Academic literature on the topic 'Culturally Specific Parenting'

The parenting experience can be both similar and vastly different across different cultural contexts. This chapter outlines what culture is and the impact it has on family structure and functioning and beliefs about parenting. Discussed are the similarities and differences across common cultural dimensions and how knowledge of local cultural beliefs and values is critical in ensuring the successful implementation of parenting interventions is detailed. The importance of adapting evidence-based programs in a culturally appropriate way and of flexibly delivering interventions to fit a range of contexts without compromising program efficacy are addressed. Practical examples of low-risk adaptations are provided. Finally, the existing evidence of a range of Triple P program variants and a range of cultural contexts with a specific focus on low-resource settings are reviewed and practical are provided. The chapter concludes with a discussion about the implications and future directions research could take.

An awareness of the complex social and political context for parenting in Indigenous cultures is important to the success of parenting interventions. This chapter shares experiences of successful program adoption, implementation, and sustainment that stem from working in partnership with an Indigenous organization, peak body, or ideally an entire community. A model of engaging communities collaboratively is discussed that encompasses the many aspects of engagement and sustainment in an implementation initiative. It takes a holistic partnership approach that involves recognition of community dynamics and capacity, establishing trust and relationship building, empowerment, and mutual respect, as well as addressing specific enablers and barriers to program implementation. This approach involves engaging with local community advisers to develop culturally accommodated training and posttraining support for practitioners, and culturally accommodated program delivery to families.

Chapter 12 explores the ways we learn about our culture, how culture shapes learning, and different learning contexts. It discusses attachment, Bowlby’s attachment theory, the Strange Situation, attachment styles, challenges to Western attachment theories, and attachment and culture. It addresses parenting, Baumrind’s parenting styles, parental ethnotheories, and parenting in different cultural contexts. It explores learning in formal settings like school, the connection between culture and schooling, parent beliefs and academic outcomes, apprenticeships, and learning in informal settings. Finally, it investigates play as a context for cultural learning and includes culture-specific and cross-cultural studies. This chapter includes a case study, Culture Across Disciplines box, chapter summary, key terms, a What Do Other Disciplines Do? section, thought-provoking questions, and class and experiential activities.

This chapter examines the cultural models specifically about religion, its value, and possible truth. Grasping parents' views of these two features of religion is essential to understanding their approaches to the transmission of religion to their children. For few American parents does religion singularly determine their understanding of the ultimate purpose and expected experience of life. Instead, the expected experiences of life involve clusters of largely autonomous beliefs forming their own distinct cultural models, perhaps partly shaped by religious traditions generally but not principally determined by the specific views and priorities of those traditions. Those basic cultural models being firmly in place, religion then comes in as its own distinct issue. And when parents think about religion, the primary focus is its practical value, how it helps people, and what makes it important in this life.

Chapter 10 explores the ways culture shapes how we behave in the presence of others, aggression, violence, and war. It discusses obedience, Milgram’s experiment, obedience and culture, and cross-cultural comparisons on obedience. It addresses conformity, culture and conformity, conformity and disease, peer pressure, and culture-specific and cross-cultural studies on peer pressure. It also discusses aggression, explanations of aggression, cultural factors that shape aggression, and the connection between parenting practices and aggression. Finally, it discusses violence against individuals, child maltreatment, cross-cultural studies on child abuse, bullying, cyberbullying, violence against women, war, ethnic genocide, and child soldiers. This chapter includes a case study, Culture Across Disciplines box, chapter summary, key terms, a What Do Other Disciplines Do? section, thought-provoking questions, and class and experiential activities.

How multiracial parents racially identify their children on official forms does not tell us how they raise their children in the context of family life. Do multiracial parents have particular ways of steering their children toward racial awareness? How do they address cultural transmission? In this chapter, I examine four ways in which multiracial people bring up their children and why particular parents are drawn to specific modes of socialization. In the process I also consider the importance of generational change and how participants’ experiences of their own upbringings and childhoods can influence their thinking and parenting practices in relation to their children.

Attachment theory has its roots in an ethnocentric complex of ideas, longstanding in the United States, under the rubric of “intensive mothering.” Among these various approaches and programs, attachment theory has had an inordinate and wide-ranging influence on a wide range of professions concerned with children (family therapy, education, the legal system, and public policy, the medical profession, etc.) inside and outside the United States. This chapter looks critically at how attachment theory has been applied in a variety of contexts and discusses its influence on parenting. It examines the tension distortion that often results when research findings are translated into actual applications or programs, ignoring any particularities of cultural context. It describes how attachment theory has been used as the basis for child-rearing manuals and has influenced programs and policies more directly, to form legal decisions that affect families, as well as to develop public policy and programs. Specific attachment applications are reviewed and their validity questioned. Because child-rearing practices vary among cultures, the value systems that motivate these different practices must be recognized and accounted for when applications are developed and implemented. It concludes with a call for researchers to become proactive in rectifying misuses of attachment theory.

Is religious morality the same across the major world religions and various cultural contexts? This chapter makes, for the first time, a review, synthesis, and interpretation of the relevant findings from recent international, focused cross-cultural, and experimental studies. Both striking quasi-universal features and amazing cultural differences emerge in the ways religion (individual religiosity, religious ideas, and/or religious heritage at the collective level) endorses, shapes, or privileges specific moral preferences regarding a vast spectrum of domains of human activity. The latter include sexuality; fertility, marriage, and parenting; work- and economy-related attitudes and behavior; various prosocial attitudes and behaviors; and civic attitudes toward democracy, social engagement, the environment, and honesty in society. The final discussion focuses on the religious conflict, across cultures, between interpersonal–consequentialist and righteous–deontological morality, and the evolutionary explanations of the transculturally strong religion-morality association and of the cultural diversity of religion and its morality.

In this chapter, I take up dilemmas that today’s parents face in rearing young children. Throughout this book, we have touched on myriad forces that make contemporary parenting highly challenging. These include one-sided, contradictory messages in the parenting-advice literature; career pressures that impinge on parent involvement in children’s lives; abysmally weak American child-care services to assist employed parents in their child-rearing roles; cultural violence and excessive materialism permeating children’s worlds; schools with less than optimal conditions for children’s learning; and impediments to granting children with deficits and disabilities social experiences that maximize their development. Contemporary parents do not just find child rearing more difficult; they feel more uncertainty than their predecessors about whether and how to intervene in their children’s activities and behavior. In the pages that follow, I draw on major themes of this book—the power of adult warmth, appropriate expectations, narrative conversation, make-believe play, and teaching in the “zone”—to show how Vygotsky’s sociocultural approach can serve as a guide for resolving a great many child-rearing concerns. This chapter answers twenty questions drawn from a survey of over four hundred parents of 2- to 8-year-olds living in a Midwestern city with a population of one hundred thousand. In that survey, I asked parents to list any questions about young children’s development and learning that interested or worried them. The questions I answer here address issues that appeared most often in parents’ responses. Each represents a concern that surfaced in three or more parental replies. I intend these answers to parents’ questions to reflect a way of thinking about child rearing, not a set of recipes for dealing with specific events. When parents are familiar with principles that are grounded in contemporary theory and research on children’s development, they can better deal with the quandaries generated by the changing home, school, and community contexts in which today’s children grow up. Although adverse cultural trends have complicated and threatened good child rearing, parents—as agents of change, buffers against stressful life circumstances, and gatekeepers of learning opportunities—can do much to protect, restore, and reshape children’s experiences.