The presentation summarizes the past five years' research about the possible Narratives of Childhood outside of Europe. It aims to start a professional discussion on the importance of early years and adaptive child-centered pedagogical attitudes towards children worldwide. When we consider childhood as a globally understandable phenomenon, we base our ideas on research made in Europe or America; we need to understand deeper the structure and main drives of Asian and African Early Childhood settings. To understand children deeper outside Europe, we asked 4-5 year old Russian and Laotian children about their opinion on themselves and Malay Lao kindergarten teachers about their definitions of childhood. We compared the data with Hungarian children and colleagues in both cases.

James and Prout made the so-called social construction of the childhood paradigm (James & Prout 1997). This new paradigm has excellent potential in interdisciplinary research too. The authors claim that childhood is a variable of social analysis. Further, James and Prout state that children live in social circles, including their primary circle of family and their institutional circle (kindergarten or school). This paradigm implies the application of different narratives of childhood. Different views of childhood rely on various ethnic, social class, or gender perspectives. There are varieties of childhood, and childhood must be considered a universal phenomenon (Jenks 2015). This discourse stated that children are not passive examiners of their development, socialization, or simply adsorbing their environment but social actors.

Research questions were about the definition of the childhood of 4-5-year-olds and kindergarten teachers outside Europe and how it differs from the European perspective. Of course, we can expand the number of respondents and widen the spatial database. So far, we can compare to the Hungarian data from Europe.

The presented research uses the association method as well cognitive metaphor analysis. Metaphors can help us understand the deeper meaning of their narratives on the questioned stimuli. Our previous investigations focused on 4/5 years olds and 10/12 years olds records with a similar method; however, with the younger ones, we did an on-site survey during their free playtime (Endrődy et al. 2019, 2020, 2021). The association method is a widely applied scientific research method used in psychology/psychiatry for more than a century (Kent & Rosanoff 1910). In psychology and linguistics (Palermo & Jenkins 1964; Postman & Keppel 1970; Kiss et al. 1973; Moss, Older 1996), and proved to be a pivotal methodologic foundation of the Moscow School of Thought Psycholinguistics (Tarasov 1996; Ufimtseva 2014, Lénárt 2017). Utilizing the association method, linguists and interculturalists aim at gaining a clearer picture of the mental lexicon of the individual by scanning word associations given to preselected stimulus words (Endrődy et al. 2021). In each country, we had 100-100 respondents in each case. We choose this age group because 4-5 years are determined, relying on Early Childhood researchers’ belief that 4-5-year-old children are already able to express their feelings, create simple sentences, and explain the world surrounding them (Cole & Cole 2001).

The recognition of the importance of early childhood education (ECE) has been growing continuously in recent years. Early childhood institutions are where professional pedagogy and child-rearing practices meet first in someones' life (Tobin et al., 2009); it has great significance in education. Acknowledgment of the needs of young children's education is evident. However, we have limited chances to compare different education systems outside Europe and the United States. (Endrődy et al. 2021) As the outcomes of the research, we hope to understand teachers' and children's definitions of their primary social circle and their own lives. If we know it, we will create a more adaptive learning environment that enables children to develop and discover the world around them at their own pace.

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