Search

“Everything for my children” is a common sentiment among Guatemalan parents displaying an unwavering, unconditional commitment to their children. Although this saying suggests that a strong family unit is at the heart of Guatemalan culture, only limited research exists about parenting Guatemalan adolescents. Research on how the country’s prevalent gender role ideologies, machismo, caballerismo, and marianismo, shape parents’ treatment and expectations of their adolescent children is even scarcer. In this chapter, we review the extant literature on those gender roles and the available research on Guatemalan adolescents’ own views on gender and gender roles in their communities. We describe the existing literature on parenting in Guatemala, which focuses primarily on young children. A series of future directions argue for continued and more extensive research at the intersection of Guatemalan culture, adolescence, parenting, and gender. Specifically, the merit in methodological diversity and the importance of capturing the ethnic and socioeconomic diversity in Guatemala should emerge as priorities when undertaking future work in this area.

Gender is one of the most salient influences on children’s social development. As infants, girls and boys are often difficult to distinguish, yet from birth onward gender matters and is defined within the child’s cultural context. Differential gender socialization determines children’s names, how they are dressed, the toys they are given, the playmates they interact with, as well as their chores, responsibilities, and education. Nevertheless, in many modern industrialized societies, gender differences have begun to blur with similarities in educational opportunities, occupations, and domestic activities. Cultural expectations about gender shape children’s gender identities, roles, stereotypes, social interactions, and other aspects of gender. These facets of gender development are the focus of the present chapter.

Young children around the world help others. Yet, the ways in which they help and the conditions under which they provide assistance differ by age and cultural context. Prosocial behavior can be defined as instrumental, empathic, or altruistic, or conceptualized as helping, sharing, or comforting. In this chapter, we explore the developmental trends and diversity behind young children’s helpfulness. For example, instrumental helping is most common among younger children and empathic helping becomes more frequent with age; altruism is rare, likely due to its costliness. In addition to developmental patterns, a major focus of our chapter is the role of cultural context in shaping children’s helping behavior. Although most of the laboratory research on children’s prosocial behavior has been conducted in the minority world, the literature outside of those contexts reveals noteworthy cross-cultural differences in a variety of domains including: what constitutes helping, the available opportunities to help, and the necessity of developmental milestones like self-recognition as precursors to prosocial behavior. Given that helping behavior is such a positive component of social relationships, we suggest circumstances that may promote helping across cultures like insuring there are sufficient developmentally appropriate opportunities to help and the role of cultural values (e.g., autonomy, relatedness). Lastly, we argue for the need to understand the mechanism(s) driving cultural differences, using the developmental niche to frame future research in this area.

Around the world children grow up in a variety of different cultural settings that shape their social relationships in ways that are adaptive for the societies and the social worlds in which they live. The physical and social setting, the family configuration, parents’ ethnotheories about appropriate childrearing practices and parenting styles, and the broader social, governmental, educational, and economic context influence the course of the child’s social, emotional, and cognitive development. Children learn a great deal over the preschool years as they interact with people in their social networks who help shape various aspects of their social development. Understanding the role of culture is integral to having a more complete, deeper understanding of children’s development in their everyday social worlds.

The empowerment of women and girls has been at the center of international aid efforts for decades. In this chapter, we provide an overview of the current status of women around the world with a particular focus on the 13 countries profiled in the subsequent chapters of this book. Those countries represent six world regions: Asia, Europe, Latin America, the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), North America, and sub-Saharan Africa. We review four general indicators of gender (in) equality before detailing the central issues and trends in five specific domains that affect the lives of women and girls internationally. Specifically, we focus on education, employment, political participation, health, and violence against women. The general indicators of gender equality yield various conclusions as each index is calculated using different criteria. A commonality across these indices, however, is that women do not fare better than men in any of the thirteen countries. Education is one area in which women and girls have seen substantial gains in recent years. Conversely, the wage gap in earnings and the gender discrepancy in political participation reveal inequalities that demand continued attention. In addition, the multifaceted consequences of gender-based violence plague approximately a third of the world’s women. We close by briefly describing possible shifts in the status of women as a result of globalization and other ongoing trends.

Life for South African women post-apartheid reflects both legislative advances and lingering challenges. Despite progress in the post-apartheid world, South Africa is still characterized by a high level of economic disparity, meaning that daily life for individual women can be quite different depending on one’s race, socioeconomic status, and age. Thus, the concept of intersectionality is critical to understand what it means to be a woman in South Africa today. Despite advances in girls’ access to education at both the primary and secondary levels, women still face significant challenges when they enter the workforce by way of occupational segregation and stratification. As is the case internationally, South African women are also more likely to engage in unpaid work and to be employed in the informal sector. Taken together, these make it more likely that South African women live in poverty and become victims of interpersonal violence. With respect to health, the risk of HIV infection and the transmission of HIV from mother to baby are paramount concerns for South African women’s health. Recent advances, however, suggest that women are gaining access to quality HIV screening and treatment. Many programs exist in the country to empower women. Two such initiatives are reviewed here: one that empowers women through microfinance loans and a second that promotes self-efficacy and HIV prevention in adolescent girls through a sports-based intervention. In spite of a host of challenges, South African women are enterprising, strong, and resilient.

The lives of women and men living in the Central American countries of Belize, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Panama are diverse with respect to gender roles, attitudes, and ideologies. However, there is evidence that gender plays out in the domains of development, work and home lives, health, violence, and sexuality. Disparities in men’s and women’s conditions are bolstered by the ideologies of machismo, an exaggerated masculinity associated with hypersexuality and violence, and marianismo, the notion that women should be pure, spiritual, subordinate, and self-effacing. In this chapter we describe the evidence for gender disparities in many domains of life and present a Central American derived process for social change, liberation psychology.