Maternal Roles and Social Competence: Parent‐Infant Interactions in Two Cultures*

Abstract

Early parent‐child interaction provides a critical context for children's socialization into a culture. Definitions of social competence may vary considerably across cultures, as may parents’ perceptions of how they themselves contribute to its development during different situations of daily living. This study extended findings from a previous study of Taiwanese mothers by comparing EuroAmerican and Taiwanese mothers’ descriptions of the social competence benefits of early parent‐child interaction and of what they do during interactions to achieve these benefits. Twenty mothers (ten from each cultural background) were interviewed. Both groups of mothers talked about social and emotional components of social competence. However, relative emphases on categories within and across the two components differed. The relative emphasis placed on maternal roles related to helping their children achieve social competence also differed between groups. Although frequencies in the Euro‐American group did not allow contingency analysis for all benefit/role pairs, visual analysis of probability patterns indicated that mothers in each group thought somewhat differently about their roles in developing different aspects of their babies’ social competence. Implications are drawn for early intervention. *This article is based on a poster session presented at the International Conference on Infant Studies, Brighton, England, July 16‐19, 2000.