Culture
In Indigenous Mayan communities of the Americas, children learn how to partake in adult activities through nonverbal communication. Children are able to learn in this manner due to their exposure to adult activities at a young age. At a young age, children intently observe and listen in on adult activities, and this helps provide them with a running knowledge on how to participate. As a result, when children take on adult activities for themselves the first time they do not need verbal communication in the form of directions from adults. They can learn how to do the adult activity themselves through physically participating in it. In fact, talk acts only as a supplement to engagement in an activity. For instance, when a child engages in adult activities, spoken communication can be used to explore ideas or discuss need-to-know information. Otherwise, caregivers and adults primarily help guide their children through an activity using non-verbal communication such as visual demonstration, gestures, gaze and touch.
Read more about this topic: Nonverbal Communication
Famous quotes containing the word culture:
“The hatred of the youth culture for adult society is not a disinterested judgment but a terror-ridden refusal to be hooked into the, if you will, ecological chain of breathing, growing, and dying. It is the demand, in other words, to remain children.”
—Midge Decter (b. 1927)
“We now have a whole culture based on the assumption that people know nothing and so anything can be said to them.”
—Stephen Vizinczey (b. 1933)
“It is not part of a true culture to tame tigers, any more than it is to make sheep ferocious.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)