Culture and Parenting Xinyin Chen, Rui Fu, and Wai Ying Vivien Yiu

Culture and Parenting

Xinyin Chen, Rui Fu, and Wai Ying Vivien Yiu

University of Pennsylvania
In M. Bornstein (Ed.) (2019), Handbook of parenting (pp. 448-473). New York, NY: Routledge.

INTRODUCTION
Research has shown considerable cross-cultural similarities as well as differences in individual socioemotional and cognitive functioning. For example, relative to their Western counterparts, children and adolescents in many African and Asian societies tend to be less expressive of their emotions and engage in less active interactions in challenging social settings (Chen, DeSouza, Chen, and Wang, 2006; Edwards, 2000; Oakland, Pretorius, and Lee, 2008). Chinese, Korean, and Mexican children display more controlled and cooperative-compliant behavior than North American children in task-oriented or limited-resource situations (Kagan and Knight, 1981; Oh and Lewis, 2008; Orlick, Zhou, and Partington, 1990). Given this background, theorists and researchers have been interested in how socialization factors, particularly parenting, play a role in explaining children’s socioemotional and cognitive functioning and its cultural variations (Bornstein, 2012; Vygotsky, 1978). In most societies, as a major socialization agent, parents provide care and monitoring to children and exert a significant influence on their development, particularly in the early years. Cultural beliefs, norms, and values in the society determine, to a large extent, parental socialization goals and parenting practices. Moreover, culture provides a guideline for social judgments of specific parenting behaviors, which in turn shape their significance for child development.
This chapter is concerned with how culture is involved in parenting. We first discuss some theoretical and methodological issues in the study of culture and parenting. Then, we review research on parental socialization goals and attitudes in cultural contexts. Next, we discuss how cultural values affect the main aspects or dimensions of parenting, followed by a section on cultural involvement in determining the developmental significance of parenting in terms of its relations with developmental outcomes. Finally, we discuss the implications of social and cultural changes for parenting. We conclude the chapter with a discussion of future directions in the study of culture and parenting.