Parenting Across Cultures

There is a strong connection between culture and parenting. What is acceptable in one culture is frowned upon in another. This applies to behavior after birth, encouragement in early childhood, and regulation and freedom during adolescence. There are differences in affection and distance, harshness and repression, and acceptance and criticism. Some parents insist on obedience; others are concerned with individual development. This clearly differs from parent to parent, but there is just as clearly a connection to culture. This book includes chapters on China, Colombia, Jordan, Kenya, the Philippines, Thailand, Korea, Vietnam, Brazil, Native Americans and Australians, Argentina, Chile, Mexico, Ecuador, Cuba, Pakistan, Nigeria, Morocco, and several other countries. Beside this, the authors address depression, academic achievement, behavior, adolescent identity, abusive parenting, grandparents as parents, fatherhood, parental agreement and disagreement, emotional availability and stepparents.​

"This vital volume advances understanding of how parenting from childhood to adolescence changes or remains the same in a variety of sociodemographic, psychological, and cultural contexts, providing a truly global understanding of parenting across cultures.This vital volume advances understanding of how parenting from childhood to adolescence changes or remains the same in a variety of sociodemographic, psychological, and cultural contexts, providing a truly global understanding of parenting across cultures"--

This vital volume advances understanding of how parenting from childhood to adolescence changes or remains the same in a variety of sociodemographic, psychological, and cultural contexts, providing a truly global understanding of parenting across cultures. Through the Parenting Across Cultures project, the editors unveil findings from this hugely important comparative longitudinal study of parents and children in China, Colombia, Italy, Jordan, Kenya, the Philippines, Sweden, Thailand, and the United States. The volume offers insight into trajectories of parenting, exploring parents’ warmth, control, rules setting, and knowledge of children’s activities and whereabouts. Each chapter is authored by a contributor native to the country examined, guaranteeing an authentic emic perspective, and together the chapters provide a broader sample that is more generalizable to a wider range of the world’s population than is typical in most parenting research. Parenting Across Cultures From Childhood to Adolescence is essential reading for researchers and students of parenting, psychology, human development, family studies, sociology, and cultural anthropology, as well as professionals working with families.

This volume is concerned with elucidating similarities and differences in enculturation processes that help to account for the ways in which individuals in different cultures develop. Each chapter reviews a substantive parenting topic, describes the relevant cultures (in psychological ethnography, rather than from an anthropological stance), reports on the parenting-in-culture results, and discusses the significance of cross-cultural investigation for understanding the parenting issue of interest. Specific areas of study include environment and interactive style, responsiveness, activity patterns, distributions of social involvement with children, structural patterns of interaction, and development of the social self. Through exposure to a wide range of diverse research methods, readers will gain a deeper appreciation of the problems, procedures, possibilities, and profits associated with a truly comparative approach to understanding human growth and development.

This book explores diverse parent-child relationships from around the world, drawing on connections between culture and parenting values and challenges. It identifies parenting practices within various countries’ unique historical, political, and cultural backgrounds, reframing parenting as a cultural process whose goals are to encourage culturally-specific child behaviors and outcomes. Chapters focus on parenting research in a range of countries, such as Australia, Bolivia, China, Egypt, Guatemala, India, Rwanda, Namibia, Saudi Arabia, and the United States. Chapters also discuss social, emotional, and physical developmental topics throughout the lifespan, including infancy, early childhood, adolescence, emerging adulthood, and adulthood. Topics featured in this book include: The link between cultural differences in academic success to parents’ academic socialization practices. The impact of culturally-specific parental engagement in positive developmental outcomes in children. Transgender children and their parents. The relationship between religious and secular values and their influence on creating polygamous teenagers. How to implement a micro-cultural lens to studying parent-child relationships during emerging adulthood. Differences and similarities in grandparenting among different cultures. Parents and Caregivers Across Cultures is a must-have resource for researchers, professors, graduate students as well as clinicians, professionals, and policymakers in the fields of developmental and cross-cultural psychology, parenting and family studies, social work, and related disciplines.

Decades of research have demonstrated that the parent-child dyad and the environment of the familyâ€"which includes all primary caregiversâ€"are at the foundation of children's well- being and healthy development. From birth, children are learning and rely on parents and the other caregivers in their lives to protect and care for them. The impact of parents may never be greater than during the earliest years of life, when a child's brain is rapidly developing and when nearly all of her or his experiences are created and shaped by parents and the family environment. Parents help children build and refine their knowledge and skills, charting a trajectory for their health and well-being during childhood and beyond. The experience of parenting also impacts parents themselves. For instance, parenting can enrich and give focus to parents' lives; generate stress or calm; and create any number of emotions, including feelings of happiness, sadness, fulfillment, and anger. Parenting of young children today takes place in the context of significant ongoing developments. These include: a rapidly growing body of science on early childhood, increases in funding for programs and services for families, changing demographics of the U.S. population, and greater diversity of family structure. Additionally, parenting is increasingly being shaped by technology and increased access to information about parenting. Parenting Matters identifies parenting knowledge, attitudes, and practices associated with positive developmental outcomes in children ages 0-8; universal/preventive and targeted strategies used in a variety of settings that have been effective with parents of young children and that support the identified knowledge, attitudes, and practices; and barriers to and facilitators for parents' use of practices that lead to healthy child outcomes as well as their participation in effective programs and services. This report makes recommendations directed at an array of stakeholders, for promoting the wide-scale adoption of effective programs and services for parents and on areas that warrant further research to inform policy and practice. It is meant to serve as a roadmap for the future of parenting policy, research, and practice in the United States.

This research-based book covers the core components of modern parenting and child development across multi-ethnic and cross-cultural contexts in Asia, Africa, Europe, and North and South America, with a focus on the United States. Parenting and Child Development: Across Ethnicity and Culture is based on a cohesive framework that links physical, psychological, social, cognitive, and emotional aspects of children's lives to their experiences of parental behavior. This book covers the fundamentals of parent-child relationships, including the theoretical perspective of parenting, positive and negative parenting behaviors, and changing patterns of parenting from infancy through adolescence. Explored are parent-child relationships and their implications for children's health, well-being, and quality of life in different family forms, including parenting in drug-addicted families, homeless families, cohabiting families, single-parent families, and LGBT families around the world. Using an array of theories with relevant empirical findings, the practical implications for child development both within the United States and across the globe are highlighted. Also included is specific information about tools and techniques for measuring intimate relationships and intervention strategies for relationship problems.

The purpose of this book, is to present a rather simple argument. Parents' thoughts about childrearing and the ways in which they interact with children to achieve particular parenting or developmental goals, are culturally determined. Within any culture, children are shaped by the physical and social settings within which they live, culturally regulated customs and childrearing practices, and culturally based belief systems. The psychological "meaning" attributed to any given social behavior is, in large part, a function of the ecological niche within which it is produced. Clearly, it is the case that there are some cultural universals. All parents want their children to be healthy and to feel secure. However, "healthy" and "unhealthy," at least in the psychological sense of the term, can have different meanings from culture to culture.