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CONCLUSIONS
Findings from a variety of research programs have indicated that cultural beliefs and values, particularly those concerning socialization goals, play important roles in shaping parenting attitudes and behaviors. Moreover, culture affects the functional significance of specific parenting practices, as indicated in their relations with children’s developmental outcomes. Macro-level social changes that are occurring in many countries due to the movement of populations, technological development, and interaction among different political and economic systems have led to the co-existence and integration of diverse cultural values, which have substantial implications for socialization and human development in Western and non-Western societies today.
In this chapter, we have reviewed and discussed theoretical perspectives and research on issues related to culture and parenting. Our discussion has focused on parental attitudes in the socialization of social initiative and self-control and related parenting styles and practices, particularly parental warmth and control or directiveness. Culture influences broader aspects of parenting, such as parental ideas about what constitute effective childrearing, parenting strategies (e.g., resources and time parents allocate to child care), and parent-child communication styles (Harkness and Super, 2002; Keller, 2012). It will be important to examine the relations between cultural values and these aspects of parenting.
Several other future directions may be suggested. First, parenting and its impact on child development occur in broader social contexts, such as community services, school practices, and peer relationships. Researchers should investigate how these contexts work together with parenting in mediating and moderating the influence of culture on children’s behaviors. It will also be interesting to explore how culture is reflected in macro-level social conditions, such as child- and family-related policies and the mass media, which in turn affect parenting and child development.
Second, it has been increasingly recognized that children play an active role in socialization and development (Chen, 2012; Edwards, de Guzman, Brown, and Kumru, 2006). Children may display their active role through their reactions to parenting. As demonstrated by Chao and Aque (2009), cultural norms and socialization experiences are likely to affect children’s interpretations of, and attitudes toward, parenting behaviors and, thus, facilitate or undermine their effects. Children’s perceptions of “normativeness” of parenting strategies, such as power assertion, may moderate the relations between the strategies and developmental outcomes (Davidov and Khoury-Kassabri, 2013; Gershoff et al., 2010; Lansford et al., 2005). There is also extensive research on the moderating effects of child temperament on relations between parenting and development (see Chen and Schmidt, 2015). Nevertheless, our understanding of the active role of the child in socialization is still rather limited, especially in non-Western societies. Researchers need to pay greater attention to this issue in the future.
Third, cross-cultural studies of parenting have mostly relied on parent or child self-reports because of relatively low costs for data collection and advantages in data analysis. Self-report methods have obvious limitations that may threaten the validity of cross-cultural comparisons, including culturally specific response biases, the “reference group” effect, and differences in the understanding of questions or items in measures (Schneider, French, and Chen, 2006). Relative to self-reports, observations, either in the controlled laboratory or naturalistic home settings, can provide more objective information that allows for more straightforward cross-cultural comparisons. However, conducting observations of parents and children in equivalent conditions, developing culturally sensitive and comparable coding systems, training coders to reliably code data from different cultures, and interpreting the results beyond observed variables are highly challenging tasks for researchers. Given the strengths and weaknesses of each of the major methods, a multimethod approach is apparently ideal to reduce potential biases in cross-cultural research.
Finally, researchers who study culture and parenting are often interested in comparing families in Western self-oriented societies with those in collectivist or group-oriented societies. This framework focusing on broad categories has been criticized for its inadequacy in describing the substantial within-society heterogeneity, differences between societies that are assumed to be extreme, and, more importantly, the complex cultural systems (Miller, 2002). Continuous investigation in a variety of cultures and sub-cultures will be crucial for a more comprehensive understanding of the contextual nature of parenting.
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