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Copyright of Ethos (00912131) is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

It is an undisputed fact among attachment researchers that children need stability and continuity in their caregiving environment for optimal developmental outcomes. However, anthropological studies show that informal and often temporally limited kinship‐based foster care, including changes of children's primary caregivers, is widespread in some cultural contexts and considered normative and thus beneficial for children. Based on ethnographic interviews with Nso families in northwestern Cameroon, we analyzed the dynamics of caregiving arrangements and relational networks during infancy and early childhood. Exploring household compositions, caregiving responsibilities, children's preferred caregivers, and foster care arrangements revealed multiple caregiver networks, with the importance of the mother decreasing and the importance of alloparents and peers increasing as the children grow older. Also, families have fluid boundaries, with about one‐third of the children changing households in the first three years of life. The Nso children's experiences reflect a relational cultural model of infant care as a cooperative task and a communal conception of attachment. The results are discussed in relation to attachment theory's claims about universal patterns of development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Children's school performance is often associated with parenting practices, implying a direct link between parents' behavior, child development, and academic success. Through the case of an Indian forest‐dwelling community, I offer an alternative view of child development, learning, and teaching, which prioritizes social skills above—and as a precondition of—academic/practical ones. I discuss the implications of such view to the evaluation of parenting, and more broadly, of formal education for marginalized indigenous communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Infancy is characterized by physical and biological changes and growth, and across cultures, parents associate this period with care, protection, and nutrition. However, beyond the universal aspects of infancy, the ways in which caretakers understand babies' needs and nature are subject to great cultural variation. In this article I explore how people in a township in Lusaka, Zambia, conceptualize and understand how babies become social persons. Particular attention is paid to how human potentials are seen to naturally grow and unfold if properly cultivated in the relationships that the child shares with others. I will also discuss how local models of natural growth contrast models of early child development offered by international parenting intervention programs that focus on how parents in poor communities can stimulate young children's cognitive development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyzes scenes from videos of young children being dropped off by their parents or grandparents in Chinese and US preschools. This is an emotionally and cognitively complex event; it asks the child to cross a threshold between the worlds of home and school and the parent or grandparent to turn the care of their child over to teachers. Our analysis suggests that these drop‐off routines reflect complicated interactions of ethnotheories of parenting and child development, implicit cultural pedagogies, changing social pressures and concerns, and affordances and constraints of space and time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Neonatal Behavioral Assessment Scale (NBAS) examination is usually done in the relatively homogeneous hospital setting. This standardization of context has been a critical procedure in facilitating research on groups of babies differing in important dimensions, such as nutritional status, gestational age, and ethnic back-ground. Because the NBAS is generally used in the nursery, it has not been necessary for researchers to focus on the possible effects of variations in this context. Indeed, while both genetic and intrauterine factors are recognized as important in the manual of instruction, the issue of postnatal factors is barely mentioned. Application of the examination to cross-cultural settings, however, often involves work outside hospitals .

This article examines the educational practices of elementary schooling in South Korea, especially the case of the recent "innovation school (hyeoksinhakgyo)" movement in the public school system. In particular, the educational unit of the home class, called "ban," has been strengthened in innovation schools to nurture, simultaneously, communality and creativity among students. By presenting ethnographic scenes from a sixth‐grade home class, I seek to show how the sociality of the home class is organized, and interpersonal behaviors are regulated by the teacher to nurture interdependence among the students, interdependence as a crucial foundation for creativity learning and community spirit in the ban. I also attend to the children's responses and reactions to the organizing and regulating of their peer relationships, especially when equality is imposed as a paramount value in peer sociality. [Interdependence, Peer Group, Schooling, Home Class, South Korea] 본 논문은 초등학교에서의 현지조사를 토대로 2010년대 한국의 혁신학교에서 나타나는 공교육 개혁의 방향성과 그 실천적 효과를 검토한다. 특히 학생들의 공동체성과 창의성을 함양하는 과정에서 혁신학교에서 '반'이라는 교육의 기본단위가 강화되는 장면들에 주목한다. 보다 구체적으로, 반의 사회성이 어떤 식으로 구축되는지, 교사‐학생 간, 그리고 또래 간 관계성이 교사에 의해 어떻게 조정되는지 살펴본다. 교사는 지속적으로 학생들 간 상호의존성을 일깨우고자 하는데, 상호의존성은 창의성 교육 및 반 공동체성의 핵심적 토대로 자리한다. 이 연구는 무엇보다도 교사가 또래관계에 개입하고 규제하는 방식, 그리고 아이들이 그것에 반응하는 양태에 주목한다. 이러한 방식과 양태는 반 공동체의 핵심가치로 평등이 부각되는 순간들과 연루되어 있다. 이를 통해 전지구화 시대 한국에서 공교육 개혁이 반의 공동체적 특징을 강화하거나 재각색하는 작업임을, 그리고 공동체성의 핵심에 특정한 평등이라는 이상이 놓여있음을 밝힌다. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this commentary we first examine psychometric issues in the ambitious enterprise of cross‐cultural application of the Parental Burnout Assessment (PBA). The present reports span a wide range of cultural places. Overall, the PBA presents good face validity and a strong replication of factor structure; future multi‐group confirmatory factor analysis will enable quantitative comparisons not currently possible. Content validity is not fully addressed in these reports, so nuanced differences in the nature of parental burnout remain an interesting possibility. Variation the PBA's correlations with other measures, such as education and household type, suggests cultural mediation in the causes and dynamics of parental burnout. In the second part of our commentary, we address more directly whether parental burnout is influenced by the sociocultural context in which it is manifest. We propose that future research will benefit from more precise description of the particular cultural community involved, including the settings, customs, and ethnotheories of parenting. Gaining a global understanding of parental burnout, in other words, rests on building firmer and more differentiated pictures at the local level. The papers in this volume nevertheless present an important step forward in what promises to be an exciting journey of discovery. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Culture and human development blossomed as a research enterprise in the last quarter of the 20th century; the energy and innovation of that enterprise are less evident now. Where did it go, and where is it going? In this essay, we examine the shifting fields of cross‐cultural psychology, psychological anthropology, cultural psychology, indigenous psychology, and the surge of research on Individualism/Collectivism. Offering both academic and personal perspectives, we reflect on the importance of "culture" as a construct, and the value of focusing on individual development in that context. The way forward now, we suggest, is international and intercultural collaboration of scientists. The challenge for training new researchers from diverse backgrounds, however, is to equip them with the knowledge and insights gained from cross‐cultural psychology, psychological anthropology, and their own cultures, rather than simply making the next generation of scholars into new representatives of Western theories of development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The behavior of newborns is ambiguous. Cultural models—representations shared by members of a community—provide new parents and others with a cognitive and motivational structure to understand them. This study asks members of several cultural groups (total n = 100) to judge the "similarity" of behavioral items in the Neonatal Behavioral Assessment Scale (NBAS). Data were obtained from NBAS experts, mothers, and undergraduates in Massachusetts, and mothers and high‐school students in rural Kenya. Multidimensional scaling of their judgments reveals that NBAS experts were especially attentive to a dimension of State Control—exactly as the scale emphasizes. Kenyan mothers focused on a dimension of motor responsiveness—in accord with their concern and practices regarding motor development, and the Massachusetts mothers organized their judgments around cognitive competence—abilities emphasized in contemporary discussions of early development. The US students appear to be more similar to US mothers than did the Kenya students to the Kenyan mothers. Each adult group's representation reflects their cultural values and goals, and helps them understand the newborn child in local terms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent years have witnessed increasing attention to early childhood education and care as a foundation for children's successful development in school and beyond. The great majority of children in postindustrial societies now attend preschools or daycare, making this setting a major part of their culturally constructed developmental niches. Although an extensive literature demonstrates the importance of parental involvement or engagement in their children's schools, relationships between parents and their children's preschools have received scant attention in the research literature. This paper aims to address that gap through a mixed‐methods cross‐cultural study of parents and preschools in four Western countries: Italy, Spain, the Netherlands, and the United States. Following an introduction to national systems of preschool in each country, parents' involvement and ideas about the family–school relationship are presented, drawing from parental diaries and from semistructured interviews (n = 110). Results indicate areas of cross‐cultural similarity but also some differences, especially between the U.S. sample and the three European samples. Discussion addresses the question of how preschools and parents can work together to create optimal developmental niches for their young children. The authors also suggest that parent–preschool relationships deserve greater attention by both researchers and program developers [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research by Xinyin Chen and others has documented that in past decades, shyness in Chinese children was associated with leadership, peer‐acceptance, and academic achievement. In contemporary China, shyness predicts maladaptive youth outcomes. Although social, political, and economic transitions are presumed to be responsible for this shift, little is known about how societal change mediates parents' beliefs and the socialization of shy children. This qualitative study explored implicit parenting cognitions and attitudes about shyness in a Chinese urban middle‐class group of mothers (N = 20). Thematic analyses revealed mothers' beliefs about the role of family socialization in the development/maintenance of shyness and the complexities between shyness and introversion. Mothers spoke of increased use of child‐centered parenting practices and the promotion of assertive and self‐assured traits. These findings highlight how Chinese parenting has contributed to the decline in the adaptive value of shyness, and inform the development of parenting interventions for shy Chinese children. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study explores the cultural construction of "difficult" temperament in the first 2 years of life, as well as the logistical and thematic continuity across infancy and childhood in what mothers perceive as difficult. It extends earlier work regarding older children in six cultural sites: Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Spain, Sweden, and the United States. In order to compare temperament profiles across sites, a "derived etic" version of standard temperament scales is constructed, and then examined in relation to mothers' global ratings of how "difficult" the child is to manage. Results are compared to the earlier report. Negative Mood and low Adaptability tend to be problematic in most sites in both age groups. High Activity and Intensity increase in their relevance to difficulty from the first 2 years to early childhood. In some sites, dispositions such as low Approach become less difficult to manage. Of particular note are culturally unique patterns of continuity that appear to be related to larger cultural themes. These results have implications for our theoretical understanding of parenting, as well as for educational and clinical practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The seven papers in this issue address a variety of challenges that parents in several different cultural places encounter as they do their best to ensure their children's safe, happy, and successful development from infancy through middle childhood: infant sleep, developmental agendas, temperament, preschools, academic success, and learning to be a parent in a new cultural environment. The authors use a varied of methods — qualitative and quantitative — to understand how parental figures in Botswana, China, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Spain, Sweden and the United States think about the needs of their children, their own role as parents, and the caretaking practices that follow. A final Commentary focuses on the power of parental ethnotheories in changing societies, and on the complexities and importance of cross‐cultural research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although children's school success is a parental goal in most cultures, there is wide cultural variation in the qualities that parents most wish their children to develop for that purpose. A questionnaire contained forty‐one child qualities was administered to 757 parents in seven cultural communities in Australia, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Spain, Sweden, and the United States. Exploratory factor analysis was conducted separately within each sample and results revealed both similarities and differences across the seven samples. The factor structures showed considerable similarity: four domains of characteristics (Cognitive Qualities, Social Qualities, Negative temperament, and Good Characters) were identified in each sample as strongly influencing children's success in school. However, parents differed across the seven cultural communities in the importance they attributed to these factors. The results also reveal some culturally unique patterns in parents' concepts of the successful schoolchild; the seven samples were differentiated by distinctive associations of individual qualities around the four common domains. These results offer new insights for incorporating perspectives from other cultures into our own concepts of what qualities are most important for children's success in school, and how educators can be cognizant of differing cultural perspectives represented by the families whose children are their students. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the earliest challenges for infants and their parents is developing a diurnal sleep–wake cycle. Although the human biological rhythm is circadian by nature, its development varies across cultures, based in part on "zeitgebers" (German: literally "time‐givers") or environmental cues. This study uses the developmental niche framework by Super and Harkness to address two different approaches to getting the baby on a schedule. 33 Dutch and 41 U.S. mothers were interviewed when their babies were 2 and 6 months old. A mixed‐methods analysis including counts of themes and practices as well as the examination of actual quotes shows that Dutch mothers emphasized the importance of regularity in the baby's daily life and mentioned practices to establish regular schedules for the baby's sleeping, eating, and time outside more than American mothers did. The U.S. mothers, in contrast, discussed regularity less often and when they did, they emphasized that their baby should develop his or her own schedule. Furthermore, actual daily schedules, based on time allocation diaries kept by the mothers, revealed greater regularity among the Dutch babies. Discussion focuses on how culture shapes the development of diurnal rhythms, with implications for "best practices" for infant care. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Urban and rural grandmothers (n = 20) in Botswana participated in focus groups to learn their expectations for the acquisition of skills by preschool children. Their expectations for self‐care, traditional politeness, and participation in household chores were dramatically earlier than developmental timetables reported for Western middle‐class populations. There are some differences, however, in the urban and rural grandmothers' expectations. Rural grandmothers had earlier expectations for self‐care skills and participation in household chores, and they had more specific expectations for mastering Setswana cultural customs. In addition, some urban grandmothers, who were generally more educated, described using more reciprocal communication, and they believed in playing with their grandchildren, whereas the rural grandmothers' communication was more instructional, and they insisted that children should play away from adults. Strikingly, there was no mention of school readiness goals or activities by either group, suggesting a "cultural misfit" between the standard early childhood curriculum, largely imported from the United States and other Western countries, and the cultural backgrounds of Batswana families. To create a more workable partnership between preschool teachers and grandparents—important caretakers of young children, both traditionally and currently—will require efforts to acknowledge and promote the values and expectations of both groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A list of forthcoming books related to family is presented. It includes "Successful Adoptive Families: A Longitudinal Study of Special Needs Adoption," by Victor Groze, "Parents' Cultural Belief Systems: Their Origins, Expressions and Consequences," edited by Sara Harkness and Charles M. Super and "Culture and Attachment: Perceptions of a Child in Context," by Robin L. Harwood.

This study examined the process of adjustment in shy and nonshy children during the transition to school in a Chinese community. Children (35 shy and 19 nonshy) were assessed three times before and after they entered the first grade. Shy and nonshy children's interactions with peers and teachers, perceived peer acceptance, and anxious behaviour were measured using multiple methods, including naturalistic observations, self-report, and teacher report. Results indicated that shy and nonshy children showed consistently different behavioural profiles in free play settings and structured classes during the transition. However, teacher ratings of and peer responses to shy and nonshy children were not consistently different. Results are discussed in relation to the cultural context where the study was conducted. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

New Hope ( NH) was a successful poverty reduction program that offered a positive social contract to working-poor adults. If you worked full time, you were eligible to receive income supplements, childcare vouchers, health care benefits, a community service job, and client respect. NH did reduce poverty and increase income and earnings for some participants, and improved outcomes for some children. But in spite of relatively generous benefits, NH was only selectively effective. Only those not working when NH began and those with few barriers to work were positively affected by the program through achieving more work hours, poverty reduction, and income gains. Boys in program families benefited, girls did not. Take-up of NH benefits was typically partial and episodic; for instance, some parents would not use childcare programs for young children. Ethnographic evidence was essential for understanding these sometimes-surprising program impacts and their policy and practice implications, and was effectively combined with an experimental, random-assignment research design. Psychological anthropology can bring its traditions of integrating qualitative and quantitative methods and its focus on experience, context, and meaning to understanding and improving policies and practices within a scientific frame of the committed, fair witness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

- Research on African children has made key contributions to the emergence of a more globalized developmental science, advancing theory and providing illuminating examples in the domains of motor development, cognitive growth, attachment, and socially responsible intelligence. Because the environments for children's development are culturally structured, local knowledge is necessary to understand development and to devise social programs to promote healthy outcomes, as illustrated in this article by a case study in Senegal. This argues for advancing the research activities of local scholars. At the same time, action at the global level is necessary to weave such local knowledge into a global science of human development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This special issue demonstrates the value of close examinations of mothering as actually practiced by particular mothers in particular circumstances. The articles in this issue analyze instances of mothering in Papua New Guinea, Sri Lanka, Ecuador, China, and the United States and are followed by commentary from leaders in the field about what might be learned by attending to such everyday practices. These ethnographic studies extend lines of research within psychological anthropology that have focused on mothers as socializers, by drawing on contemporary developments, including those concerned with schema theory, psychodynamic and intersubjective processes, the interpenetrations of political-economies and domestic relations, feminist perspectives, and questions of agency in the lives of women and children. This examination of projects, processes, and practices of mothering affords insights into a range of related questions concerning human nature, processes of enculturation and socialization, individual agency and lived worlds, cultural patterning and change. [mothering, practice, child socialization, cross-cultural child development, psychological anthropology] [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on videotaped family interactional data, I consider Martha Wolfenstein's psychoanalytically informed conception of 'fun morality' in the context of contemporary U.S. maternal-child relations. I highlight how U.S. middle-class mothers and children craft imaginative interludes that cultivate valued aspects of personhood and relationality. Cooperative, prosocial behaviors are modeled and elicited alongside individualized self-expression to constitute coexisting values in U.S. middle-class life. Analysis contributes to discussion of situated engagement in moral life by delineating how mothers take up preferred cultural models of mothering as they simultaneously mentor children's moral experiences, behaviors, and worldviews amid circumstances of daily life. [mothering, morality, children, play, family, United States] [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using data gathered through participant-observation and interviews focused on everyday mothering interactions in a Sinhala family in central Sri Lanka, I argue that the combination of continuous indulgence with disappointing material, social, and emotional results leads children to disavow their own desires by middle childhood. This early socialization to the negative potential of desire makes fertile ground for cultural doctrines that explicitly link desire, suffering, and destruction. Further, mothers who themselves have internalized these understandings react to their children's assertions of desire with intense discomfort combined with indulgence, reproducing their own socialization in the experiences of their children. By being attuned to psychodynamic processes between and within people and as well as attentive to the sociocultural medium in which they occur, I provide a model of and for thinking about how actual practices of mothering lead children to develop culturally patterned habits of thought, behavior, and feeling, preparing them to find subsequently encountered cultural material meaningful. [mothering, child socialization, indulgence, disavowal, desire, Sri Lanka] [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous research on lesbian-led families rarely comments on specific mothering moments observed first hand by researchers. This article presents observations made with one such family in February of 2007, which followed up research I conducted throughout 2001-04 with this family and 29 other lesbian-led families. The vast majority of these informants are middle-class Euro-American lesbians living in the New York metropolitan area. In this article I detail particular mothering moments pertaining to the ways in which one couple educates and disciplines their children. Observations reveal an intentional rule-based parenting guided by expert opinion and focused on producing 'highly intelligent,''polite' children. I argue that raising 'good children' is meaningful to lesbian couples in the United States as it indexes their own value as 'good parents.' I suggest that my informants are nontraditional traditionalists as they parent and socialize their children in ways that cull components from cultural models from their own families of origin. These data offer a corrective to popular views of alternative family formations and practices as strictly countercultural. The family presented in the following microethnography consciously incorporates and reappropriates many traditional cultural values and models from the dominant heterosexual, middle-class, Euro-American culture. [lesbian-led families, U.S. parenting, childrearing, discipline, comothering, lesbian IVF] [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we analyze the development of responsibility through the lens of the Peruvian Matsigenka, Samoan, and middle-class Los Angeles, California, childhoods. We propose that recognizing social awareness, social responsiveness, and self-reliance as keystone properties of responsibility supports an argument that children's routine work at home enables not only social but also moral responsibility, in the form of respectful awareness of and responsiveness to others' needs and reliance on knowledge that takes into consideration others' judgments. We document distinct modes of engagement in community and family activities evidenced in community ethnographies of children in Matsigenka, Samoa, and in middle-class Los Angeles, and propose seven arguments (related to sociopolitical organization, necessity, development, school priority, independence–interdependence, attention practices, and inconsistency) that bear on these observations. A contradiction in the values and practices for promoting independence and giving care is manifested exclusively in the L.A. families, creating a dependency dilemma for children of these families. If moral responsibility involves an active turning toward the other that engenders the capacity for compassion, our research indicates childhood socialization practices differentially facilitate or complicate achievement of this perspective. [responsibility, child development, socialization, Samoa, Los Angeles, Matsigenka] [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The intersection of two questions about human experience is the starting point for this article. The first question has to do with the problem of how charisma can be successfully transferred to the second generation of a prophetic community. The second question has to do with how children come to be, and to act as, moral and spiritual beings. These questions converge in a particular way in the ethnographic setting of The Word of God Community: it is founded on a charismatic spirituality closely intertwined with a moral imperative, such that its viability depends on reproduction of that morality and spirituality among children of the founding generation. Data come from interviews with 38 children across three age groups (5–7, 10–12, and 15–17 years), conducted over a four-week period subsequent to a community schism, which left members in a state of reflection, self-examination, and openness. We focus on children's responses to a series of culturally specific vignettes designed to present various dilemmas of moral reasoning. In this highly charged context moral and spiritual life are based on an active engagement characterized by dynamic and contested processes, and it is through these processes that individuals make meaning out of and reconstruct the moral code of their culture. [childhood and adolescence, religion, Catholic Charismatic Renewal, Pentecostalism, morality, spirituality, intentional communities] [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many forms of individual variation in early childhood are accommodated via processes of reciprocal adaptation of the child and their “developmental niche.” Although most are minor adaptations, some culturally patterned adjustments can have profound organizational effects on the niche and the child's developmental trajectory. Research conducted in Samoa suggests at least two distinct adaptations of the modal developmental niche for infants and toddlers keyed to different temperamental profiles: interpersonally assertive and behaviorally restrained. I argue that these two different variants of the modal niche emerge from dynamic interplay of different temperamental profiles, ethnotheories of child development, and child-rearing practices. These different niches can be developmentally significant in that they channel the individual's development in contrastive ways and introduce different future developmental challenges and opportunities. My larger point is that these different manifestations of the developmental niche represent one way in which social, cultural, and ecological factors on the one hand, and individual diversity on the other hand, interact to organize and constrain individual diversity. [Child development, temperament, infancy, developmental niche, Samoa] [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cultural values and scripts for parenting can be inconsistent, producing intrapsychic and cultural conflict. For example, many middle-class U.S. parents encourage independence, self-reliance, and autonomy in children, yet also encourage children to seek out help and look for attention from adults. Parents respond with egoistic recognition of children's achievements—a set of contradictions that lead to dependency conflicts. Another example of conflicting goals and fears for many U.S. parents is bedsharing with children. Parents hold strong beliefs about the importance of bedsharing and its positive or negative outcomes; their beliefs are important to their identity and beliefs about good outcomes for their children, even where actual impacts of bedsharing on children show no strong differences. At the same time, if enough features of the cultural learning environment are similar, outcomes of childrearing practices will be reasonably similar and consistent within a community. These examples suggest that conflict, diversity, and pluralism are expectable within and across communities, but also that shared cultural learning environments will simultaneously encourage similarity. In this article, I present empirical examples of these processes, some of which organize diversity to produce consensus, whereas others produce intrapsychic, intersubjective, and cross-cultural conflict. [cultural pluralism, conflict, cultural learning environment, dependency conflict, bedsharing] [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of International Journal of Psychology is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Naikan has been viewed as a culturally specific therapy aimed at resocializing clients into conservative Japanese social norms. The Ajase complex is used to support this view by illustrating specifically Japanese therapeutic needs arising from the Japanese mother--child dynamic. Based on ethnographic work conducted in Japan and Austria from 1997 to 2003, this article traces the logic of this conservative view and the challenges posed to it by Naikan's increasing success outside Japan. Reexamining Naikan and Ajase in light of the Buddhist tradition from which they stem shows that Naikan's efficacy lies in its mechanism of deconstructing fixed, unrealistic notions of self and other and replacing them with a new understanding of relationality that recognizes individuality as existing only within interdependence. This better explains Naikan's success abroad and shows that the efficacy of culturally situated therapies may be less limited than previously thought if they are based on psychological principles with cross-cultural relevance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Past research comparing fostered and nonfostered children's welfare in sub-Saharan Africa has led to inconsistent results. One reason for this disparity might be that children's experiences are shaped more by the circumstances in which they are fostered than by merely being raised away from their parents. This article examines how fostered children in one urban community in northwestern Cameroon spend time relative to their nonfostered peers and, by grouping fostered children according to fostering circumstances, how they spend time relative to one another. Analysis of children's activities suggests little variance between the experiences of fostered and nonfostered children, but significant differences among fostered children. These results are interpreted using children's views of activities, and the potential consequences of children's relative integration in foster households are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article addresses early caregiving environments, specifically cosleeping patterns among wage-earning and subsistence farming-based Cameroonian Nso families and their children during the first year of life. Forty-three wage-earning and 35 farming Nso mothers were interviewed at home about their formal schooling, economic activities, living conditions, children's sleeping arrangements, and night care. The findings provide ethnographic evidence that the Nso have a cosleeping culture, and that wage earning is an index of social and cultural change and exerts a substantial influence on sleeping patterns. The traditional pattern in the farming family is that mothers share the bed only with the infant, engage in no bedtime routines or schedules, and plan to wean their children later than do mothers in wage-earning families. The wage-earning mothers share a bed with an infant and others, predominantly the father. They also have bedtime routines and schedules and plan to wean their children approximately five months earlier than do mothers in farming families. The results are discussed with respect to the Nso culture and sociohistorical changes related to changes in economic livelihood and urbanization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This mixed-methods study investigated self-esteem and social comparison during middle childhood in two distinct communities: a Chicago public-housing development and a group of refugee camps near Luanda, capital of the Republic of Angola. Building on separate bodies of existing research about childhood in marginalized communities, self-esteem, and social comparison, I present an interpretive account of how conceptions of childhood associate with psychosocial characteristics in these two communities. In the Chicago community, an intense emphasis on accelerating childhood toward adult characteristics corresponded with accentuating high self-esteem and extremely competitive social comparison. In contrast, the Angolan community conceptualized childhood as distinct from adulthood in ways that prioritized role achievement above self-esteem and encouraged integrative social comparison. The comparison of the cultures of childhood in these two communities, which shared relative poverty and were regularly targeted by external agencies for interventions, has implications for understanding child development and psychological adaptation in marginalized communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on the position that children are always separate and socially connected when participating in cultural activities with others, this article offers a theoretical framework for discerning how both independence and interdependence are particularized in children's developmental experiences based on the position that children are always separate and socially connected when participating in cultural activities with others. The current approach holds that independence and interdependence are multifaceted and interrelated dimensions of activity that may be structured in culturally distinct ways as children participate with others in varied cultural activities. In support of this theoretical approach, I present a study of how multifaceted and interrelated independence and interdependence dimensions are structured in a kindergarten classroom in the United States. Analyses of the kindergarten activities indicate that varied independence dimensions (e.g., self-direction, individuality) are inseparable from varied interdependence dimensions (e.g., pursuing common goals, "turn-taking"). The current theoretical approach can be used in future research on the complexities of how both independence and interdependence are understood and particularized in diverse cultural contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this study was to determine if the low fertility rate in postsocialist Hungary is related to how mothers from different social strata conceptualize children and childbearing. It was hypothesized that stratum-specific differences would be found in the way mothers see the role of children in the context of their lives and that these differences would be related to the number of children they produce. The study is based on in-depth interviews with mothers of children between the ages of three and five who attended preschool in Budapest. The preschools were variously located and were selected as representative of different social strata in the city. Important social strata variation was found. Mothers from the four strata differed not only in how they talked about their children but also in the number of children they had and desired. The significance of these findings for cross-cultural research and for elucidating fertility rate statistics is discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this study, the early social experiences of infants from two agricultural societies, Indian Rajput and Cameroonian Nso are compared to each other and to German urban middleclass families. Using spot observations, infants' social experiences were assessed when they were between 2.5 and 3 months. The parenting styles in the three communities are distinctly different from each other. However, the Nso and the Rajputs share a parenting pattern that can be regarded as supporting, the development of communion. Differences between the two agrarian communities are related to different emotional expressivity and different health and nutritional status. The German caregiving pattern can be regarded as oriented towards the development of agency. In the discussion the question of the cultural interpretation of parenting behaviors is raised, emphasizing that the analysis of both shared practices as well as shared ideas is important in order to understand the dynamics of parenting in cultural context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]