Comparing Childhoods : PBS series visits 12 families around the world to see how we are shaped

Documentary producer Geoff Haines-Stiles may have hit on the ultimate PBS series. Its subject is one every viewer can relate to. In fact, he said, “Just about everybody thinks they’re an expert on the topic.”

Haines-Stiles’ “Childhood” is a new seven-part series that journeys from infancy to adolescence. Using theories from psychology, anthropology and history, the series explores what influences child development and personality. Some of the results may surprise even those who thought they knew it all.

“We were wondering about past and current theories about how children get their ideas, how do they become what they become as they grow up,” said Haines-Stiles, who began work on the series in 1985. “We also wanted to view kids in a real-world context. Often, scientific research has looked at children in laboratories. This series is a nice reminder that there is this ongoing interaction between us and our environment.”

“Childhood” uses footage from 12 families in Japan, the Soviet Union, Brazil, Cameroon and the United States. By following the families through as much as 18 months of filming, viewers experience the tiny dramas that happen to all children--learning to communicate, participating in rites of passage--and see real-life examples of how children form their world views.

One episode, for example, “Life’s Lessons,” looks at the first day of school in different countries.

“In Japan and Russia, there’s a good deal of ceremony associated with the first day of school,” Haines-Stiles said. “Kids in those cultures know that adults take education really seriously.”

The result, he said, is that those children absorb the importance of education better than do their American counterparts.

“Childhood” not only shows how environment affects development, but also discusses the biological factors that form personality, said Jerome Kagan, professor of developmental psychology at Harvard University, and one of six experts who appear throughout the series. Parents may be surprised to learn in the first episode that basic aspects of a child’s temperament--”whether he’s fearful or sociable,” said Kagan--are present from birth.

“The main message of the series is that in order to understand the growth of any child, you must appreciate the family in which it grows, the neighborhood in which it lives and the values of the culture in which it develops,” Kagan says. “But it also says, here are the characteristics all children have because of the species we’re born into.”

“Childhood” airs Monday at 8 p.m. on KCET and KPBS, Monday at 9 p.m. on KVCR and Saturday at 6 p.m. on KOCE.