Question

The term paper for this class is on cross-cultural differences in parenting and child-care techniques. The paper may compare and contrast 2 cultures on multiple issues or multiple cultures on one issue (not multiple issues from multiple cultures).

Answer 1

Bornstein (2012) introduced some main ideas behind culture and parenting and next addresses philosophical rationales and methodological considerations central to cultural approaches to parenting, including a brief account of a cross-cultural study of parenting. It then focuses on universals, specifics, and distinctions between form (behavior) and function (meaning) in parenting as embedded in culture. His article concludes by pointing to social policy implications as well as future directions prompted by a cultural approach to parenting.

Some culture research in parenting compares group means on variables of interest, like parenting cognitions and practices or their child outcomes, using analyses of variance statistics. Other research looks at how culture moderates patterns of associations between variables across cultural groups. Both approaches require indicators that are clearly defined and measured in consistent ways. Cultural science, in addition to requirements of any good science, also brings with it unique issues and requirements (translation, sampling, and measurement equivalence, for example), and risks associated with this research are enhanced when it is conducted without full awareness and sensitivity to these specific concerns. For example, studies that compare cultural groups often require the collection of data in different languages, and the instruments used in such comparisons must be rendered equally valid across cultural groups (Peña, 2007). Furthermore, with any test of between-group differences, there is a chance that measures are not equivalent in the groups. Equivalences at many levels are important, and steps need to be taken to promote not only cross-linguistic appropriateness but also cross-cultural validity of instruments to achieve at least “adapted equivalence” (van de Vijver & Leung, 1997). Indeed, failure to do so creates problems in interpretation of findings that are as serious as lack of reliability and validity (Vandenberg & Lance, 2000). If test measurement invariance is not tested and ensured, additional empirical and/or conceptual justification that the measures used have the same meaning in different cultural groups is required.

Cultural comparisons of parenting usually involve quasi-experimental designs, in which samples are not randomly selected either from the world population or from national populations or (obviously) assigned to cultures. Interpreting findings is much more challenging in such designs than in experiments that are based on random assignment of participants. A major challenge that confronts cultural comparisons concerns how to isolate source(s) of potential effects and identify the presumed active cultural ingredient(s) that produced differences. Samples in different cultures can differ on many personological or sociodemographic characteristics that may confound parenting differences. For example, parents in different cultural groups may vary in modal patterns of personality, acculturation level, education, or socioeconomic status (Bornstein et al., 2007; Bornstein et al., 2012). Various procedures are available to untangle rival explanations for cultural comparisons, such as the inclusion of covariates in the research design to confirm or disconfirm specific alternative interpretations. By ruling out complementary accounts, it is possible to draw conclusions that are more firmly situated in culture. For example, culture influences teaching and expectations of children in mothers of Australian versus Lebanese descent all living in Australia apart from child gender, parity, and socioeconomic class (Goodnow, Cashmore, Cotton, & Knight, 1984).

The “story” of the cultural investigation of parenting is largely one of similarities, differences, and their meaning. In an illustrative study, we analyzed and compared natural mother-infant interactions in Argentina, Belgium, Israel, Italy, and the United States (Bornstein et al., 2012). Differences exist among the locales we recruited from in terms of history, beliefs, languages, and childrearing values. However, the samples were more alike than not in terms of modernity, urbanity, economics, politics, living standards, even ecology and climate. Thus, they created the possibility of identifying culture-unique and -general conclusions about childrearing. Mothers were primiparous, at least 18 years of age, and from intact families; infants were firstborn, term, healthy, and 5 months old. Our aims were to observe mothers and their infants under ecologically valid, natural, and unobtrusive conditions, and so we studied their usual routines in the familiar confines of their own homes. We videorecorded mother-baby dyads and then used mutually exclusive and exhaustive coding systems to comprehensively characterize frequency and duration of six maternal caregiving behavioral domains (nurture, physical, social, didactic, material, and language) and five corresponding infant developmental domains (physical, social, exploration, vocalization, and distress communication).

One question we asked concerned cultural similarities and differences in base rates of parenting in the six caregiving domains. We standardized maternal behavior frequency in terms of rate of occurrence per hour, pooled, normalized, and disaggregated the data by country, finally analyzing country means for parallel comparisons for different domains. Mothers differed in every domain assessed. Moreover, mothers in no one country surpassed mothers in all others in their base rates of parenting across domains. The fact that maternal behaviors vary significantly across these modern, industrialized, and comparable places underscores the role of cultural influence on everyday human experiences, even from the start of life. Of course, even greater variation is often revealed in starker contrasts. For example, mothers in rural Thailand do not know that their newborns can see, and so during the day swaddle infants in fabric hammocks that allow babies only a slit view of ceiling or sky (Kotchabhakdi, Winichagoon, Smitasiri, Dhanamitta, & Valyasevi, 1987). Awareness of alternative modes of development also enhances understanding of the nature of variation across cultures; cross-cultural comparisons show how. For example, U.S. mothers are often thought of as being highly verbal, but U.S. mothers actually fell at the bottom of our five-culture comparison.

A second question we asked concerned relations between parent-provided experiences and behavioral development in young infants (Bornstein et al., 2012). Across cultures, mothers and infants showed a noteworthy degree of attunement and specificity. Mothers who encouraged their infants’ physical development more had more physically developed infants as opposed to other outcomes; mothers who engaged infants more socially had infants who paid more attention to them; mothers who encouraged their infants more didactically had infants who explored more properties, objects, and events in the environment, as did babies whose mothers outfitted their environments in richer ways. That is, mothers and infants are not only in tune with one another, but their correspondences tend to be domain specific. Thus specific correspondences in mother-infant interaction patterns were widespread and similar in different cultural groups.

This kind of study continues the story of cultural approaches to parenting in terms of their traditional dual foci on similarities and differences. Mothers in different cultures differ in their mean levels of different domains of parenting infants, but mothers and infants in different cultures are similar in terms of mutual attunement of caregiving on the part of mothers and development in corresponding domains in infants. A shift in focus to the meaning of those similarities and differences advances the culture and parenting narrative.