I'm writing this on the last day of the year in 2006 and thinking back to some time in the autumn of 1989 when the idea for the research to be reported in this book was very new. It wasn't supposed to take so long, and I wasn't expecting that what began as an intended comparison of the everyday lives of young children in the United States and the Soviet Union would develop a life of its own. But my initial reasoning hasn't changed much. Then, as now, I felt that there was a real lack of knowledge about how young children spent their time, engaged in what sorts of activities, interacted with whom, and got involved in the myriad aspects of their lives. This was an important lack, because one of the ways in which we can understand how cultures influence children's developments and how, in turn, children influence their own development (and in so doing help change their cultural group) is by focusing on these types of typically occurring activities and interactions. It's not that we don't have any information about this topic, but most of the good observational work that we do have is restricted to the lives of children growing up in rural areas of countries often referred to as “Third World” or “developing,” rather than to the lives of children in North America, Europe, or other parts of the industrialized world.