Maternal Personality and Parenting Cognitions in Cross-Cultural Perspective

A total of 467 mothers of firstborn 20-month-old children from 7 countries (103 Argentine, 61 Belgian, 39 Israeli, 78 Italian, 57 Japanese, 69 Korean, and 60 US American) completed the "Jackson Personality Inventory" (JPI), measures of parenting cognitions (self-perceptions and knowledge), and a social desirability scale. Our first analysis showed that the Five-Factor structure of personality (Openness, Neuroticism, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Conscientiousness) could be extracted from the JPI scales when cross-cultural data from mothers in the 7 countries were analyzed; it was also replicable and generalizable in mothers from so-called individualist and collectivist cultures. Our second analysis showed that the five personality factors relate differently to diverse parenting cognitions in those individualist versus collectivist cultures. Maternal personality has significance in studies of normative parenting, child development, and family process across cultural contexts. (Contains 5 tables and 2 figures.)