A cultural connection or growing pains?

So I just couldn't stay away from blogging after I stumbled across this article the other day by based on a study out of the University of California Riverside, examining how lessons vary from culture to culture in picture books. The results were recently published in Journal of Cross Cultural Psychology examing a list of "learning-related" values and checked to see how often the books promoted them. The values included setting a goal to achieve something difficult, putting in a lot effort to complete the task and generally viewing intelligence as a trait that can be acquired through hard work rather than a quality that you're born with.

The researchers then studied picture books from the United States, China and Mexico to see how the lessons varied and how frequently each appeared in books from the different cultures. Researchers found that a heavy theme of these values appeared twice as frequently in the books from China as those from the United States. Further, books from the United States more prevalently had a theme or message about happiness.

You can read further into the study yourself, but I can't say, based on the books that I read and my own findings that I'm much surprised by the fact that there is a notable difference between the themes and messages in the books from place to place. I found that MANY times in all my reading.  I think that goes back to the idea of children and what role they play in each of those societies.

Another thought did strike me, though, based on what I found about the Children's book industry in China, back from when we talked about My Grandmother Lives In A Perfume Village. It was there that I learned that the children’s book market in China is a rapidly expanding industry, largely unrecognized until about the past fifteen years.  I'm wondering if this has anything to do with the content of the books being created and then researched in this study.  If you consider the texts that were first produced for children in England and America, they were extremely didactic in nature and leaned heavily on morals and teaching a specific lesson via the story.  I am curious if this is similar to the growth period for the industry in China.  As it is still evolving, is it experiencing similar growing pains as it attempts to define what children's literature means to the culture there?  I think as the study suggests, the culture itself plays a large part, but I'm wondering if as more and more books are produced in China if the strong moral bent to their literature for children will start to shift over time.  Definitely something to consider for a future rabbit hole ;-)