"Why Are Little Kids in Japan So Independent?" - and what we can do to encourage similar attitudes in our society,

"What accounts for this unusual degree of independence? Not self-sufficiency, in fact, but “group reliance,” according to Dwayne Dixon, a cultural anthropologist who wrote his doctoral dissertation on Japanese youth. “[Japanese] kids learn early on that, ideally, any member of the community can be called on to serve or help others,” he says.

This assumption is reinforced at school, where children take turns cleaning and serving lunch instead of relying on staff to perform such duties. This “distributes labor across various shoulders and rotates expectations, while also teaching everyone what it takes to clean a toilet, for instance,” Dixon says.

Taking responsibility for shared spaces means that children have pride of ownership and understand in a concrete way the consequences of making a mess, since they’ll have to clean it up themselves. This ethic extends to public space more broadly (one reason Japanese streets are generally so clean). A child out in public knows he can rely on the group to help in an emergency."

The comments about this article from many different cultural perspectives and the explanations/critiques are of particular interest.

http://www.citylab.com/commute/2015/09/why-are-little-kids-in-japan-so-independent/407590/?utm_source=nl__link6_092915

Here is material related to the original study:

http://scalar.usc.edu/students/endlessquestion/index