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Presents conceptual analysis of U.S. and Japanese early education discourse, contrasting cultural assumptions and views of self that inform each context. Finds Japan holds progressive, child-centered but not developmentalist views that promote self in terms of cultural values; the United States emphasizes the individual child defined by differences across discrete developmental domains in which the "whole child" is lost. (JPB)

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The article presents an analysis on raising children and its significance to parents, the children and the society. The evolution of parenting ideas is believed to have changed parenthood into an infusion of book-based process with child development. American parenting's resistance to characterization is said to resuls from several factors including racial diversity, ethnicity and social differences. Recognizing children as reflections of their parents' unparalleled efforts is also mentioned.

In the discourse on contemporary parenting in the United States, the parent-child 'power struggle' is often spoken of as a common event in the everyday lives of parents and children. On the basis of ethnographic interviews with economically privileged white mothers of preschool and elementary-age children, I analyze the power struggle as a cultural trope. Despite refusal to be considered 'mainstream' and outright denigration of what they considered to be 'mainstream' parenting, mothers' discourse reveals cultural understandings about power and its relationship to the self that reflect broader themes of emotional control, choice, rationality, and individualism that are in fact characteristic of 'mainstream' views of child development. Further, although mothers explicitly valued emotional connectedness and freedom of expression with their children, the actual strategies advocated for dealing with emotions during the power struggle are centered on control and constraint of emotional discourse and expression. The article explores this theme in the light of tensions surrounding parental identities in privileged communities in the contemporary United States [parenting, emotion, self, power, child development] [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]