Psychology Press Cultural Approaches To Parenting (Crosscurrents in Contemporary Psychology Series)

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. Review "...a thoughtful first step in applying current observational methods of family study to cross-cultural inquiry."—Contemporary Psychology "...expands the understanding of parenting and provides valuable insight into multicultural families and their children....a welcome divergence from mainstream psychology's traditional monocultural perspective."—Merrill-Palmer Quarterly "...a splendid example of the 'new' wave of cross-cultural child developmental research."—Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology