Personal and social guidance in children's development. How youth personalize and (re)construct digital TikTok-practices.

This article explores how human development is constrained by collective and personal meaning-making processes. The empirical work of the study is grounded in interviews with children and educational staff at a Danish youth club and concerns children's selection, personalization, and (re)construction of various "TikTok-trends" through the digital media, TikTok. With empirical examples from both the children and the educational staff, the analytical work is anchored in James Mark Baldwin's theoretical conceptualization of persistent imitation. It will be argued that children's persistent imitation is guided by and may diverge from historical and cultural meanings with a twofold attention to the "TikTok-community" and the educational staff. Here, the notion of "inappropriate" imitation, or development, will be unfolded as a resistant meaning construction in the tension field between what is being promoted by the collective and what is imitated by the child. Following this, it will be argued that the social guidance creates developmental ruptures and stability during ontogeny.