Parents' Concepts of the Successful School Child in Seven Western Cultures.

Xin Feng,Piotr O Zylicz,Ughetta Moscardino,Charles M Super,Moises Rios Bermudez,Sara Harkness,Sabrina Bonichini,Barbara Welles

doi:10.1002/cad.20337

Abstract

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.

Highlights

Fellowship to the first author; all statements made and views expressed are the sole responsibility of the authors
We examine parents’ beliefs about the importance of various child qualities for success in school among groups of middle-class families in seven post-industrial Western societies, chosen to sample the broad East-West and North-South variation within the European continent, as well as the British diaspora: Italy, Spain, Sweden, Poland, the Netherlands, Australia, and the United States
Analysis of parental background and child predictors of ratings showed that some of them contributed to small differences in ratings, but the cultural differences remained highly significant even after controlling for these potential confounds. This is especially true for the Cognitive and Character factors. Despite such other sources of variance, moderate to strong within-sample consensus was found for the Dutch, Polish, Swedish, Spanish, Italian, and U.S samples, leaving only the Australian sample with low consensus

Summary

Introduction

Fellowship to the first author; all statements made and views expressed are the sole responsibility of the authors. The authors especially appreciate the participation of the many families in this research, which was part of the International Study of Parents, Children, and Schools. María Carmen Moreno, Alfredo Oliva, and Moisés Ríos Bermúdez; in Sweden, Barbara Welles and Caroline Tovatt; in the United States of America, Sara Harkness, Charles Super, Xin Feng, Marcia Hughes, Archna Khattar, Amy Miller, Beth Muller, and Parminder Parmar. A crucial task of parenting, is to help children develop the personal qualities needed to succeed in school

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Results

Conclusion