PARENTING: SCIENCE AND PRACTICE, 12: 212221, 2012

ISSN: 1529-5192 print / 1532-7922 online

DOI: 10.1080/15295192.2012.683359

Cultural Approaches to Parenting

Marc H. Bornstein
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SYNOPSIS

This article first introduces some main ideas behind culture and parenting and next addresses
philosophical rationales and methodological considerations central to cultural approaches to
parenting, including a brief account of a cross-cultural study of parenting. It then focuses
on universals, specifics, and distinctions between form (behavior) and function (meaning)
in parenting as embedded in culture. The article concludes by pointing to social policy
implications as well as future directions prompted by a cultural approach to parenting.

INTRODUCTION

Every culture is characterized, and distinguished from other cultures, by deeply rooted
and widely acknowledged ideas about how one needs to feel, think, and act as a
functioning member of the culture. Cross-cultural study affirms that groups of people
possess different beliefs and engage in different behaviors that may be normative in
their culture but are not necessarily normative in another culture. Cultural groups thus
embody particular characteristics that are deemed essential or advantageous to their
members. These beliefs and behaviors tend to persist over time and constitute the val-
ued competencies that are communicated to new members of the group. Central to a
concept of culture, therefore, is the expectation that different cultural groups possess
distinct beliefs and behave in unique ways with respect to their parenting. Cultural
variations in parenting beliefs and behaviors are impressive, whether observed among
different, say ethnic, groups in one society or across societies in different parts of the
world. This article addresses the rapidly increasing research interest in cultural dif-
ferences in parenting. It first takes up philosophical underpinnings, rationales, and
methodological considerations central to cultural approaches to parenting, describes
a cross-cultural study of parenting, and then addresses some core issues in cultural
approaches to parenting, namely, universals, specifics, and the form-versus-function
distinction. It concludes with an overview of social policy implications and future
directions of cultural approaches to parenting.

THE CULTUREPARENTING NEXUS

Culture is usefully conceived of as the set of distinctive patterns of beliefs and behaviors
that are shared by a group of people and that serve to regulate their daily living. These
beliefs and behaviors shape how parents care for their offspring. Thus, having experienced

This article not subject to US copyright law.

 CULTURAL APPROACHES TO PARENTING 213

unique patterns of caregiving is a principal reason that individuals in different cultures

are who they are and often differ so from one another. Culture helps to construct
parents and parenting, and culture is maintained and transmitted by influencing parental
cognitions that in turn are thought to shape parenting practices (Bornstein & Lansford,
2010; Harkness et al., 2007). Childrens experiences with their parents within a cultural
context consequently scaffold them to become culturally competent members of their
society. For example, European American and Puerto Rican mothers of toddlers believe
in the differential value of individual autonomy versus connected interdependence,
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a contrast that in turn relates to mothers actual caregiving (Harwood, Schoelmerich,

Schulze, & Gonzalez, 1999): Where European American mothers use suggestions (rather
than commands) and other indirect means of structuring their childrens behavior, Puerto
Rican mothers use more direct means of structuring, such as commands, physical
positioning and restraints, and direct attempts to recruit their childrens attention.
Parents normally organize and distribute their caregiving faithful to indigenous cul-
tural belief systems and behavior patterns. Indeed, culturally constructed beliefs can
be so powerful that parents are known to act on them, setting aside what their senses
might tell them about their own children. For example, parents in most societies speak
to babies and rightly see them as comprehending interactive partners long before infants
produce language, whereas parents in some societies think that it is nonsensical to talk
to infants before children themselves are capable of speech (Ochs, 1988).
Cultural cognitions and practices instantiate themes that communicate consistent cul-
tural messages (Quinn & Holland, 1987). For example, in the United States personal
choice is firmly rooted in principles of liberty and freedom, is closely bound up with
how individuals conceive of themselves and make sense of their lives, and is a persistent
and significant construct in the literature on parenting (Tamis-LeMonda & McFadden,
2010). Moreover, culture-specific patterns of childrearing can be expected to adapt to
each societys specific setting and needs. For example, young infants among the nomadic
hunter-gatherer Aka are more likely to be held and fed in close proximity to their care-
givers than are infants from Ngandu farming communities who are more likely to be
left by themselves, even though these two traditional groups live close to one another in
central Africa (Hewlett, Lamb, Shannon, Leyendecker, & Schlmerich, 1998). Aka par-
ents are reasoned to maintain closer proximity to infants because the group moves in
search of food more frequently than do Ngandu.
Generational, social, and media imagescultureof caregiving and childhood play
formative roles in generating parenting cognitions and guiding parenting practices
(Bornstein & Lansford, 2010). Parenting thus embeds cultural models and meanings
into basic psychological processes which maintain or transform the culture (Bornstein,
2009). Reciprocally, culture expresses and perpetuates itself through parenting. Parents
bring certain cultural proclivities to interactions with their children, and parents inter-
pret even similar characteristics in children within their cultures frame of reference;
parents then encourage or discourage characteristics as appropriate or detrimental to
adequate functioning within the group.

CULTURAL STUDY AS A PRIMARY APPROACH IN

PARENTING SCIENCE

The move toward a culturally richer understanding of parenting has given rise to a set
of important questions about parenting (Bornstein, 2001). What is normative parenting
 214 BORNSTEIN

and to what extent does it vary with culture? What are the historical, economic, social,
or other sources of cultural variation in parenting norms? How does culture embed into
parenting cognitions and practices and manifest and maintain itself through parenting?
There is definite need and significance for a cultural approach to parenting science.
Descriptively it is invaluable for revealing the full range of human parenting. The study
of parenting across cultures also furnishes a check against an ethnocentric world view
of parenting. Acceptance of findings from any one culture as normative of parent-
ing is too narrow in scope, and ready generalizations from them to parents at large are
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blindingly uncritical. Comparison across cultures is also valuable because it augments

an understanding of the processes through which biological variables fuse with environ-
mental variables and experiences. Parenting needs to be considered in its socio-cultural
context, and cultural study provides the variability necessary to expose process.

Cultural Methods in Parenting Science

Some culture research in parenting compares group means on variables of inter-
est, like parenting cognitions and practices or their child outcomes, using analyses of
variance statistics. Other research looks at how culture moderates patterns of associa-
tions between variables across cultural groups. Both approaches require indicators that
are clearly defined and measured in consistent ways. Cultural science, in addition to
requirements of any good science, also brings with it unique issues and requirements
(translation, sampling, and measurement equivalence, for example), and risks associ-
ated with this research are enhanced when it is conducted without full awareness and
sensitivity to these specific concerns. For example, studies that compare cultural groups
often require the collection of data in different languages, and the instruments used in
such comparisons must be rendered equally valid across cultural groups (Pea, 2007).
Furthermore, with any test of between-group differences, there is a chance that mea-
sures are not equivalent in the groups. Equivalences at many levels are important, and
steps need to be taken to promote not only cross-linguistic appropriateness but also
cross-cultural validity of instruments to achieve at least adapted equivalence (van de
Vijver & Leung, 1997). Indeed, failure to do so creates problems in interpretation of find-
ings that are as serious as lack of reliability and validity (Vandenberg & Lance, 2000).
If test measurement invariance is not tested and ensured, additional empirical and/or
conceptual justification that the measures used have the same meaning in different
cultural groups is required.
Cultural comparisons of parenting usually involve quasi-experimental designs, in
which samples are not randomly selected either from the world population or from
national populations or (obviously) assigned to cultures. Interpreting findings is much
more challenging in such designs than in experiments that are based on random assign-
ment of participants. A major challenge that confronts cultural comparisons concerns
how to isolate source(s) of potential effects and identify the presumed active cultural
ingredient(s) that produced differences. Samples in different cultures can differ on many
personological or sociodemographic characteristics that may confound parenting differ-
ences. For example, parents in different cultural groups may vary in modal patterns
of personality, acculturation level, education, or socioeconomic status (Bornstein et al.,
2007; Bornstein et al., 2012a). Various procedures are available to untangle rival expla-
nations for cultural comparisons, such as the inclusion of covariates in the research
design to confirm or disconfirm specific alternative interpretations. By ruling out com-
plementary accounts, it is possible to draw conclusions that are more firmly situated in
 CULTURAL APPROACHES TO PARENTING 215

culture. For example, culture influences teaching and expectations of children in moth-
ers of Australian versus Lebanese descent all living in Australia apart from child gender,
parity, and socioeconomic class (Goodnow, Cashmore, Cotton, & Knight, 1984).
Other methodological questions threaten the validity of cultural comparisons
(Matsumoto & van de Vijver, 2011). For example, it matters who is doing the study, their
culture, their assumptions in asking certain questions, and so forth. Whether collaborat-
ing scientists are on the ground in the culture and undertake adequate preliminary
study to generate meaningful questions are also pertinent.
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Similarity and Difference in Parenting across Cultures

The story of the cultural investigation of parenting is largely one of similarities,
differences, and their meaning. In an illustrative study, we analyzed and compared
natural mother-infant interactions in Argentina, Belgium, Israel, Italy, and the United
States (Bornstein et al., 2012b). Differences exist among the locales we recruited from
in terms of history, beliefs, languages, and childrearing values. However, the samples
were more alike than not in terms of modernity, urbanity, economics, politics, living
standards, even ecology and climate. Thus, they created the possibility of identifying
culture-unique and -general conclusions about childrearing. Mothers were primiparous,
at least 18 years of age, and from intact families; infants were firstborn, term, healthy,
and 5 months old. Our aims were to observe mothers and their infants under eco-
logically valid, natural, and unobtrusive conditions, and so we studied their usual
routines in the familiar confines of their own homes. We videorecorded motherbaby
dyads and then used mutually exclusive and exhaustive coding systems to compre-
hensively characterize frequency and duration of six maternal caregiving behavioral
domains (nurture, physical, social, didactic, material, and language) and five corre-
sponding infant developmental domains (physical, social, exploration, vocalization, and
distress communication).
One question we asked concerned cultural similarities and differences in base rates
of parenting in the six caregiving domains. We standardized maternal behavior fre-
quency in terms of rate of occurrence per hour, pooled, normalized, and disaggregated
the data by country, finally analyzing country means for parallel comparisons for dif-
ferent domains. Mothers differed in every domain assessed. Moreover, mothers in no
one country surpassed mothers in all others in their base rates of parenting across
domains. The fact that maternal behaviors vary significantly across these modern, indus-
trialized, and comparable places underscores the role of cultural influence on everyday
human experiences, even from the start of life. Of course, even greater variation is often
revealed in starker contrasts. For example, mothers in rural Thailand do not know that
their newborns can see, and so during the day swaddle infants in fabric hammocks that
allow babies only a slit view of ceiling or sky (Kotchabhakdi, Winichagoon, Smitasiri,
Dhanamitta, & Valyasevi, 1987). Awareness of alternative modes of development also
enhances understanding of the nature of variation across cultures; cross-cultural com-
parisons show how. For example, U.S. mothers are often thought of as being highly
verbal, but U.S. mothers actually fell at the bottom of our five-culture comparison.
A second question we asked concerned relations between parent-provided experi-
ences and behavioral development in young infants (Bornstein et al., 2012b). Across
cultures, mothers and infants showed a noteworthy degree of attunement and speci-
ficity. Mothers who encouraged their infants physical development more had more
 216 BORNSTEIN

physically developed infants as opposed to other outcomes; mothers who engaged

infants more socially had infants who paid more attention to them; mothers who encour-
aged their infants more didactically had infants who explored more properties, objects,
and events in the environment, as did babies whose mothers outfitted their environ-
ments in richer ways. That is, mothers and infants are not only in tune with one another,
but their correspondences tend to be domain specific. Thus, specific correspondences
in motherinfant interaction patterns were widespread and similar in different cultural
groups.
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This kind of study continues the story of cultural approaches to parenting in terms of
their traditional dual foci on similarities and differences. Mothers in different cultures
differ in their mean levels of different domains of parenting infants, but mothers and
infants in different cultures are similar in terms of mutual attunement of caregiving
on the part of mothers and development in corresponding domains in infants. A shift
in focus to the meaning of those similarities and differences advances the culture and
parenting narrative.

CULTURAL UNIVERSALS, SPECIFICS, AND FORMFUNCTION

RELATIONS IN PARENTING

Culture-Common and Culture-Specific Parenting

The cultural approach to parenting has as one main goal to evaluate and com-
pare culture-common and culture-specific modes of parenting. Evolutionary thinking
appeals to the species-common genome, and the biological heritage of some psycho-
logical processes presupposes their universality (Norenzayan & Heine, 2005) as do
shared historical and economic forces (Harris, 2001). At the same time, cultural psychol-
ogy explores variation in core psychological processes by investigating the competing
influences of divergent physical and social environments (Bornstein, 2010; van de
Vijver & Leung, 1997). Psychological constructs, structures, functions, and processes
like parenting can be universal and simultaneously reflect cultural moderation of their
quantitative level or qualitative expression. Language illustrates this essential duality.
An evolutionary model posits a language instinct from the perspective of an inborn
and universal acquisition device, but diversity of environmental input plays a strong
role in the acquisition of any specific language (Pinker, 2007). Some demands on par-
ents are universal. For example, parents in all societies must nurture and protect their
young (Bornstein, 2006). Other demands vary greatly across cultural groups. For exam-
ple, parents in some societies play with babies and see them as interactive partners,
whereas parents in other societies think that it is senseless for parents to play with
infants (Bornstein, 2007).
Culture-specific influences on parenting begin long before children are born, and they
shape fundamental decisions about which behaviors parents should promote in their
children and how parents should interact with their children (Bornstein, 1991; Whiting,
1963). Thus, caregiving varies among cultures in terms of opinions about the full range
of caregiving and child development, including the significance of specific competencies
for childrens successful adjustment, the ages expected for children to reach develop-
mental milestones, when and how to care for children, and the like. For example, the
United States and Japan are both child-centered modern societies with equivalently high
 CULTURAL APPROACHES TO PARENTING 217

standards of living and so forth, but U.S. American and Japanese parents value differ-
ent childrearing goals which they express in different ways (Bornstein, 1989; Bornstein
et al., 2012a; Morelli & Rothbaum, 2007). American mothers try to promote auton-
omy, assertiveness, verbal competence, and self-actualization in their children, whereas
Japanese mothers try to promote emotional maturity, self-control, social courtesy, and
interdependence in theirs.
Many parenting cognitions and practices are likely to be similar across cultures;
indeed, similarities may reflect universals (in the sense of being common) even if they
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vary in form and the degree to which they are shaped by experience and influenced
by culture. Such patterns of parenting might reflect inherent attributes of caregiving,
historical convergences in parenting, or they could be a by-product of information
dissemination via forces of globalization or mass media or migration that present par-
ents today with increasingly similar socialization models, issues, and challenges. In the
end, all peoples must help children meet similar developmental tasks, and all peo-
ples (presumably) wish physical health, social adjustment, educational achievement,
and economic security for their children, and so they parent in some manifestly sim-
ilar ways. Furthermore, the mechanisms through which parents likely affect children
are universal. For example, social learning theorists have identified the pervasive roles
that conditioning and modeling play as children acquire associations that subsequently
form the basis for their culturally constructed selves. By watching or listening to oth-
ers who are already embedded in the culture, children come to think and act like them.
Attachment theorists propose that children everywhere develop internal working mod-
els of social relationships through interactions with their primary caregivers and that
these models shape childrens future social relationships with others throughout the
balance of the life course (Sroufe & Fleeson, 1986). With so much emphasis on identifi-
cation of differences among peoples, it is easy to forget that nearly all parents regardless
of culture seek to lead happy, healthy, fulfilled parenthoods and to rear happy, healthy,
fulfilled children.

Form and Function in Cultural Approaches to Parenting

These general considerations of universals and specifics lead to a logic model that
contrasts form with function in parenting. By form, I mean a parenting cognition or
practice as instantiated; by function, I mean the purpose or construal or meaning
attached to the form. A proper understanding of the function of parenting cognitions
and practices requires situating them in their cultural context (Bornstein, 1995). When
a particular parenting cognition or practice serves the same function and connotes the
same meaning in different cultures, it likely constitutes a universal. For example, care-
givers in (almost) all cultures routinely adjust their speech to very young children
making it simpler and more redundant, presumably to support early language acqui-
sition; child-directed speech constitutes a universal that adults find difficult to suppress
(Papouek & Bornstein, 1992). The same parenting cognition or practice can also assume
different functions in different cultural contexts. Particular parental practices, such as
harsh initiation rites, deemed less harmful to children in some cultures may be judged
abusive in others. Conversely, different parenting cognitions and practices may serve
the same function in different cultural contexts. For example, an authoritative parent-
ing style (high warmth, high control) leads to positive outcomes in European American
school children, whereas an authoritarian parenting style (low warmth, high control)
 218 BORNSTEIN

leads to positive outcomes in African American and Hong Kong Chinese school chil-
dren (Leung, Lau, & Lam, 1998). When different parenting cognitions or practices serve
different functions in different settings, it is evidence for cultural specificity. Many dif-
ferent parenting practices appear to be adaptive but differently for different cultural
groups (Ogbu, 1993). Thus, cultural study informs not only about quantitative aspects
but also about qualitative meaning of parents beliefs and behaviors.
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SOCIAL POLICY AND FUTURE DIRECTIONS IN CULTURAL

APPROACHES TO PARENTING

It is imperative to learn more about parenting and culture so that scientists, educators,
and practitioners can effectively enhance parent and child development and strengthen
families in diverse social groups. Insofar as some systematic universal relations obtain
between how people parent and how children develop, the possibility exists for identify-
ing some best practices in how to promote positive parenting and child development.
Differences attached to the cultural meanings of particular behaviors can cause prob-
lems, however. For example, immigrant children may have parents who expect them to
behave in one way that is encouraged at home (e.g., averting eye contact to show defer-
ence and respect) but then find themselves in a context where adults of the mainstream
culture attach a different (often negative) meaning to the same behavior (e.g., appearing
disinterested and unengaged with a teacher at school).
Other possible future directions for a cultural parenting science would consti-
tute a long agendum. Some will be procedural. Many studies rely on self-reports,
and many survey parenting at only one point in time. Observations of actual prac-
tices constitute a vital complementary data base (Bornstein, Cote, & Venuti, 2001),
and a developmental perspective offers insights into temporal processes of encul-
turation, parents tracking differential ontogenetic trajectories, and highlights inter-
generational similarities and differences in parents and children from different cul-
tures (Bornstein et al., 2010). Parenting modifies social and cognitive aspects of the
developing individual and so the design of the brain. For example, assistance con-
stitutes an important feature of family relationships for adolescents but has distinc-
tive values in Latino and European heritage cultures. Youth in both ethnic groups
show similar behavioral levels of helping but, via functional magnetic resonance
imaging (fMRI), different patterns of neural activity within the mesolimbic reward
system: Latinos show more activity when contributing to family, and European
Americans show more activity when gaining cash for themselves (Telzer, Masten,
Berkman, Lieberman, & Fuligni, 2010). A future behavioral neuroscience of parent-
ing will profitably include cultural variation (Barrett & Fleming, 2011; Bornstein,
2012).
Parenting is thought to differ in mothers and fathers (and for girls and boys), but
most parenting research still focuses on mothers. In many cultures, children spend large
amounts of time with caregivers other than parents, and all contribute to the caregiving
environment of the child. How caregiving is distributed amongst different stakeholders
across cultures is not well understood, and future cultural research in parenting will
benefit from an enlarged family systems perspective (Bornstein & Sawyer, 2006).
Thinking about parentchild relationships often highlights parents as agents of
socialization; however, caregiving is a two-way street. Parent and child activities are
 CULTURAL APPROACHES TO PARENTING 219

characterized by intricate patterns of sensitive mutual understandings and unfolding

synchronous transactions (Bornstein, 2006, 2009). Moreover, childrens appraisals of
their parents affect parenting and child adjustment. Future research needs to attend to
child effects, cultural normativeness, and construals of parenting as well as how culture
moderates each. Parenting styles that are congruent with cultural norms appear to be
effective in transmitting values from parents to children, perhaps because parenting
practices that approach the cultural norm result in a childrearing environment that is
more positive, consistent, and predictable and in one that facilitates childrens accurate
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perceptions of parents; children of parents who behave in culturally normative ways

are also likely to encounter similar values in settings outside the family (e.g., in religious
institutions, in the community) that reinforce their parenting experiences.

CONCLUSIONS

Research on dynamic relations between culture and parenting is increasingly focused

on which aspects of culture moderate parenting cognitions and practices and how they
do so, as well as on when and why links between parenting cognitions and practices
and childrens development are culturally general versus culturally specific. These new
directions will move the field toward a deeper understanding, not just of which simi-
larities obtain and which differences can be identified, but also of why, in whom, and
under which conditions.
The cultural study of parenting is beneficially understood in a framework of nec-
essary versus desirable demands. A necessary demand is that parents and children
communicate with one another. Normal interaction and childrens healthy mental and
socioemotional development depend on it. Not unexpectedly, communication appears
to be a universal aspect of parenting and child development. A desirable demand is that
parents and children communicate in certain ways adapted and faithful to their cul-
tural context. Cultural studies tell us about parents and childrens mutual adjustments
in terms of universally necessary and contextually desirable demands. Assumptions
about the specificity and generality of parenting, and relations between parents and
children, are advantageously tested through cultural research because neither parenting
nor childrens development occurs in a vacuum: Both emerge and grow in a medium of
culture. Variations in what is normative in different cultures help us to question our
assumptions about what is universal and informs our understanding of how parent
child relationships unfold in ways both culturally universal and specific. That admirable
goal notwithstanding, methodological challenges unique to this line of research loom
large.
It has been said that only two kinds of information are transmitted across genera-
tions: genes and culture. Parents are the final common pathway of both. We can ask,
however, Which is the more meaningful and enduring? The biological view is that we are
gene machines, created to pass on our genes. A child, even a grandchild, may resem-
ble a parent in facial features or in a talent for music. However, as each generation
passes the contribution of any parents genes is halved and it is pooled with those
of many other parents. It does not take long to reach negligible proportions. Genes
may be immortal, but the unique collection of genes which is any one parent crum-
bles away (Dawkins, 1976). Rather, what parents do, and how they prepare the next
 220 BORNSTEIN

generation in their cultures, can live on, intact, long after their genes dissolve in the
common pool.

AFFILIATION AND ADDRESS

Marc H. Bornstein, Child and Family Research, Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute
of Child Health and Human Development, Suite 8030, 6705 Rockledge Drive, Bethesda
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MD 20892-7971, USA. E-mail: [email protected].

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Research supported by the Intramural Research Program of the NIH, NICHD. I thank
P. Horn and C. Padilla.

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