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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.

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.

Understanding culture is essential for understanding child development, and thus for designing and evaluating interventions to improve children’s physical and mental health. We outline seven key as...

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.

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.

This study investigates differences in the amount and structure of infant sleep in two cultural places with previously documented, divergent parental beliefs and practices. Eight-month-old infants (n=24 per site) were recruited from towns in the Netherlands and the eastern U.S.A. To evaluate sleep, infants’ physical activity was recorded at home for 24 hours using a miniature actigraph, while parents kept a diary of infant activities. Measures derived from actigraphy include total sleep, longest sleep episode, longest wake episode, number of sleep episodes, and percent of sleep during nighttime, as well as time in the stages of Quiet and Active Sleep. Measures based on the parental diaries include most of these aspects as well, except those related to sleep stages. Results based on the more precise actigraphy method indicate that (1) the Dutch infants averaged 13.65 hours of sleep per 24 hours, 1.67 hours more than the U.S. infants; this difference was mostly due to daytime sleep; (2) The Dutch infants’ longest wake episode averaged less than that of the U.S. infants, while their longest sleep episode appeared slightly longer. (3) The Dutch infants, compared to the U.S. sample, spent more time in the Quiet, rather than the Active phase of sleep; (4) They began their Quiet sleep earlier in the evening than did their U.S. counterparts. Measures derived from parental diaries are largely in agreement with the actigraph findings. These results are consistent with reported and observed practices and beliefs in the two communities. The pattern of differences – less apparent maturity among the Dutch in the amount of sleep, but greater apparent maturity in the structure of sleep -- illustrates that behavioral and neurological maturity can be assessed only in the context of the developing child’s adaptation to the specific demands and affordances of the culturally structured developmental niche.

High levels of work-related stress have been frequently documented among front-line family service providers including social workers, home visitors, and agency staff members. Left unaddressed, such stress contributes to burn-out and job turnover, with negative effects on client families as well as agencies and the workers themselves. In response to this problem, some child and family service organizations have encouraged the use of self-care practices to counteract the inherent stresses of these jobs. The present study reports on descriptions of stress and self-care contained in written portfolios of 99 family workers enrolled in a strength-based training program, the Family Development Credential®. As found in other research, virtually all study participants reported an over-arching sense of stress and anxiety, with specific issues of workload, client problems, and work/family imbalance most frequently mentioned. To deal with their stress, workers described a variety of self-care practices: most common were mindfulness, exercise, social connections, changing self-expectations, and time management. Results show a significant curvilinear relationship between the number of stresses and the number of self-care practices mentioned, such that workers discussing both the lowest and the highest number of stresses discussed fewer self-care practices than workers naming a moderate number of stresses. Although a similar relationship between the level of stress and individuals' ability to take advantage of available resources has been demonstrated for low-income families, to our knowledge the present study is the first empirical demonstration of this principle for people who serve such families. These findings illustrate the limits of individual self-care for dealing with high levels of stress, and suggest the importance of strengthening worker support at the agency level, as well as tailoring stress management programs to the needs of individual workers.

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.

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.

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.

Contains fulltext : 227081.pdf (Publisher’s version ) (Closed access) 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 29 p.

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.

Although developmental science has always been evolving, these times of fast-paced and profound social and scientific changes easily lead to disorienting fragmentation rather than coherent scientific advances. What directions should developmental science pursue to meaningfully address real- world problems that impact human development throughout the lifespan? What conceptual or policy shifts are needed to steer the field in these directions? The present manifesto is proposed by a group of scholars from various disciplines and perspectives within developmental science to spark conversations and action plans in response to these questions. After highlighting four critical content domains that merit concentrated and often urgent research efforts, two issues regarding “how” we do developmental science and “what for” are out- lined. This manifesto concludes with five proposals, calling for integrative, inclusive, transdisciplinary, transparent, and actionable developmental science. Specific recommendations, prospects, pitfalls, and challenges to reach this goal are discussed.

This chapter presents the data primarily from two communities: the village of Kokwet in rural Kenya and the town of Duxbury in metropolitan America. Traditional studies of clustering in American children, for reasons that probably have more to do with logistics and economics than a failure of theory, have not examined year-to-year changes in clustering strategy. Changes in elementary visual analysis and construction, in the clustering of items in free recall, and in the rate and type of illusions in the Verbal Transformation Effect are highly canalized growth patterns of middle childhood. Psychological theories of cognitive development are generally vertical. By examining the way subjects of different ages deal with a particular set of tasks, psychologists have derived generalizations about how thinking changes as children mature. A central theme in psychological theories about thinking contrasts organization based on abstracted structural categories with organization based on physical features or function.

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.

The response of 185 infants to their mothers’ departure was assessed in a rural area of Bangladesh. Despite their poor health and nutritional status, this group of infants showed the same peak in separation protest around the end of the first year that has been documented for healthier samples in several cultural contexts; correlational analysis suggests that the healthier infants were more likely to display protest. In addition, there was an earlier rise and decline in distress at maternal departure in the first half year of life, not seen in other reports. In this case, poor health appeared to dispose toward upset, indicating that the most fragile infants were least able to cope with the regulatory demands imposed by maternal departure. Overall, the results are evidence for a very strongly canalized transformation of cognitive and emotional functioning toward the end of the first year of life.

— 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.

Cross-cultural research is inherently limited by the difficulty of disentangling cultural effects on children’s development from other environmental features that covary with culture. The growing presence of immigrant populations in the United States offers an opportunity to study parents’ cultural belief systems, or “parental ethnotheories,” as they influence children’s settings and activities in the absence of other environmental supports. This study examined Asian Indian immigrant mothers’ ( n = 10) and matched Euro-American mothers’ ( n = 10) ethnotheories about their daughters by means of analysis of the mothers’ discourse in the context of semistructured interviews, multidimensional scaling and cluster analysis of the descriptors, and consensus analysis. The mothers’ ethnotheories are reflected in differences between the settings and daily activities of their daughters. The Indian immigrant mothers’ ideas and practices are compared to findings in the Whitings’ comparative field studies and discussed in relation to several concepts of culture.

The three contributions to this Special Section on Culture and Human Development are summarized and critiqued. In considering the nature of contemporary psychological science, as well as applications to early childhood care and development, education to prevent HIV/AIDS, and formal academic education, the various authors are in general agreement on the limitations of current knowledge as it applies to African populations. There is also a common focus on the promise of scientific procedures that take seriously the importance of local understandings, institutions, and social settings. Les trois contributions de cette section speciale sur la culture et sur le developpement humain sont resumees et critiquees. En considerant la nature de la science psychologique contemporaine ainsi que les applications aux soins a la petite enfance et au developpement, a l'education pour prevenir le VIH/SIDA, et a l'education academique formelle, les divers auteurs sont globalement en accord sur les limites des connaissances a...

Parents often arrange activities for their children either by providing them with opportunities or restricting their participation. The way children spend their time affects their cognitive and social development. This study compares the involvement of Asian immigrant and Euro-American parents in their young children's daily activities, with particular attention to two contrasting roles: teacher and playmate. Parents of children aged 3 to 6 years (n = 24 children in each group) kept daily logs of their children's activities and companions for a week. Results show that parents in both groups spent similar amounts of time in play activities with their children, although the Euro-American parents did more pretend play and the Asian parents did more constructive play. However, Asian parents spent far more time on preacademic activities with their children such as learning letters and numbers, playing math games, and working with the computer. The cultural differences among parents are mirrored to a lesser extent by patterns of participation of siblings, friends, and babysitters with the target children. These results are discussed in relation to universality and cultural specificity of parenting beliefs and practices.

The developmental niche, a theoretical construct for the study of the child in cultural context, has been usefully applied to the analysis of environments of disabled individuals. In this article, the authors review the three components of the niche (settings of daily life, customs of care, and the psychology of the caretakers), with particular reference to issues of disability. Two case studies are presented as illustrations of the importance of parents' culturally constructed ideas, or ethnotheories, as either challenges or supports to the work of the occupational therapist. The article concludes with a consideration of cultural variability in parents' ideas of “successful development,” with illustrations from research in Italy, the Netherlands, and the United States. The developmental niche framework is relevant to concepts of “habit” as used in occupational therapy. It is also helpful for considering how the environment of the disabled individual—including cultural assumptions about what constitutes an agenda for successful development—may be modified to promote full participation in meaningful activities in the community.

The power of a mixed-methods approach combining anthropological and psychological theories and methods is demonstrated through the experiences of the International Study of Parents, Children, and Schools, a collaborative project involving teams of researchers from seven Western countries. The developmental niche framework of Super and Harkness proved useful for integrating multiple methods to understand the context of children’s early development at home and at school. Several parts of the study are presented as illustrations: the development and application of a common list of descriptors for coding parents’ discourse about their children; the construction of a derived etic form of a child temperament questionnaire; the discovery and exploration of ideas and practices related to parent-child co-sleeping; and the identification of cultural themes across various kinds of data. The authors conclude that a combination of anthropological and psychological methods can enrich understanding of children’s development in various cultural settings.

Asian and Euro-American parents of preschool-aged children were interviewed concerning their beliefs about the nature and purpose of play; they also completed two questionnaires and a diary of their children’s daily activities. The children’s teachers were interviewed and provided information about the behaviour of the children in preschool. The Euro-American parents were found to believe that play is an important vehicle for early development, while the Asian parents saw little developmental value in it. On the other hand, the Asian parents believed more strongly than the Euro-Americans in the importance of an early start in academic training for their children. These contrasting beliefs were instantiated in parental practices at home regarding the use of time and the provision of toys. At preschool, the Asian children were similar to the Euro-Americans on a standardised behavioural measure but they were described by their teachers as initially more academically advanced than the Euro-American children, and as showing different patterns of play and social interaction. The implications of these results for home–school relations and the design of early education programmes are discussed.

The self-perceived competence of 750 Korean children in kindergarten through the seventh grade was investigated using adaptations of Harter's scales for younger and older children. Measures of family characteristics and the home environment were collected to explore the determinants of variation in self-perceived competence. Adaptations of the competence scales yielded maximum similarity of content across the full age span, and also reflected the Korean emphasis on collectivist, intergenerational social skills and on early, direct training in academic cognitive skills. The results replicate two findings reported for North American and European samples; namely, increasing differentiation of domains of self-perceived competence with age, and decreasing levels of self-perceived competence in the opening years of primary school. In addition, the present study also finds two phenomena not evident in previous reports. First, a significant statistical interaction of grade and sex in the cognitive and physical domain was found, such that girls' self-perceived competence decreased more with age than did that of boys. Second, two social domains were differentiated, one reflecting peer acceptance (like the Harter scales) and the other tapping intergenerational and collectivist social skills that are valued in Korean society. Structural equation modeling revealed different patterns of influence for the four outcome measures. Both the analysis of internal variation and comparison with previous reports highlight the importance of a social and cultural perspective in understanding the development of children's self-perceived competence.

Pepper''s [1942] conceptualization of `root metaphors´ offers developmentalists a scheme for organizing theories of child behavior held by both parents and professionals. In this paper, we identify the root metaphors underlying current perspectives on human develoment, and present evidence for their role in interpretations of child behavior by parents and mental health professionals. Study 1 demonstrates that there are stable individual differences in root metaphor preference among US parents (n = 224), and these differences are influenced by experience in predictable ways. Study 2 describes similar differences among 32 mental health professionals at a US psychiatric clinic, and confirms relationships expected on the basis of theoretical analysis between metaphoric orientation and therapeutic specialization. Study 3 replicates these findings with a broader sample of 55 mental health professionals at a Dutch psychiatric treatment center and further relates metaphoric orientation to the daily task demands of their occupational roles. Thus the studies reported here provide strong support for the proposition that Pepper''s metaphoric analysis of philosophical systems can be applied meaningfully to the cognitive systems used by both parents and professionals in interpreting children''s behavior. We discuss the implications for understanding the socially regulated nature of partents'' belief systems, the origins of individual variation, the `goodness of fit´ between mental health practitioners and their clients, and the role of theory in the developmental sciences.

Culture is usefully conceived for developmentalists as the organization of the developmental environment. This definition makes available to scientific scrutiny the processes by which culture affects the course of development, that is, how it generates the relationships and meanings of variables that are more familiar, individually, to traditional developmental scientists. One framework for parsing the environment is the ''developmental niche'', which identifies three operational subsystems – the physical and social settings, the historically constituted customs and practices of child care and child rearing, and the psychology of the caretakers, particularly parental ethnotheories which play a directive role and are, by definition, shared with the community. Three organizational aspects of the niche create particularly important developmental outcomes: contemporary redundancy, which is the mutually reinforcing repetition of similar influences from several parts of the environment during the same period of development; thematic elaboration, which is the repetition and cultivation over time of core symbols and systems of meaning; and chaining, in which no single element of the environment is sufficient in kind to produce a particular outcome, but the linking of disparate elements creates a qualitatively new phenomenon. In addition, there is a more complex set of second-order effects; sex and temperament, for example, are characteristics whose meaning and consequence are organized by features of the environment. Finally, it is argued that theoretical recognition of variable relationships between development and the environment represents our discipline''s growth toward abstract thinking.

Beatrice Whiting's focus on cultural meanings implicit in everyday routines provided a focus for this study of men and women's social networks in a rural Kipsigis community of western Kenya. Using methods from social network analysis, the authors interviewed men and women of the community about the contexts of their encounters with other same-sex community members. The data were analyzed using multidimensional scaling and cluster analysis in order to discern the bases of social interaction. Results indicate that mutual helping relationships, not kinship, clan, or age, are at the core of social life in this community.

Research on Dutch and American parentS' descriptions and interpretations of their children's personality and behavior reveals a systematic pattern of difference that defies the idea of a uniform “Western mind” characterized by individualism.

This introductory chapter has been designed to provide a broad definition of early childhood development (ECD) and a detailed description of the conceptual organizing framework of the volume. The definition of ECD is both comprehensive and multidisciplinary, in keeping with the tone and contributions to the volume. The framework has been designed with consideration of the global implications for ECD programs and policies. This introductory chapter provides a brief overview and description of every chapter in the book by section, including the commentaries.

Universal aspects of early childhood development (ECD) are recognized globally, but cultural expectations of children’s competence vary widely across different domains, such as literacy and domestic responsibilities. The core challenge of ECD programs and policies is to integrate interventional goals with the biologically based developmental agendas of young children and the cultural expectations that shape their daily lives. This chapter presents a theoretical framework—the developmental niche—to help to clarify the issues involved in ECD across various cultural contexts, particularly in economically developing societies. We begin with a brief review of concept of culture as it applies to children and families, drawing from recent scholarship in psychology and anthropology. We then provide a description of the developmental niche as a framework for informing policy and improving program effectiveness. The final section illustrates the relevance of the developmental niche for ECD policy, using examples from several cultural regions.

Globally, young children bear the greatest burden of poverty, disease, neglect, and lack of educational opportunities. This volume’s goal is to promote evidence-based policies for advancing the positive development of young children everywhere, with a specific focus on developing countries. It brings scientific knowledge about early child development in both developed and developing countries to bear on international programs and policies that affect young children and families, focusing on the whole child. The evidence framework is presented from multiple disciplinary and analytical perspectives. The volume includes traditional sectoral approaches (e.g., health, nutrition, and education), as well as newer sectors such as child protection, social assistance, and child rights; and it addresses nongovernmental actors, such as community- and faith-based agencies, nonprint media, and the private sector. The volume also focuses on the “how to” of using evidence to address the greatest challenges to program quality, sustainability, and “scaling up"—the challenges of capacity building, governance, and finance. Also presented is a clear set of recommendations for future research, policy, and programmatic directions for the field, addressing not only the implications of evidence, but also recognizing the importance of including families and serving vulnerable and disadvantaged populations. The comprehensive nature of this book and its compelling use of evidence are thanks to its contributors—researchers, policymakers, and practitioners from around the world—and its organizational sponsorship by the Society for Research in Child Development (SRCD) and the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), both leading organizations in promoting children’s well-being.