Cultural Approaches To Parenting

Book excerpt: 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.