Abstract
Culture influences the way parents shape children’s environment. Two studies examined cross-cultural differences in parental practices related to motor development in Israel and the Netherlands. In the first study, 198 Dutch and 206 Israeli parents of infants aged 1–7.5 months completed questionnaires measuring parental practices and beliefs regarding motor development. In the second study, 30 Dutch and 30 Israeli parents completed the same questionnaires when their children were 2 and 10 months old. While similarities were found across the cultures, Israeli parents practiced infant prone positioning more. Additionally, Dutch infants spent substantial more time in the playpen. Furthermore, beliefs stressing stimulation and stimulating practices (both more frequent within Israeli parents) predicted better prone skills, shown by the Israeli infants. Findings highlight the diversity of parental practices related to infant motor development.
Highlights
Ever since the ages and stages of motor development have first been documented, context-specific variation in type and timing of motor development have been reported (Karasik et al, 2015)
Motor development in non-Western countries was found to differ from Western norms and these differences were related to differences in parental practices
We studied whether daily practices are Parental Practices Regarding Motor Development related to parental beliefs and explored whether daily practices and parental beliefs are related to infant motor skills as reported by parents
Summary
Ever since the ages and stages of motor development have first been documented, context-specific variation in type and timing of motor development have been reported (Karasik et al, 2015). In a previous study we found clear differences between Dutch and Israeli parents in their parental beliefs about motor development (Van Schaik et al, 2018), such that Israeli parents attributed more importance to stimulation of motor development, following this development in the “right” order and obtaining expert advice. On the other hand, attributed greater importance to letting children follow their own pace in motor development (Van Schaik et al, 2018). These differences in beliefs are presumably mostly relevant for children’s development through their instantiation into parental choices for the childrearing settings or practices. We studied whether daily practices are Parental Practices Regarding Motor Development related to parental beliefs and explored whether daily practices and parental beliefs are related to infant motor skills as reported by parents
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