Parents And Caregivers Across Cultures

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.

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.​

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 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.

Family caregiving affects millions of Americans every day, in all walks of life. At least 17.7 million individuals in the United States are caregivers of an older adult with a health or functional limitation. The nation's family caregivers provide the lion's share of long-term care for our older adult population. They are also central to older adults' access to and receipt of health care and community-based social services. Yet the need to recognize and support caregivers is among the least appreciated challenges facing the aging U.S. population. Families Caring for an Aging America examines the prevalence and nature of family caregiving of older adults and the available evidence on the effectiveness of programs, supports, and other interventions designed to support family caregivers. This report also assesses and recommends policies to address the needs of family caregivers and to minimize the barriers that they encounter in trying to meet the needs of older adults.

One doesn’t have to travel extensively to realize that there are intriguing differences in the ways in which people from different cultures tend to behave. Gartstein and Putnam explore whether these differences are shaped during the early years of life, at the moment when children are just beginning to understand how, when, and why they should express some emotions, and not others. Based on the findings of the Joint Effort Toddler Temperament Consortium (JETTC), which asked parents from 14 different countries multiple questions regarding their main goals and techniques for raising children to be successful in their culture, Gartstein and Putnam analyze how children’s characteristics (both normative and problematic) are shaped by different cultural environments. Drawing from insights in anthropology, sociology, and developmental psychology, the book explores the full spectrum of human experience, from broad sets of values and concerns that differentiate populations down to the intimate details of parent-child relationships. The results reveal a complex web of interrelations among societal ideals, parental attempts to fulfill them, and the ways their children manifest these efforts. In doing so, they provide a revealing look at how families raise their young children around the world. Toddlers, Parents, and Culture will be of great interest to students and scholars in temperament, cross-cultural psychology, parenting and socioemotional development in early childhood, as well as professionals in early education, child mental health, and behavioral pediatrics.

This supplemental text presents cultural differences relevant to all caregiving settings (day care, nursery, and preschool programs). Daily caregiving routines and objectives are stressed throughout, with emphasis given to the practical and immediate concerns of the caregiver. The book promotes sensitivity, communication, and problem solving as keys to providing what children need according to their individual development, their parents' beliefs, and the beliefs of the caregiver. Learning to communicate across cultures, even when a common language is not shared, is emphasized.

The role of parents in education has become increasingly important today. This book puts parent-child relations in a historical and cultural context to help undergraduate students understand that there are important similarities and differences in parent-child relationships across cultures. This approach allows students to see how culture and family variations, as well as age and gender, are related to parent-child interactions at each stage of life. The text also features in-depth coverage of parenting strategies. These are covered early in the book to set the stage for the later chapters that focus on parenting at different stages of development. These strategies provide guidance for parents as well as for professionals working with children and their parents or other caregivers. Each chapter now includes learning objectives, critical thinking questions, and a list of useful websites. A new glossary of key terms has also been added. This new edition has an increased emphasis on the various contexts of parenting as well as more examples and personal quotations from parents and children in various family circumstances. This text prepares students to integrate theory, research, and technique while working with parents and children in various family contexts.