Belonging as Yourself: Identity, Culture and the Difference Between Belonging and Fitting In

Which aspects of themselves and their lives do children identify as significant, and what happens to those aspects within nursery life?

As adults, we can be quick to describe the identities of young children. We might talk about their family, culture, home language or heritage, or describe a child as confident or cautious, sociable or independent, creative, physical, funny or determined. We notice their interests, the people who matter to them and the experiences they bring from home. Yet a child's identity cannot be reduced to any one of these things.

A young child's sense of who they are develops through relationships, experiences and participation in the different communities they inhabit. Family, culture, language and traditions may form important parts of this, but so too may being a brother or sister, particular interests and abilities, ways of communicating, relationships with people and animals, and characteristics children are beginning to recognise as their own.

This makes identity particularly interesting within our wider enquiry into belonging. Our exploration of place asked what meaning children give to the environments they inhabit, while our consideration of relationships asked what it might mean for a child to experience themselves as known, accepted and connected. Identity takes us towards another question: when we enter a community, do we simply learn how to become part of what is already there, or does who we are also contribute to what that community becomes?

Belonging as yourself

Research concerned with identity and belonging in early childhood places children's developing sense of self within their relationships, families, cultures and communities. Identity is not something a child brings into nursery fully formed, nor is it created entirely within the setting.

Language, culture, faith, family relationships, interests and experiences can all shape how children understand themselves. Children can belong to several communities at once, and the aspects of identity that appear most significant to an adult may not necessarily be those that matter most to the child.

This creates an important tension for Early Years practice: how do we recognise children's identities without defining those identities on their behalf? A child can too easily become representative of a language, ethnicity, family structure or perceived difference, rather than being encountered as a person whose identity has many dimensions. Recognising it therefore has significance beyond supporting communication or language development; it may also acknowledge an important part of the child's life and identity.

There is an important connection here with relationships. In our previous exploration of belonging, we considered what it might mean for children to experience themselves as known, accepted and connected. Identity takes one part of that question further. If being known matters to belonging, what does it mean to be known as yourself?

That must involve more than an educator knowing facts about a child's life. It raises the question of whether the aspects of themselves that matter to children are able to be recognised and valued within the community they have joined.

This begins to shift the question from whether children's identities are represented towards whether children experience themselves as recognised. Books, images, resources and displays reflecting different families and cultures can communicate who and what is valued, but representation alone cannot tell us whether an individual child experiences themselves as recognised within that community. Can a child truly belong if belonging requires them to become less recognisably themselves?

What children bring with them

If children's identities are shaped across the different parts of their lives, what happens to the knowledge and experiences developed in one part when they enter another? Research using the concepts of funds of knowledge and funds of identity offers a useful way of thinking about this. Rather than treating children's home and community lives as separate from their educational experiences, this work draws attention to the knowledge, practices, relationships and experiences developed across families and communities, and to the ways these can become resources for learning and identity.

This changes the question an Early Years setting might ask. Rather than simply considering, “What do we provide for this child?” we might also ask: “What does this child already bring, and what happens to it when they are here?”

For one child, this might include words and expressions from a language spoken at home. For another, it might be knowledge developed through cooking with a grandparent, caring for an animal, helping with a younger sibling or pursuing an absorbing interest. These experiences may appear ordinary precisely because they are part of children's everyday lives, yet they can contribute to the knowledge through which children understand themselves and encounter new experiences.

Language provides a particularly powerful example. A home language is not simply another set of words a child uses alongside, or while learning, English. It may carry relationships, humour, family stories, cultural knowledge and particular ways of communicating with people who matter to them. Recognising it therefore has significance beyond supporting communication or language development; it may also recognise a part of the child's life and identity.

Continuity between home and nursery need not mean trying to reproduce home within the setting. Children encounter different expectations, relationships and experiences across different parts of their lives, and those differences can themselves contribute to development. The more interesting question for belonging may be whether children's different worlds are able to meet: whether something known at home can be spoken about here, whether knowledge gained elsewhere is taken seriously, and whether children can bring aspects of their lives into the shared experiences of the group.

This leads us towards the more difficult tension at the centre of this enquiry. Every community develops shared expectations, routines and ways of doing things. Children inevitably learn some of these as they become part of nursery life. But when does becoming part of a community support belonging, and when might it begin to require a child to fit in?

Belonging or fitting in?

A child may become highly skilled at understanding what is expected of them: which language is usually spoken, how they are expected to communicate, what kinds of play are recognised, how emotions are expressed, or which interests and experiences find an easy place within the life of the setting. From an adult perspective, that child may appear to participate successfully. Yet successful participation alone cannot tell us what, if anything, the child has had to set aside in order to achieve it.

The concept of assimilation offers one way of examining this tension. Within literature concerned with culture and identity, assimilation describes processes through which participation in a wider or dominant culture can involve adapting towards its established norms, potentially at the expense of aspects of an individual's existing cultural identity. In Early Years practice, pressures towards conformity need not involve an explicit instruction to abandon a language, tradition or way of being. Expectations can be communicated more subtly through what is treated as normal, what receives attention, which forms of communication are most readily understood, and whose knowledge and experiences find an easy place within everyday life.

This does not mean that shared expectations are inherently problematic. Living and learning alongside other people involves negotiation, adaptation and learning ways of participating together. Nor can an Early Years setting reproduce every aspect of every child's home life. The more useful question may be whether adaptation works predominantly in one direction. Are children always learning how to enter the existing culture of the setting, or is that culture also capable of being changed by the children and families who become part of it?

This gives us another way of thinking about the relationship between individuality and community. Belonging does not necessarily require everyone to be the same. A community can have shared experiences, routines and values while still making room for different languages, histories, interests, relationships and ways of being. Indeed, the question for our enquiry may be whether children can experience themselves as both part of something shared and distinctly themselves within it.

For our enquiry, then, we do not want to begin by deciding what fitting in or belonging should look like. Instead, we can pay attention to the expectations embedded within nursery life and to what children themselves show and tell us. What seems easy for children to bring into the community? What appears to remain outside it? What happens when a child's experiences, knowledge or ways of being differ from those already established within the setting?

What might recognition look like to children?

The literature gives us useful ways of thinking about identity, but it also exposes a difficulty. Adults can decide that an environment is inclusive, that children's cultures are represented or that individual interests are recognised. None of those judgements necessarily tells us whether children experience themselves as recognised, or which aspects of their lives and identities are significant to them.

Our enquiry therefore needs to leave room for children to define what matters. Rather than beginning with predetermined categories of identity, we can create different opportunities for children to direct our attention towards what is significant to them through conversation, drawing, photography, play and the things they choose to show us. We can notice the people, places, knowledge, languages, stories, interests and experiences they bring into nursery life, while remaining open to aspects of themselves we had not thought to look for.

Families can offer another perspective on the experiences, relationships, languages and communities that form part of children's lives beyond nursery. Their knowledge can help us notice connections we might otherwise miss. But, just as an educator's perspective cannot define a child's identity, neither can a family's perspective stand in for the child's own. What adults understand to be significant may not always be what the child themselves experiences as significant.

We should not expect this enquiry to produce one model of what belonging as yourself looks like. Different children may place significance on very different aspects of themselves, and those meanings may change over time. Nor should an adult's interpretation of a photograph, drawing, choice of language or moment of play be treated as evidence that a child does or does not belong. These can become starting points for listening more closely to what children communicate about who they are and what matters to them — not conclusions to impose upon their experience.

At this stage, we do not know which aspects of themselves children will show us are significant, whether identity will prove difficult to separate from relationships, place and agency, or whether children will draw our attention towards aspects of their lives that our reading has not prepared us to notice. Retaining that uncertainty matters. If we decide in advance which parts of children's identities should matter, we risk hearing most clearly the things we were already expecting to find.

Perhaps that is where the distinction between belonging and fitting in becomes most useful. Rather than asking only whether children have successfully become part of our community, we can begin to ask whether there is space within that community for them to remain, and increasingly become, themselves.