Parental Acceptance-Rejection and Parental Control: Cross-Cultural Codes

Abstract

Using Murdock and White's (I969) Standard Cross-Cultural Sample of I86 societies, this article presents a set of holocultural codes on two major dimensions of parental behavior; vit., parental acceptance-rejection and parental control. Children everywhere experience more or less warmth (acceptance-re jection) and control (permissiveness-strictness) from their parents or other major caretakers, and research evidence (Martin I975; Rohner I975; Rohner and Nielsen I978; Rohner and Rohner I980) documents amply the pancultural significance of these forms of parental behavior for the behavioral and personality development of children. Rejection and acceptance together form what we call the warmth dimension of parental behavior; permissiveness and strictness together form what we call the control dimension. Both warmth and control are bipolar dimensions where, for example, rejection or the absence of warmth and affection stands at one pole of the scale in opposition to acceptance at the other. Similarly, permissiveness or lax control (or alternatively, high autonomy-granting) stands at one pole of the scale in opposition to strictness or restrictive control at the other. The rejection end of the warmth dimension is differentiated into two subcomponents: parental hostility and aggression on the one hand; and parental indifference and neglect on the other (Rohner I975, Ig80b). Hostility and indifference refer to parents' internal feelings and attitudes, whereas aggression and neglect are forms of observable behavior motivated to a large degree by each of these internal states, respectively. A more complete description of these concepts is provided below. The codes presented in this article are part of a larger program of research that aims to elaborate and test parental acceptance-rejection theory (Rohner I975, Ig80b). Parental acceptance-re jection theory attempts (a) to explain some of the major psychological, environmental, and maintenance systems conditions under which parents the world over accept or reject, and control their children, as well as (b) to predict the consequences of parental warmth and control for personality development, and for selected institutionalized expressive features of society.