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THE EXPLORATION OF CULTURE AND PARENTING: A BRIEF HISTORY
The inquiry about culture and parenting has a long and rich history, mostly in cultural anthropology. The initial interest, appeared in the early 1900s, was in whether children’s experiences, especially childrearing experiences, in the early years could serve to explain cultural variations in personality. Combined with the classic psychological theories, particularly Freudian psychoanalytic theory, the culture and personality school (Benedict, 1934; Mead, 1928) attempted to search for culturally patterned early childhood experiences (e.g., mother-infant sleeping arrangement, strict discipline, feeding, weaning, toilet training) that might lead to distinct adult personality profiles or national characters in different societies. However, the over-simplistic views of the causal and determinative force of early socialization practices in the development of modal personalities, and the work using scientifically inadequate methodologies, became highly controversial and eventually abandoned by most scholars and researchers in the field.
In the 1950s, a number of researchers, together with mixed training backgrounds of anthropology and psychology, conducted a series of cross-cultural field studies of childrearing patterns and child development (Barry, Child, and Bacon, 1959; LeVine, 1960; Whiting and Child, 1953; see Harkness and Super, 2002, for a review). The most systematic project was the Six Culture Study of Socialization, led by Whiting and Whiting (1975), conducted in Juxtlahuaca (Mexico), Khalapur (India), Nyansongo (Kenya), Tarong (Philippines), Taira in Okinawa (Japan), and Orchard Town (USA). In this project, the researchers examined typical socialization experiences and children’s behaviors using ethnographic and observational methods. In societies where extended families lived together in traditional styles (Nyansongo, Juxtlahuaca, Tarong), a high level of cooperation among family members was required, and children were assigned various household tasks (e.g., collecting firewood, fetching water from the river, cooking food, taking care of younger siblings). In contrast, in culturally and economically more “complex” societies with class structures and occupational division of labor (Taira, Khalapur, and Orchard Town), children were assigned fewer, and different types of, household chores (e.g., cleaning their own rooms, picking up toys). Further analyses indicated that children in the former societies displayed more nurturant-responsible behaviors (e.g., prosocial-cooperative and compliant behaviors) than did children in the latter societies, and the researchers argued that the differences were related to the performance of family responsibilities. According to Whiting and Whiting (1975), the assignment of tasks to children and other socialization arrangements constitutes a “child learning environment” for the development of behavioral styles, skills, and psychological attributes.
The anthropological work in the 1950s and 1960s, including its theoretical frameworks and methodologies, had a pervasive impact on the study of culture, parenting, and child development. Researchers have continued to explore socialization issues using those data sets. For example, Edwards (2000) reanalyzed the data from the Six Culture Study to examine peer interactions. The results showed that children in the relatively “open” societies (Taira, Orchard Town) were more active in social interaction and engaged in more sophisticated forms of play, such as fantasy or sociodramatic play, than their counterparts in more “close” societies (Khalapur, Nyansongo). According to Edwards (2000), adult encouragement of play and the opportunity to choose playmates without adult supervision or control were some of the factors that might account for the cross-cultural variations.
Nevertheless, most contemporary developmental researchers, particularly in psychology, have not followed the direction of the traditional research on culture and parenting. The deviation from the traditional research may be mainly due to the fact that, although developmental researchers have sought to understand social and cultural influences on human development, they are less interested in the broad issues of anthropological paradigms, such as how settlement patterns, land use, and food accumulation and storage in the society may determine childcare and childrearing practices and how socialization experiences and children’s and adults’ behaviors are reflected in the “projective-expressive systems” of societal-level collective beliefs, social-political systems, and general patterns of psychopathology (e.g., crime, suicide; Worthman, 2010). Developmental psychologists, such as Bornstein (Bornstein, Tal, and Tamis-LeMonda, 1991), Chao (1994), Cole, Tamang, and Shrestha (2006), García Coll and colleagues (1996), Kağıtçıbaşı (1996), Keller and colleagues (2004), Harkness and Super (1996), Trommsdorff and Friedlmeier (1993), and Wang and Fivush (2005), are particularly interested in cultural involvement in specific parenting processes. Their research focuses, among others, on (1) parenting beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors at the individual level and individual variations within and across the societies (as reflected in the analysis of variance) and (2) culturally similar and distinct patterns of relations between parenting and child outcomes (as reflected in the multi-group regression analysis or the group-invariance test of relations). The data collected in studies using different types of designs (e.g., longitudinal, mixed-method) and psychometrically established assessments and sophisticated statistical analyses allow researchers to rigorously examine the display of specific aspects of parenting (e.g., parental warmth, power assertion) and their developmental significance in cultural contexts.
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