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.

This illuminating new volume offers a multifaceted view of parenting cultural belief systems - their origins in culturally constructed parental experience, their expressions in parental practices, and their consequences for children's well-being and growth. Discussing issues with implications beyond the study of parenthood, the book shows how the analysis of child outcomes which relate to parents' cultural belief systems (or parental "ethnotheories") can provide valuable insights into the nature and meaning of family and self in society and, in some cases, a basis for culturally sensitive therapeutic interventions. Illuminating the powerful influence of parents' cultural belief systems on the health and development of children, this volume will be welcomed by a broad audience. Anthropologists and psychologists interested in cultural theory and the interface of self and society will find a rich source of ideas and information. Parent educators, family therapists, pediatricians, and others who deal with ethnically diverse populations will discover invaluable information on what makes parents think and act the way they do. The book can be used as a primary text for courses in cognitive anthropology and cultural psychology, and as an auxiliary text for culturally oriented courses in lifespan development, education, health, and human services.

One doesn’t have to travel extensively to realize that there are intriguing differences in the ways in which people from different cultures tend to behave. Gartstein and Putnam explore whether these differences are shaped during the early years of life, at the moment when children are just beginning to understand how, when, and why they should express some emotions, and not others. Based on the findings of the Joint Effort Toddler Temperament Consortium (JETTC), which asked parents from 14 different countries multiple questions regarding their main goals and techniques for raising children to be successful in their culture, Gartstein and Putnam analyze how children’s characteristics (both normative and problematic) are shaped by different cultural environments. Drawing from insights in anthropology, sociology, and developmental psychology, the book explores the full spectrum of human experience, from broad sets of values and concerns that differentiate populations down to the intimate details of parent-child relationships. The results reveal a complex web of interrelations among societal ideals, parental attempts to fulfill them, and the ways their children manifest these efforts. In doing so, they provide a revealing look at how families raise their young children around the world. Toddlers, Parents, and Culture will be of great interest to students and scholars in temperament, cross-cultural psychology, parenting and socioemotional development in early childhood, as well as professionals in early education, child mental health, and behavioral pediatrics.

This vital volume advances an in-depth understanding of how parenting infants in the first year of life is similar and different in two contrasting contexts in each of five countries—Argentina, Belgium, Israel, Italy, and the United States—providing a global understanding of parenting across cultures. Edited and written by Marc H. Bornstein and his country collaborators, the chapters presented compare microanalytic approaches to three topical issues in each of two cultural groups in each country. The three issues concern, first, how often and how long mothers in each of the groups in each of the countries engage in basic parenting practices, and how often and how long infants in the same groups engage in different behaviors. Second, whether the maternal parenting practices are organized in any way and whether those infant behaviors are organized in any way. And, third, whether those maternal parenting practices and those infant behaviors are interrelated. Thus, this book offers insights into the basics of parenting and infancy from both intra-cultural and cross-cultural perspectives. Each country chapter is co-authored by a contributor native to the country examined, ensuring an authentic cultural perspectives on parenting and infancy. Together, the chapters provide a broader sample that is more generalizable to a wider range of the world’s population than is typical in most parenting and infancy research. Parenting, Infancy, Culture is essential reading for researchers and students of parenting, psychology, human development, family studies, sociology, and cultural anthropology as well as professionals working with families.

This insightful volume presents important new findings about parenting and parent-child relationships in ethnic and racial minority immigrant families. Prominent scholars in diverse fields focus on families from a wide range of ethnicities settling in Canada, China, Israel, Italy, the Netherlands, and the United States. Each chapter discusses parenting and parent-child relationships in a broader cultural context, presenting within-group and cross-cultural data that provide readers with a rich understanding of parental values, beliefs, and practices that influence children’s developmental outcomes in a new country. For example, topics of investigation include cultural variation in the role of fathers, parenting of young children across cultures, the socialization of academic and emotional development, as well as the interrelationships among stress, acculturation processes, and parent-child relationship dynamics. This timely reference: • explores immigration and families from a global, multidisciplinary perspective; • focuses on immigrant children and youth in the family context;• challenges long-held assumptions about parenting and immigrant families;• bridges the knowledge gap between immigrant and non-immigrant family studies;• describes innovative methodologies for studying immigrant family relationships; and• establishes the relevance of these data to the wider family literature. Parental Roles and Relationships in Immigrant Families is not only useful to researchers and to family therapists and social workers attending to immigrant families, but also highly informative for persons interested in shaping immigration policy at the local, national, and global levels.

Decades of research have demonstrated that the parent-child dyad and the environment of the familyâ€"which includes all primary caregiversâ€"are at the foundation of children's well- being and healthy development. From birth, children are learning and rely on parents and the other caregivers in their lives to protect and care for them. The impact of parents may never be greater than during the earliest years of life, when a child's brain is rapidly developing and when nearly all of her or his experiences are created and shaped by parents and the family environment. Parents help children build and refine their knowledge and skills, charting a trajectory for their health and well-being during childhood and beyond. The experience of parenting also impacts parents themselves. For instance, parenting can enrich and give focus to parents' lives; generate stress or calm; and create any number of emotions, including feelings of happiness, sadness, fulfillment, and anger. Parenting of young children today takes place in the context of significant ongoing developments. These include: a rapidly growing body of science on early childhood, increases in funding for programs and services for families, changing demographics of the U.S. population, and greater diversity of family structure. Additionally, parenting is increasingly being shaped by technology and increased access to information about parenting. Parenting Matters identifies parenting knowledge, attitudes, and practices associated with positive developmental outcomes in children ages 0-8; universal/preventive and targeted strategies used in a variety of settings that have been effective with parents of young children and that support the identified knowledge, attitudes, and practices; and barriers to and facilitators for parents' use of practices that lead to healthy child outcomes as well as their participation in effective programs and services. This report makes recommendations directed at an array of stakeholders, for promoting the wide-scale adoption of effective programs and services for parents and on areas that warrant further research to inform policy and practice. It is meant to serve as a roadmap for the future of parenting policy, research, and practice in the United States.

How Many More Questions?: Techniques for Clinical Interviews of Young Medically Ill Children provides readers with a comprehensive framework to understand how 5-10 year old children use language to formulate and communicate their thoughts. The book then guides the reader in how to effectively elicit information about sensitive and stressful topics from young children, such as their emotions, difficulties, problems, worries, and illness. Seventeen exquisitely written chapters that include twelve developmental guidelines, techniques, case examples, and illustrative dialogues provide the reader with the tools needed to address specific communication challenges involved in speaking with young children who have pain, medical trauma, terminal illness, or specific disorders like epilepsy. How Many More Questions? is useful for pediatric professionals who strive to acquire exceptional clinical interviewing skills and who no longer wish to hear children say, "When are we done?" The wide range of medical and non-medical professionals who work with young ill children, such as pediatricians, neurologists, psychiatrists, psychologists, neuropsychologists, social workers, nurses, child life specialists, as well as interested parents will use this book as a reference guide.

V.1. Children and parenting. v.2. Biology and ecology of parenting. v.3. Status and social conditions of parenting. v.4. Applied and practical parenting

Parenting in England is the first study of the world of parenting in late Georgian England. The author, Joanne Bailey, traces ideas about parenthood in a Christian society that was responding to new cultural trends of sensibility, romanticism and domesticity, along with Enlightenment ideas about childhood and self. All these shaped how people, from the poor to the genteel, thought about themselves as parents, and remembered their own parents. With meticulous attention to detail, Bailey illuminates the range of intense emotions provoked by parenthood by investigating a rich array of sources from memoirs and correspondence, to advice literature, fiction, and court records, to prints, engravings, and ballads. Parenting was also a profoundly embodied experience, and the book captures the effort, labour, and hard work it entailed. Such parental investment meant that the experience was fundamental to the forging of national, familial, and personal identities. It also needed more than two parents and this book uncovers the hitherto hidden world of shared parenting. At all levels of society, household and kinship ties were drawn upon to lighten the labours of parenting. By revealing these emotional and material parental worlds, what emerges is the centrality of parenthood to mental and physical well-being, reputation, public and personal identities, and to transmitting prized values across generations. Yet being a parent was a contingent experience adapting from hour to hour, year to year, and child to child. It was at once precarious, as children and parents succumbed to fatal diseases and accidents, yet it was also enduring because parent-child relationships were not ended by death: lost children and parents lived on in memory.