Parental Ethnotheories Research Articles

P27 - Parental Ethnotheories About Healthy Eating: Exploring the Developmental Niche of Preschoolers

Background (Background, Rationale, Prior Research, and/or Theory): Parents' structure and participate in daily activities with their children in ways that resonate with their cultural beliefs known as parental ethnotheories. Healthy eating is a daily activity that can be shaped by parental ethnotheories. Objective: To understand parental ethnotheories (i.e. cultural beliefs) that support preschool-age (3–5 years) children's healthy eating guided by the three components of the developmental niche theoretical framework: physical and social settings of everyday routines, customs of childrearing practices, and parental ethnotheories. Study Design, Setting, Participants, Intervention: Utilizing hermeneutic phenomenology design, one-on-one interviews were conducted with 20 primary caregivers of preschool-age children until data saturation. Participants were selected using purposive sampling. Outcome Measures and Analysis: Data was analyzed using MaxQDA to develop codes and themes about parental ethnotheories that support preschool-age children's healthy eating. Results: Three overarching themes and related sub-themes emerged. Theme 1 was parental ethnotheories about the meaning of healthy eating included subthemes around participants' definitions of healthy eating, motivations to support children's healthy eating, and sources of knowledge about healthy eating. Theme 2 was parental ethnotheories that supported organization of children's physical and social settings included a structured mealtime routine and participants' food socialization strategies. Theme 3 was parental ethnotheories that supported children's learning about healthy eating included parent-child communication and engagement in age appropriate food activities such as meal preparation, visiting farmer's market, grocery shopping, gardening, cooking, and baking. Conclusions and Implications: Developmental niche of preschool-age children constitutes an interactive system (i.e. physical and social settings, childrearing practices, and parental ethnotheories) in which ethnotheories serve as guides to parenting practices where healthy eating messages are conveyed and practiced. Primary caregivers' knowledge/skills about healthy foods and positive feeding practices are important. Findings make an important contribution to the scant literature on parental ethnotheories that support preschool-age children's healthy eating, thus, presenting a unique qualitative contribution to the field of parenting/cultural food environment research. Funding: USDA-AFRI.

Domácí vzdělávání jako výraz kulturního kreativismu

The article reflects on whether and when it is possible to see home schooling as a reflection of cultural creativism as defined by Ray and Anderson. The heterogeneous nature of home schooling is explored here through the theoretical frame of the anthropology of education, with a more narrow focus on different parental ethnotheories (Harkness and Super) and the theory of capital (Bourdieu). Set against primary research, represented by two case studies, the article shows how families that practise home schooling enter the game of capital, how they justify their decisions, and how they negotiate their difference. Based on personal practice these families contribute to the overall transformation of the field of education. Given that they do so not from the position of a lobbyist or a movement leader but from a position where they are convinced of their ideological and action isolation, the author concludes that it is possible to consider here a parallel with cultural creativism.

Language development, delay and intervention-the views of parents from communities that speech and language therapy managers in England consider to be under-served.

Evidence-based practice includes research evidence, clinical expertise and stakeholder perspectives. Stakeholder perspectives are important and include parental ethno-theories, which embrace views about many aspects of speech, language and communication, language development, and interventions. The Developmental Niche Framework provides a useful theory to understand parental beliefs. Ethnotheories, including those about language development, delay and interventions, may vary cross culturally and are less well understood in relation to families who may be considered 'under-served' or 'hard-to-reach' by speech and language therapy services. Who is considered to be under-served and the reasons why some families are under-served are complex. To describe beliefs and reported practices, in relation to speech and language development, delay and intervention, of parents and carers from a small number of groups in England who were perceived to be under-served in relation to SLT services. As part of a wider National Institute for Health Research (NIHR)-funded study (Child Talk), seven focus groups (with a total of 52 participants) were held with parents from three communities in England. Topics addressed included beliefs about language development, language delay and parents' reported responses to language delay. Data were transcribed and analysed using adapted framework analysis, which also drew on directed content analysis. Four themes resulted that broadly matched the topics addressed in the focus groups: language development and the environment; causes and signs of speech and language delay; responses to concerns about speech, language and communication; and improving SLT. These produced some previously unreported ideas, e.g., about how language develops and the causes of delay. The findings are discussed in relation to previous literature and the Developmental Niche Framework. Clinical implications include ideas about issues for SLTs to discuss with families and the need to recognize that parents may see themselves as competent facilitators of language. Suggestions are made for future research, including: expanded investigation of a wider range of under-served groups, an exploration of who parents consult when concerned about their child's language, and how key community figures advise parents in relation to language delay.

The ecocultural context and child behavior problems: A qualitative analysis in rural Nepal

Commonly used paradigms for studying child psychopathology emphasize individual-level factors and often neglect the role of context in shaping risk and protective factors among children, families, and communities. To address this gap, we evaluated influences of ecocultural contextual factors on definitions, development of, and responses to child behavior problems and examined how contextual knowledge can inform culturally responsive interventions. We drew on Super and Harkness’ “developmental niche” framework to evaluate the influences of physical and social settings, childcare customs and practices, and parental ethnotheories on the definitions, development of, and responses to child behavior problems in a community in rural Nepal. Data were collected between February and October 2014 through in-depth interviews with a purposive sampling strategy targeting parents (N = 10), teachers (N = 6), and community leaders (N = 8) familiar with child-rearing. Results were supplemented by focus group discussions with children (N = 9) and teachers (N = 8), pile-sort interviews with mothers (N = 8) of school-aged children, and direct observations in homes, schools, and community spaces. Behavior problems were largely defined in light of parents’ socialization goals and role expectations for children. Certain physical settings and times were seen to carry greater risk for problematic behavior when children were unsupervised. Parents and other adults attempted to mitigate behavior problems by supervising them and their social interactions, providing for their physical needs, educating them, and through a shared verbal reminding strategy (samjhaune). The findings of our study illustrate the transactional nature of behavior problem development that involves context-specific goals, roles, and concerns that are likely to affect adults’ interpretations and responses to children’s behavior. Ultimately, employing a developmental niche framework will elucidate setting-specific risk and protective factors for culturally compelling intervention strategies.

Black mothers' ethnotheories of moral development: A client-centered approach

Child development research has engaged the concept of parental ethnotheories as a theoretical framework for understanding and analyzing how culture shapes child development. It assumes that a child's environment is organized in part by a cultural system that forms a three component developmental niche including (1) the physical and social settings, (2) the customs and practices of child rearing, and (3) the psychology of caregivers. Despite its use in child development research, the ethnotheory framework has been less prevalent in social work research. This paper presents a study whose findings describe parental ethnotheories related to Black mothers' beliefs about the moral development of their daughters. This research is relevant to increasing concerns regarding the development of conduct problems amongst Black girls. Rather than viewing Black mothers as a deficit, knowledge of a child's developmental niche enables social work practitioners and scholars to engage an emic understanding of Black parenting. It also furthers our knowledge about the process and mechanisms that characterize their mothers' parenting, thereby facilitating client-centered practice.

Bangladeshi parental ethnotheories in the United Kingdom: Towards cultural collaborations in clinical practice.

Parental meaning systems (ethnotheories) constitute a very important part of the context in which children live and develop. Parental ethnotheories are in turn shaped by implicit cultural ideals that organize parental beliefs and actions and frame child-rearing practices. The article presents a qualitative research into Bangladeshi parental ethnotheories in the United Kingdom, which illustrates both the rich cultural meanings that orientate parental action and also demonstrates how parents generate new meanings following migration and culture change. Professional understandings about children's developmental needs, of child rearing and parenting, are not culture free and an examination of the cultural frames of professional theories is important as parenting is often taught as a universal technique that takes little account of the cultural context and of what parents think. An engagement with other cultural theories about child development can enhance critical reflexivity in clinical practice by provoking reflection on the cultural constructions of professional theories. Creating a context for the expression of parental ethnotheories is necessary for developing cross-cultural collaborations in clinical practice as it empowers families and redresses the power relationship between the therapist and the parent.

Niños buenos vs. niños malos: Etnoteorías de un grupo de madres guatemaltecas

Parental ethnotheories, or parents’ beliefs about their children’s development, provide a framework for cultural transmission of values and behaviors. In this study we aimed to understand Guatemalan mothers’ beliefs about children’s learning, what is “good” and “bad” behavior, and the desired qualities of grown-up children. Twenty-two low-income mothers (ages 20 through 70) were interviewed about their beliefs with respect to learning and desired qualities of children. Mothers reported that good children are obedient and respectful, behaviors that they learn from their parents. Good girls help with housework and boys study hard. Bad children are disobedient and disrespectful, behaviors that they learn from their friends or “on the street.” Grown-up children were expected to be hard-working and respectful. It will be important to understand how these parental beliefs are instantiated in mothers’ parenting behavior in the changing diverse context of Guatemalan society.

Parental Ethnotheories, Social Practice and the Culture-Specific Development of Social Smiling in Infants

In this article we argue that current theories on socioemotional development during infancy need to be reconceptualized in order to account for cross-cultural variation in caregiver–infant interaction. In line with the cultural-historical internalization theory of emotional development (Holodynski & Friedlmeier, 2006) and the ecocultural model of development (Keller & Kärtner, 2013), we argue that socioemotional development can be understood only in the context of social practice and underlying ethnotheories that give significance to infants' emotional expressions. Thus, culture-specific interpretations of and expectations concerning infants' expressive cues lead to culture-specific interactional routines. These, in turn, lead to culture-specific usage of these expressions by the developing child. To develop our argument, we focus on a specific aspect of early socioemotional development, namely, the emergence of social smiling during infancy. Interactional dynamics in autonomous cultural milieus are based on specific ethnotheories, most prominently that positive emotional exchange during face-to-face interaction is one of the most desirable ways of interacting with infants. However, the dominant ethnotheories concerning emotional development and their associated behavioral routines vary systematically across cultural milieus and are markedly different in prototypically relational cultural milieus, in which they center on infants' contentment. This has implications for infants' emotional expressivity and, possibly, experience.

What is the state of play?

For over two decades I have attempted to explain the cultural basis of children's play in several of my published papers. A consistent message is that a consideration of the cultural foundations of play is necessary if we are to more fully understand the meaning of different play activities for children's intellectual and social development (see Roopnarine, 2011). Collectively, these accounts are largely descriptive and provide evidence that parents hold different beliefs about the value of play for childhood development and also that the rates at which children engage in different modes of play vary considerably. The majority of this research has been conducted in technologically developed societies. In this essay, I introduce cultural constructs (e.g., parental ethnotheories, physical settings, practices) that have guided my work on play and culture before proceeding to a discussion of parental beliefs about play and parent–child play across cultures.

Parental ethnotheories and family language policy in transnational adoptive families

Family language policy refers to explicit and overt decisions parents make about language use and language learning as well as implicit processes that legitimize certain language and literacy practices over others in the home. Studies in family language policy have emphasized the ways in which family-internal processes are shaped by and shape societal level realities. By examining the interview discourse of 11 transnational adoptive parents about their language and education decisions for older, native Russian-speaking adoptees, this article shows how parents draw on categorizations and descriptions of their children to explain their language and education policies. The parental ethnotheories embedded in these categorizations represent a mediating link between societal level discourses on adoptive parenting and adoptees and parents’ individual language planning decisions. The data from transnational adoptive parents presented here indicate that, although adoptive parents’ language policy decisions were reflective of larger discourse processes in society such as monolingual normativity, parents themselves saw their FLP decisions in relation to their children’s particular cognitive and emotional capacities, educational needs, and desire to form a family bond.

Parental ethnotheories and customs of childrearing in two Roma urban communities in Greece: Examining the developmental niche of the 6-year-old child.

Parental ethnotheories and customs of childrearing in two Roma urban communities in Greece: Examining the developmental niche of the 6-year-old child.

Parental Ethnotheories in the Context of Immigration: Asian Indian Immigrant and Euro-American Mothers and Daughters in an American Town

Cross-cultural research is inherently limited by the difficulty of disentangling cultural effects on children’s development from other environmental features that covary with culture. The growing presence of immigrant populations in the United States offers an opportunity to study parents’ cultural belief systems, or “parental ethnotheories,” as they influence children’s settings and activities in the absence of other environmental supports. This study examined Asian Indian immigrant mothers’ ( n = 10) and matched Euro-American mothers’ ( n = 10) ethnotheories about their daughters by means of analysis of the mothers’ discourse in the context of semistructured interviews, multidimensional scaling and cluster analysis of the descriptors, and consensus analysis. The mothers’ ethnotheories are reflected in differences between the settings and daily activities of their daughters. The Indian immigrant mothers’ ideas and practices are compared to findings in the Whitings’ comparative field studies and discussed in relation to several concepts of culture.

Etnoteorias parentais: um estudo com mães residentes no interior e na capital de Santa Catarina

O estudo teve como objetivo investigar etnoteorias parentais em mães residentes na capital e interior de Santa Catarina. Foram aplicadas escalas de crenças sobre práticas de cuidado, metas de socialização e alocentrismo familiar em 50 mães de cada contexto cultural. Os resultados na capital indicaram predomínio de elementos autônomo-relacionais em práticas e alocentrismo familiar, enquanto que em termos de metas, as mães valorizaram a autonomia da criança. No interior, no que se refere a metas de socialização e alocentrismo familiar, foram identificados aspectos relacionais. Contudo, em termos de crenças sobre práticas de criação, constatou-se maior valorização da autonomia. Concluiu-se que ambos os contextos caracterizam-se por um modelo de self autônomo-relacional, embora com diferentes ênfases de acordo com a dimensão investigada.

Teaching and Learning Guide for: Culture and Biology: The Foundation of Pathways of Development

Teaching and Learning Guide for: Culture and Biology: The Foundation of Pathways of Development

Cultural and Developmental Variation in Toddlers' Interactions With Other Children in Two Small-Scale Societies in Central Africa

In this paper we present a cross-cultural study of toddler interactions with other juveniles (1-15 years of age) in two small-scale societies, the Bofi farmers and foragers of Central Africa. This paper provides a unique perspective because child development studies have predominantly been conducted in Western industrialized settings. Most studies of juvenile interactions among non-Western small-scale cultures have focused either on sibling caretaking or the functional value of juvenile play-groups, while little attention has been given to various types of juvenile interactions. In this study we utilized naturalistic observations of 21 Bofi farmer and 22 Bofi forager toddlers to examine the role of cultural group and age in how toddlers interact with other juveniles, specifically with respect to caretaking, social, and conflict interactions. Toddlerjuvenile caretaking interactions were quite similar among the Bofi foragers and farmers despite differing parental ethno-theories about juvenile caretaking, and age effects were apparent only among the farmers. Toddler-juvenile social interactions were predicted by both age and cultural group: Toddlers engaged socially with juveniles more as they grew older in both groups, but farmer toddlers interacted with juveniles more than did forager toddlers overall. Bofi farmer and forager toddler conflicts appeared quite infrequent by Western standards, although cultural group differences were apparent: Farmer toddlers engaged in more conflict with juveniles than forager toddlers did. Lastly, the topics of conflicts varied according to cultural group, but not age: Farmer toddler conflicts were more often related to disagreements over objects and responses to physical aggression than were forager toddler conflicts.

Indigenous and Cultural Psychology: Understanding People in Context

Section I Theoretical and Methodological Issues: Contributions To Indigenous And Cultural Psychology: Understanding People in Context.- The Scientific Foundation of Indigenous and Cultural Psychology: The Transactional Approach.- The Importance of Constructive Realism for The Indigenous Psychologies Approach.- Constructive Realism and Confucian Relationalism: An Epistemological Strategy for the Development of Indigenous Psychology.- From Decolonizing Psychology to the Development of a Cross-Indigenous Perspective in Methodology: The Philippine Experience. - Section II Family and Socialization: Parental Ethnotheories of Child Development: Looking beyond Independence and Individualism in American Belief Systems.- Close Interpersonal Relationships among Japanese: Amae as Distinguished from Attachment and Dependence.- Affect and Early Moral Socialization: Some Insights and Contributions from Indigenous Psychological Studies in Taiwan.- Cultures are Like All Other Cultures, Like Some Other Cultures, Like No Other Culture.- Section III Cognitive Processes: The Mutual Relevance of Indigenous Psychology and Morality.- Native Dialectism and the Tao of Chinese Thought.- Indian Perspectives on Cognition.- Section IV Self and Personality: Indigenous Personality Research: The Chinese Case.- Site Under Construction: An Ethnopsychological Representation of Mexican Self-Concept.- The Chinese Conception of the Self: Towards a Person-making Perspective.- Naive Psychology of Koreans' Interpersonal Mind and Behavior in Close Relationships.- Section V Application: Humanism-Materialism: Century-long Polish Cultural Origins and Twenty Years of Research in Cultural Psychology.- Chinese Conception of Justice and Reward Allocation.- Family, Parent-Child Relationship and Academic Achievement in Korea: Indigenous Psychological Analysis.- Paternalism: Towards Conceptual Refinement andOperationalization.- Creating Indigenous Psychologies: Insights from Empirical Social Studies of the Science of Psychology.- Biographical Sketch.- Index.

Socialization environments of Chinese and Euro-American middle-class babies: Parenting behaviors, verbal discourses and ethnotheories

Children's socialization environments reflect cultural models of parenting. In particular, Euro-American and Chinese families have been described as following different socialization scripts. The present study assesses parenting behaviors as well as parenting ethnotheories with respect to three-month-old babies in middle-class families in Los Angeles and Beijing. Euro-American parents' behaviors towards their children, as well as their parental ethnotheories are assumed to express the cultural model of autonomy; whereas Chinese parents' socialization strategies are assumed to be shaped by the cultural model of relatedness. The results reveal that Euro-American and Chinese mothers embody different cultural models in their verbal parenting behaviors and verbalized parenting strategies. However, the differences are not consistent and there are no differences with respect to non-verbal parenting behaviors. The results are discussed as illustrating the complexity of cultural models of parenting, where cultural messages are expressed differently in different domains.

The Psycho-linguistic Embodiment of Parental Ethnotheories: A New Avenue to Understanding Cultural Processes in Parental Reasoning

A linguistic discourse analysis of the study of parental ethnotheories is proposed in this paper. It is argued that not only are ideas about parenting informed by the cultural environment, but the ways ideas are formulated in language itself can be understood as expressing cultural codes. In order to identify these cultural codes, we analysed interviews with mothers from independent and interdependent cultural contexts and looked for specific differences in the content and linguistic markers found in these personal narratives. We studied interviews with mothers from: two typically independent cultural communities (middle-class mothers from Los Angeles, USA, and Berlin, Germany); one typical interdependent cultural community (West African Nso farmers); and a cultural community that is believed to combine independent and interdependent orientations (middle-class urban Nso). The styles and analysis enabled us to discover the cultural embodiment of ethnotheories in terms of characteristic linguistic markers associated with independent and interdependent parenting environments. The close association between style and content in the narratives sheds further light on children’s early socialization environments.

Parental Concepts About Preschool Education

Parents play an important role in the early childhood education and development. This fact is becoming increasingly popular. Parents transmit cultural values and expectations to their offspring and create for them an environment of competence. The child internalizes his parental expectations and tries to make the parents happy by conforming to them. This forms the developmental niche which has been conceptualized in terms of three components i) the physical and social settings in which the child lives ii) culturally regulated customs of child care and child rearing iii) psychology of the caretakers. The Childs developmental environment is shaped by parental ethno theories because the parents while taking decisions about their childrens socialization use these. Harkness and Super (1991) view parental ethno theories as expressed in the ways that parents assign their children to different kinds of physical and social settings. They also posit that many customs of child rearing function as instantiations of parental ethno theories and thus are of special importance in translating parental thinking into action that has developmental consequences. (excerpt)

Social and Emotional Contexts of Weaning among Bofi Farmers and Foragers

Weaning is a topic of much theoretical interest in anthropology, psychology, and public health. Several specific images about weaning are ubiquitous throughout the scholarly literature, but these are inadequate for describing the full spectrum of social and emotional factors involved in weaning. The images are evaluated in the context of comparative data collected among the Bofi farmers and foragers. While most studies of weaning have focused on health issues, this analysis identifies social and emotional factors related to caregiving practices, children's responses to weaning, and social transitions that accompany weaning. The Bofi farmers and foragers provide an interesting comparison of weaning because, although they live in the same natural ecology and speak the same language, they have distinct patterns of child-rearing and weaning. The comparison of Bofi weaning practices leads to a discussion of weaning patterns among other farmers and foragers and weaning patterns predicted by region and subsistence. (Tropical farmers and foragers, Central Africa, parent-child relations, weaning) ********** Weaning has been of much interest to anthropologists and psychologists for some time and is a prominent feature in many theories of human development. For example, weaning is characterized by attachment theorists (Ainsworth 1967) as a period in which the mother-child relationship is likely to be under stress; parent-offspring conflict theorists depict weaning as a nexus of parent-offspring conflict (Trivers 1974); and in the grandmother hypothesis, weanling children are shown to be especially vulnerable and in need of allomothering by grandmothers (Hawkes, O'Connell, and Blurton-Jones 1997). Despite the theoretical interest in weaning, few systematic studies of the behavior of weanling children have been conducted. Instead, most of our knowledge about weaning is derived from anecdotes in ethnographies, studies of maternal decision-making, and studies documenting the nutritional transition of weaning. Cultural and emotional contexts of weaning, however, have rarely been the focus of research. Studies of children are currently gaining more interest and attention in anthropology. Hirshfeld (2002) urged anthropologists to study childhood because children are integral members of every culture. By documenting only the ideas and behaviors of adults, he points out, anthropologists are missing a substantial portion of cultures. In most non-Western, small-scale cultures (such as the Bofi foragers and farmers), weaning typically occurs in toddlerhood rather than in infancy, and is therefore a central theme of early childhood. This article describes a cross-cultural study of weaning, documenting the practices, beliefs, caregiving transitions, and child behaviors associated with weaning among two small-scale societies, the Bofi farmers and foragers of Central Africa. My colleagues and I (Fouts, Hewlett, and Lamb 2001) described a preliminary study of the social and emotional aspects of weaning among the Bofi foragers, which involved observations of twelve Bofi forager children and interviews with the children's parents. This preliminary study illustrated how our Western images of weaning were inconsistent with the Bofi forager weaning pattern. Because the Bofi forager sample was small in number and did not contain cross-cultural comparisons of child behavior, we found it difficult to reach any strong conclusions. This essay builds upon the previous study by raising the number of observed Bofi forager children to 22, and by providing comparable data about their neighbors, the Bofi farmers. The Bofi farmers and foragers practice two distinct patterns of weaning that vary with respect to such features as timing, methodology, parental ethnotheories, children's responses to weaning, and caregiving patterns. By examining the Bofi farmer and forager patterns of weaning, this article evaluates prevalent images of weaning, and discusses general patterns of weaning among farmers and foragers. …