collective norms as opposed to Swedish children who are more individualistically oriented,