1. What is the difference between micro and macro socialisation?
2. What do we mean when we say that the socialisation process is
bidirectional?
cultural differences in socialisation have a profound effect on how youngsters ‘turn out’.
Cultural variations in parenting: bedtime, playtime, doing as you’re told
Culturally diverse parenting practices manifest themselves in many ways, from domestic discipline regimes to divisions of labour around the home, to the more general goals that parents set for their children.
There are indications that the ways in which parents socialise their children vary considerably cross-culturally. Levine et al. (1996) com- pared household routines among the agricultural Gusii of Kenya with those observed in a sample of (US) Bostonian suburb-dwellers, and noticed a greater expectation for children to help with chores in the former, coupled with more parental emphasis on intellectual stimulation in the latter.
Domestic sleeping habits also reflect culturally diverse parenting.
Anecdotally it is suggested that Spanish children stay up relatively late into the night, that rural African children fall asleep amid a hubbub of outdoor activity and that Japanese children rise relatively early for school. Is there any evidence to support these observations?
Cross-cultural studies do reveal cultural differences in ‘bedtime habits’.
For example, US parents encourage their children to sleep alone more often than their rural European and (Central American) Mayan counterparts do (Morelli et al., 1992). Such differences may of course reflect material differences in income and space, as well as differences in the desire to allow children more independence. Another comparison found Dutch parents to be particularly insistent on an ‘early to bed and plenty of sleep’ regime, with under-fives getting up to two hours’ more sleep than a US comparison group (Super et al., 1996). Interestingly, these findings correlate with what was perceived to be calmer waking behaviour in Dutch infants.
Sleeping patterns aside, divisions of parental responsibilities between genders also show cultural variation. Fathers in Mexico, France and Italy indulged in a greater proportion of playtime activities than did those from other national groups, with German fathers most likely to eschew playtime or leave it to mum (Best & Ruther, 1994).
Elsewhere, differences have also been observed in parental discipline regimes. As you may remember from your own childhood, several strat- egies are open to parents seeking to get children to do as they’re told.
Compliant behaviour may be requested in the name of authority (because I’m in charge), feelings (because so and so will be upset),
consequences (because ‘x’ will happen if you don’t behave), rules (because that’s not allowed), or modelling (because good boys don’t do that). Comparing the use of these strategies across cultures, Conroy et al. (1980) found authority strategies to be common in a US sample, while stressing interpersonal relationships (such as feelings) was significantly more common in Japanese families. In a comparison of disciplinary techniques among cultural groups within the US, European American mothers preferred to use consistency, sensitivity and rule-setting, while Chinese Americans were more likely to yell and administer minor physical punishments, typical of an authority strategy.
It seems evident that from playtime to bedtime, parenting plays by different rules in different places. Arguably, cultural differences in parenting correspond with the transmission of norms, beliefs and behaviours that have an optimum survival value for those who operate in these cultures and for the cultures a whole. However, as we are about to discover, cross-cultural research into parenting has also revealed many common practices.
Cultural commonalities in parenting
Despite their differences, parents the world over operate in many similar ways. Certain common practices, such as baby-carrying to allow hands free access to other activities, may go back over a million years (Konner, 1972). This may partly explain why the human infant has evolved into a relatively immobile creature, unable to do much for itself in the first months, compared with the young of some other species.
Another global parenting practice with a long history is weaning (the gradual process of accustoming mammalian offspring to do without their mother’s milk). Most non-industrial human societies share a pre- weaning phase of three to four years, which corresponds proportionally to pre-weaning in other primates as it represents one-third to a quarter of the age until female sexual maturity (Berry et al., 2002). There are, however, limits to the cultural universality of this practice, with parents in many industrialised societies typically weaning earlier.
Language development in children reveals another parenting habit that has been identified as a global phenomenon: motherese. It appears that many of the world’s parents are fluent in this strange language. This seemingly ubiquitous dialect involves vocal intonation patterns directed towards infants that are characterised by raising the pitch of the voice, exaggerated variations in sound (doing funny voices) and generally talking in nonsense syllables. Papousek and Papousek (1997) listened to motherese worldwide and pronounced it a truly inter-
KEY TERM
Motherese. Vocal intonation patterns directed towards infants that are characterised by raising the pitch of the voice, exaggerated variations in sound.
national language, though they found parents throwing themselves into it in some regions more than in others. Japanese mothers, for example, were found to use more ‘singing and nonsense’ than comparison groups.
It appears, then, that while we can identify aspects of parenting that seem to be culturally widespread, the influence of culture is detectible even in these behaviours.
Culturally diverse parental styles and ethnotheories
So far we have presented evidence to suggest that while parents in different cultures may all nurture, protect and feed their offspring, they approach the role of the parent in diverse ways. Could it thus be argued that parenting in different cultures assumes differing styles – some authoritarian, others laissez-faire or easy-going, for example?
Baumrind (1971) distinguishes between three parenting styles:
• Authoritarian: requires high levels of obedience; displays little warmth.
• Permissive: allows autonomy; displays warmth.
• Authoritative: firm but fair; displays warmth.
The last of these is widely thought to be most associated with the development of healthy, stable, sociable children (Denham et al., 1997). But how does this model fare when applied cross-culturally?
Chen et al. (1997) found a correlation between authoritative parenting and good levels of social adjustment among Chinese children, thus supporting Baumrind’s hypothesis. However, we should be aware that Baumrind’s typology arises from a Euro-American context, so it may not translate to Asia. We cannot, for instance, assume the connotations of authoritarianism, which may be negative in certain cultural settings, to be similarly negative elsewhere.
Rather than using imported typologies to rate parenting across cul- tures, it may be more useful to identify theories and styles of parenting that originate in diverse locations, known as parental ethnotheories (Harkness & Super, 1995). These indigenous ethnotheories underwrite the diverse ideas held by parents on matters relating to learning, sleeping, discipline and play. For example, in a study by Tobin et al.
(1989), Japanese parents’ valuing of social interdependency (high levels of reciprocal interactions) was reflected in their approval of pre- school groups of over 30 pupils (more social interaction is a good thing for my child and for our society as a whole). Such a positive view would KEY TERM
Parental ethnotheories.
Theories and styles of parenting that originate in diverse locations.
not gel with a stereotypically European outlook, emerging from a more individualistic ethnotheory (too many children playing together may hold back my child).
Parental ethnotheories also manifest themselves in the expectations parents hold for their children about how old they should be when they acquire various skills. For example, the mastery of various perceptual, cognitive and interpersonal skills has been anticipated at an earlier age by parents from more industrialised, more affluent regions (Harkness &
Super, 1995).
Parenting is a two-way street: the role of temperament
So far we have focused on variations and similarities in parenting prac- tices across cultures. However, it should be obvious from our experi- ences as parents and children that the development of children is not just a question of how parents treat them. Rather, development is a two-way street along which parental influence and the temperament of the child interact. How a child turns out is due to its own biological predisposition to behave in certain ways, its parents’ and caregivers’
responses, as well as sundry other environmental factors (Berry et al., 2002). Having already discussed various parenting styles, let us now consider the role of an infant’s temperament in this ongoing interaction.
You often hear parents say of a child, Oh she has a lovely tempera- ment. For psychologists, this term refers to a biologically based style of interacting with the world (Matsumoto & Juang, 2004) which, in turn, affects the parental response. Earlier we considered differing styles of parenting. Distinctions have also been made between various tem- peramental styles (Thomas & Chess, 1977):
• Easy: adaptable, consistent in responses and emotions.
• Difficult: inconsistent, moody, intense.
• Cool: withdrawn at first, becoming responsive with familiarity.
Together with the parental response, these styles yield a develop- mental outcome. But do these styles vary cross-culturally? In one cross-cultural study (which you might not want to try at home), a cloth was laid over an infant’s head and face and the reaction described (Freedman, 1974). Chinese infants were more likely to simply let it happen, breathing through the cloth and lying still. A typically more agitated reaction was observed in an American sample.
Other researchers have found temperamental differences in similar
KEY TERM
Temperament.
Biological predisposition to behave in certain ways.
demonstrations, with Chinese and Navajo infants seemingly less irritable than those from the US and Ireland (Kagan, 1994).
What might precipitate differences in biologically predisposed temperament? The answer to this is not immediately obvious, although correlations have been found between average levels of blood pressure in mothers from certain cultural settings and infant irritability (Garcia Coll, 1990). Besides the mother’s health, ecological factors also correlate with temperamental responses in the first 30 days after birth. For example, Peruvian infants born at high altitude were more agitated during these early weeks than were those born around sea level (Saco-Pollit, 1989). Although this suggests that newborns from some cultures may be predisposed towards certain responses, these behavioural differences may equally be explained by identifying very early parental practices such as body contact, massaging and vocalisation in the first thirty days. Clearly, parental responses and temperament are an influential double act whose mutual influence cannot easily be separated.
Temperamental differences, it should be remembered, are no more than a biological predisposition towards certain responses. They may be expressed or inhibited by the parental and environmental influence.
Furthermore, we cannot rely on labels such as easy, difficult and cool to be equally meaningful, or indeed equally adaptive, across cultures.
A child who is labelled as having a difficult temperament may actually have a positive survival advantage in some situations. Certain environments may require an infant to be fussy, demanding or chal- lenging in order to survive large families or scarce food supplies (DeVries, 1989). Once again this reminds us of the dangers of applying generalised typologies across cultures.
Parenting styles and temperamental predispositions are ingredients that interact to yield a developmental outcome, the growing human being. The cultural manifestations of these ingredients are manifold, but those that have been observed worldwide are the ones that repre- sent the best survival prospects of the cultures themselves, as well as the families who make them up.
Limitations of research on culture and parenting
1 What do we mean by cultural differences in parenting? When draw- ing conclusions regarding the proposed relation between culture and childhood experience and parenting practices, we should be wary of what is actually meant by the term ‘culture’ in this equation.
On closer inspection it may be that cultural influences mask material
or economic differences between groups. For example, it has been noted that certain cognitive skills develop at different ages in dif- ferent cultural settings. Closer inspection of this conclusion reveals that some skills are expected to develop later in less affluent nations, as well as in those where larger family size is the norm, or where mothers are educated to a lower average level (Willemsen, 1996).
Findings like these suggest that what appear to be cultural dif- ferences in parenting often have a strong educational or economic element. Therefore, rather than labelling these differences as cultural, we may do well to recognise their socio-economic origin.
2 Parenting is only part of the socialisation picture. Although research into the effects of diverse parenting practices on the development of children is informative, over-concentration thereon runs the risk of not recognising the role of the agents of socialisation that form Bronfenbrenner’s exo-system (see
Figure 8.2). The effects of these exo-system values on the develop- ment of the child should not be ignored, especially when we con- sider that around three-quarters of non-European families in the US see themselves as extended organisa- tions (Fields, 2001). Examples of research into attachments that are formed between children and extended family members will be considered in the next section.
Attachment and strange situations
Developmental psychologists have long recognised that attachment patterns (emotional ties between people, such as parents and infants) formed in early childhood have lasting effects on our sense of who we are (self) and on how we interact (sociability). An influential view of early attachment is the so-called epigenetic model (from epigenesis, meaning to multiply gradually). The emotionally healthy infant is seen as moving from a single caregiver (usually the mother) in the first year towards numerous secondary attachments with extended family and peers (Smith, 1980). Variations on this epigenetic pattern are seen by proponents of this model as detrimental to the child’s development (Bowlby, 1969). Proponents of the classic epigenetic view claim that the infant’s bond with the mother is (biologically) qualitatively different