Cultural Approaches To Parenting

Marc H. Bornstein

• Publisher: Psychology Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781138967045
• eBook ISBN: 9781134766574
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Developmental Psychology
• Index: Psychology

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.

1

Approaches to Parenting in Culture

Marc H. Bornstein

National Institute of Child Health and Human Development

Introduction

Human beings, who are at once uniquely and commonly endowed, experience widely varying conditions in growing up. For example, children’s immediate social networks vary from one culture to another, thereby dramatically influencing socialization and enculturation patterns. Presumably, cultural variations in the various domains of childrearing exert significant and differential influences over mental, emotional, and social development of children, just as variation clearly dictates the language children eventually speak. Whiting and Child (1953) developed this essential idea in their seminal study Child Training and Personality, arguing that modal developmental behaviors could be linked to different cultural treatments if it could be assumed that consistent individual relationships mediated society–wide effects. They found—and it is widely accepted—that parents in different cultures adopt some similar, as well as some different, approaches to childrearing, and that parenting is a principal reason why individuals in different cultures are who they are, and are often so different from one another.

Further, it is a truism of contemporary psychological study that the cultural contexts in which children are reared constitute central, yet often neglected, factors in developmental study. Cultural Approaches to Parenting is concerned with elucidating similarities and differences in enculturation processes that help to account for the ways in which individuals in different cultures develop.

Motives for Approaching Culture in Parenting

The scope of developmental psychology embraces both description and explanation of the nature of human behavior over the life span. Among the many perspectives from which to pursue these twin charges, the cross–cultural developmental method of comparison occupies a significant position because it encompasses the full spectrum of human variation across a worldwide context and over a lifespan ontogeny.

The rationales for cross–cultural developmental study are many. Lay and professional people alike are perennially curious about human growth and behavior in other cultures. Social inquiry has as a matter of course almost always invited reports of alternative childrearing practices. One of the classic instances of one culture’s over–the–shoulder interest in the parenting style of another is the legendary Athenian reverence for, and perhaps idealization of, traditional Spartan childrearing practices (French, 1977, 1990). Among the Greeks, Xenophone and Aristotle expressed special fascination with the Lycurgan system of training youth in Sparta, called the agogé. Their histories compared child management systems and documented how the Spartans intentionally set about developing a disciplined and obedient, self–denying and competitive, physically tough and mentally austere generation of young adults who confidently met and endured the harsh existence of the Peloponese. Xenophon, an Athenian who lived at the turn of the 4th century BC, specifically contrasted Spartan with other Greek childrearing practices in the Constitution of the Lacedaemonians of 380. Likewise, Aristotle’s lost essay on Education is thought to have compared childrearing and child management in Sparta with family practices in other local cultures. Later, in his “Life of Lycurgus” and throughout the Moralia, Plutarch also focused on Spartan childrearing.

Comprehensive description of cultures is prerequisite to formal explanation of cultural phenomena:

If children are studied within the confines of a single culture, many events are taken as natural, obvious, or a part of human nature and are therefore not reported and not considered as variables. It is only when it is discovered that other peoples do not follow these practices that have been attributed to human nature that they are adopted as legitimate variables (Whiting & Whiting, 1960, p. 933).

Further, epistemological inquiry has provoked many philosophers, following Bacon and Descartes, to ponder the origins and development of mind and morals under varying rearing conditions. Romantic fancy, like Rousseau’s “noble savage,” springs from considerations of development in the context of alternative cultures. Historical commentaries, such as those of De Toqueville and Spengler, have explored the psychological characteristics of a society that are, as Compte speculated, inculcated by one generation in the next during childhood. All of our more direct forbearers in psychology—Darwin, Freud, Piaget, Skinner—dwelt on the question of cultural approaches to parenting.

From the perspective of more formal inquiry, the disciplines of anthropology, sociology, and psychology have also attempted to approach the study of human development cross–culturally because of the unique and extraordinary power that this perspective is thought to furnish social scientific analysis (e.g., Bronfenbrenner, 1970; Erikson, 1950; Kessen, 1975; LeVine, 1977; Montagu, 1974; Munroe & Munroe, 1975; Werner, 1979; Whiting & Whiting, 1960). For example, many theories postulate that individual aptitude and performance capacity form in early life. Psychoanalytic theory, learning theory, and ethological theory all place a strong emphasis on early childhood experiences as determinants of adult patterns of behavior. In these views, childhood training also exerts a significant influence on the values, attitudes, and behaviors of whole communities.

We are not saying here that their treatment in babyhood causes a group of adults to have certain traits—as if you turned a few knobs in your child–training system and you fabricated this or that kind of tribal or national character. … We are speaking of goals and values and of the energy put at their disposal by child–training systems. Such values persist because the cultural ethos continues to consider them “natural” …. They persist because they have become an essential part of an individual’s sense of identity, which he must preserve as a core of sanity and efficiency. But values do not persist unless they work, economically, psychologically, and spiritually; and I argue that to this end they must continue to be anchored, generation after generation, in early child training (Erikson, 1950, pp. 137–138, emphasis added).

Cross–cultural developmental comparison also provides unique opportunities to test specific social–scientific hypotheses or predictions, to evaluate the generalizability or constraints on phenomena of interest, and to generate new hypotheses. Notable in this connection are the variety and value of unique information cross–cultural study is acknowledged to provide about cultural universals and specifics of human growth. Statistically, cross–cultural developmental psychology extends the range of variation being assessed. The study of development as culturally contextualized is also valuable for the check it provides against an ethnocentric world view … as well as the implications of such a view.

Many critics today point to culture–bound assumptions and limitations of the prevailing, however restricted, Western psychologies. In actuality, “three different cultural limitations have constrained the scope of psychological theory: a narrow subject data base, a biased sampling of world cultures in its authorship, and a corresponding bias in the audience to which it is addressed” (Serpell, 1990, p. 99). Calls for cross–cultural investigation have in recent years echoed an increasingly strident critique of the monocultural perspective (see Berry, 1983; Kennedy, Scheirer, & Rogers, 1984; Moghaddam, 1987; Russell, 1984; Segall, 1986; Sexton & Misiak, 1984; Triandis, 1980; Valsiner, 1989). In response to such criticism, cultural context is achieving greater recognition in mainstream psychology, and most contemporary psychological investigators acknowledge that cross–cultural developmental inquiry is integral to understanding both substance and process in development. Description and explanation therefore constitute compelling reasons to undertake cross–cultural developmental comparisons. To discuss or reach conclusions about the growth of perception, cognition, communication, emotion, personality, or social interaction outside of a cross–cultural developmental framework is perilous.

A.R. Luria (1930/1978, p. 45) put the grander rationale for this catholic perspective most succinctly:

… no psychological function can be understood except in terms of its development (the genetic approach) and its particular social conditions (the sociological approach).

In brief, absent the cross–cultural developmental perspective, the true diversity and expanse of human behavior cannot be grasped, nor can it be known how diverse forces interact to shape our propensities to perceive, think, speak, feel, and act in the ways we do. Cultural Approaches to Parenting meets contemporary challenges to psychology to expand the subject data base, to contextualize thinking, and to promote internationalism.

Motives for Approaching Parenting in Culture

This book is concerned with a full range of cultural approaches to phenomena associated with caretaking young children. A major issue of Cultural Approaches to Parenting is how children become members of the culture, given the behaviors, language, and physical surroundings they experience. In this construal, culture constitutes a kind of independent variable in individual development. (Like another taboo subject, we may not always or so easily be able to define culture, but still know it when we see it.) At the very heart of the concept of culture is the expectation that different peoples possess different values, beliefs, and motives and behave in different ways (Segall, 1986, p. 542). It is a particular and continuing task of parents and other caretakers to enculturate children, that is to prepare them for socially accepted physical, economic, and psychological situations that are characteristic of the culture in which they are to survive and thrive (Benedict, 1938; LeVine, 1977). In essence, culture (plus genetics) determines the structure and nature of the social and physical environments the individual is reared in and that influence the course and outcome of development. In that caretakers play the most critical role:

I maintain that a good part of what we call … development is dependent on the selection by caretakers among possible lines of development in children. In content we can, as holders of the culture, select physics or music, and in strategy we can emphasize social–interactional solutions to problems or we can emphasize analytic–“scientific” solutions (Kessen, 1984, p. 427, emphasis added).

Thus, young children everywhere have the potential to learn intricate culture complexities of, say, language, but at the same time they master the language to which they are exposed. Cultural Approaches to Parenting elaborates on the many assumptions, models, and data of parenting enculturation patterns and practices.

Cultural Approaches to Parenting

All of the contributors to this volume on Cultural Approaches to Parenting investigate and compare at least one substantive issue of parenting young children in at least two different cultures. Structurally, these chapters review the substantive parenting topics, describe the relevant cultures (albeit in psychological ethnography, rather than from an anthropological stance), report on the parenting–in–culture results, and discuss the meaningfulness of cross–cultural investigation for understanding the parenting issue of interest. All of the presentations thus attempt to meet high standards for cross–cultural psychological investigation. These include, most importantly, the assessment of comparable behaviors observed in different cultural settings with obtained similarities and differences being related to particular features of the cultures involved in ways that articulate with theory and prediction (see Lamb & Wozniak, 1990). Super and Harkness (1986) defined three components of a “developmental niche”: the physical and social setting in which the child lives, the customs of child care and childrearing, and the psychology of the child’s caretakers. Chapters in Cultural Approaches to Parenting are addressed to each of these central aspects of development.

Two words of caution about Cultural Approaches to Parenting are appropriate at this introductory juncture. First, this volume houses contributions concerned with a diversity of substantive issues looked at in a diversity of ways across a diversity of cultural settings. Variety in all three of these domains faithfully reflects characteristics of contemporary cross–cultural developmental study. Across the ten chapters, specific issues of study include: speech form—interaction context relations, environment and interactive style, responsiveness, activity patterns, distributions of social involvement with children, structural patterns of interaction, language and the transmission of culture, development of the social self, and apprenticeship. Despite this range, language and interaction are consistent foci of interest and analysis throughout the book. Contributors to Cultural Approaches to Parenting have also employed a variety of methods, thereby enriching the range of data and the reader’s understanding of how cross–cultural research is conducted. Methodologies include: questionnaires, interviews, experiments, and biochemical analyses of food intake. By far, however, the most popular method among cross–cultural developmental researchers is direct observation of behavior. The national settings for these reports number a baker’s dozen. They include: Canada (Québécois, Vietnamese, and Haitian of Montréal), Egypt, England, France, Germany, Guatemala, India, Japan, Kenya, Korea, Turkey, the United States (Mandarin Chinese and Caucasian), and Zaïre (Efe and Lese). Not unexpectedly, the modal comparison is with U.S. samples. In virtually all cases, however, contributors have exercised care to discuss the target phenomena of parenting as specifically related to the cultures actually studied, choosing to under–rather than overgeneralize.

Second, virtually all of the principal contributors to this volume are of Western origin, and the categories and determinations of parenting represented here must be weighted by their Western orientation. Since it is difficult, if not impossible, to overcome one’s own enculturation before taking up cross–cultural investigation, it is critical that contributors to Cultural Approaches to Parenting have acknowledged their own origins, as they have the essential foreignness of other cultures. Happily, most have undertaken collaborative studies with colleagues from the cultures being investigated. Both arrogance and danger attend projecting essentially Western ideas onto the behavior and experience of peoples living their lives in other cultural contexts. The degree to which applications of sets of descriptions “work” across culturally–diverse settings is an empirical question. Two factors are important to appreciate in this connection, however. One is that, for better or worse, researchers in many different cultures have today been schooled almost exclusively in the framework of Western psychologies. Therefore, many use (if not embrace) the same concepts and paradigms. The other is that there exists, despite different cultural perspectives, a “common core” of primary family experiences that underwrites the possibility of cross–cultural comparisons of parenting. This core recurs as central subject matter in Cultural Approaches to Parenting, and it is discussed more fully below.

The cultural approaches to parenting represented in this volume are divided into two broad categories: conceptions of parenting and consequences of parenting. In one way or another, each of the chapters in the first section considers characteristic relations between cultural attitudes and actions: For the Papoušeks, it is activity in discourse; for Pomerleau, Malcuit, and Sabatier, consistency across environment, interaction, and beliefs; for Bornstein, Tal, and Tamis–LeMonda, activity and responsiveness; and for Morelli and Tronick, distributions of different types of involvement among the child’s main partners. In one way or another, each of the chapters in the second section of the book concerns itself with dynamics of enculturation: For Sigman and Wachs, it is the structure of interaction as conditioned by nutritional status; for Shatz, the role of language in cultural transmission; for Dunn and Brown, development and expression of the social self in language and play; and for Rogoff, Mistry, Güncü, and Mosier cultural apprenticeship.

These chapters examine topics in belief—behavior relations or enculturation dynamics, respectively, but all do so in comparative contexts. Hence, the accent on conceptions and consequences. Of course, there are many different conceivable ways to organize a collection of papers such as this one, just as there are important topics in cultural approaches to parenting that are not represented—like segmentation of the lifespan, rites of passage, culture from the child’s eye view, and treatment of the aged to name a prominent few. This volume is not intended to be comprehensive by topic, method, or place; that would be impossible. Rather, its purposes are to illustrate, to examine, and to sensitize—to provide a forum in which writer and reader share the conduct of cross–cultural studies of parenting and the meanings that such cross–cultural study portends for advancing an understanding of substantive issues in parenting. A more detailed examination of individual chapters will serve to elucidate these objectives.

In the first chapter of “conceptions,” on “Innat...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contributors to this Volume
• Contents
• Series Prologue
• Introduction
• 1. Approaches to Parenting In Culture
• Part I: Conceptions of Parenting: Cultural Attitudes and Actions
• Part II: Consequences of Parenting: Dynamics of Enculturation
• About the Authors
• Author Index
• Subject Index