ABSTRACT
Childhood socialization involves children's acquisition and use of social interactive and communicative skills and social knowledge in their everyday life worlds. This chapter identifies and describes stable elements of peer culture in the nursery school. It discusses the significance of features of peer culture for understanding children's social development, and, more generally, the significance of the concept of peer culture for socialization theory. The chapter addresses how specific experiences resulting from participation in peer culture may affect the children's acquisition of interactive skills and social knowledge. Of all the rules of nursery school, the ones most actively resisted by the children pertained to proper behavior during clean-up time. Many of the rules the children encountered in the nursery school were the same as those they followed at home. The identification of features of peer culture is important for reasons beyond their implications for the children's social development.
