Parents and caregivers across cultures: Positive development from infancy through adulthood

Abstract

This book explores diverse parent-child relationships from around the world, drawing on connections between culture and parenting values and challenges. It identifies parenting practices within various countries’ unique historical, political, and cultural backgrounds, reframing parenting as a cultural process whose goals are to encourage culturally-specific child behaviors and outcomes. Chapters focus on parenting research in a range of countries, such as Australia, Bolivia, China, Egypt, Guatemala, India, Rwanda, Namibia, Saudi Arabia, and the United States. Chapters also discuss social, emotional, and physical developmental topics throughout the lifespan, including infancy, early childhood, adolescence, emerging adulthood, and adulthood. Topics featured in this book include: The link between cultural differences in academic success to parents’ academic socialization practices. The impact of culturally-specific parental engagement in positive developmental outcomes in children. Transgender children and their parents. The relationship between religious and secular values and their influence on creating polygamous teenagers. How to implement a micro-cultural lens to studying parent-child relationships during emerging adulthood. Differences and similarities in grandparenting among different cultures. Parents and Caregivers Across Cultures is a must-have resource for researchers, professors, graduate students as well as clinicians, professionals, and policymakers in the fields of developmental and cross-cultural psychology, parenting and family studies, social work, and related disciplines.