Cultures differ with respect to parenting strategies already during infancy. Distal parenting, i.e., face-to-face context and object stimulation, is prevalent in urban educated middle-class families of Western cultures; proximal parenting, i.e., body contact and body stimulation, is prevalent in rural, low-educated farmer families. Parents from…

Adolescence is often considered a period in a person's life when important physiological and emotional changes occur. When discussing adolescence, however, it should not be forgotten that it is just another stage in one's life span between birth and death. By adopting a life-span perspective, researchers are more likely to consider contextual…

In a national (US) telephone survey of parents of four-month-old to six-month-old infants (n = 2250), 904 respondents answered the question "Is there anything else you want to tell me about how or why you use music with your baby?" Qualitative analyses of responses generated descriptors, which were applied to Bornstein's four caregiving…

The purpose of this study was to examine American and Japanese pre-service teachers' understanding of the notion of whether or not children under age three should be cared for by their mothers at home. The participants were 87 female Japanese and 64 female American college students majoring in Early Childhood Education. The participants responded…

Over 3 million people speak Arabic as a first language in the USA and almost all of them are native-born Americans. Efforts in recent decades to provide support, at both local and governmental levels, for the teaching of Arabic as a heritage language are described. Reflecting on the development of his own personal literacies and his teaching…

After three decades of decline, the amount of time spent by parents on childcare in the U.S. began to rise dramatically in the mid-1990s. Moreover, the rise in childcare time was particularly pronounced among college-educated parents. Why would highly educated parents increase the amount of time they allocate to childcare at the same time that…

This study used a cross-national framework to examine country, region, and gender differences in emotional availability (EA), a prominent index of mutual socioemotional adaptation in the parent-child dyad. Altogether 220 Argentine, Italian, and U.S. mothers and their daughters and sons from both rural and metropolitan areas took part in home…

This article reports the relations of the well-being of college students whose parents immigrated to America from Arab countries with their perceptions of their parents' (a) acculturation behaviors (i.e., openness to the American culture and preservation of the Arab culture) and (b) control. Results indicate that the perceived acculturation…

This article presents an analysis of the functional roles of "baby signing" in three hearing families in the United States, as well as a discussion of the social and ideological implications of the practice. Baby signing fits neatly into the parenting ideologies prevalent in the professional class in the United States that value early…

Cultural variation in durations, relations, and contingencies of mother-infant person- and object-directed behaviors were examined for 121 nonmigrant Latino mother-infant dyads in South America, Latina immigrants from South America and their infants living in the United States, and European American mother-infant dyads. Nonmigrant Latina mothers…

This study explores parental ethnotheories of children's temperament through mothers' responses to McDevitt and Carey's Behavioral Style Questionnaire (1978) for 299 children aged 3 to 8 years and interviews with their parents, in Australia, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Spain, Sweden, and the United States. We first established a standardized,…

This article offers an evidence-based argument for exempting the majority of LGBTTIQ youth from parental consent requirements in research studies. The argument is grounded in international research ethics principles and social science research studies of risks to the well-being of LGBTTIQ youth. A schema derived from consent concepts used in…

Filling a significant gap in the literature, this book examines the impact of culture on the social behaviors, emotions, and relationships of children around the world. It also explores cultural differences in what is seen as adaptive or maladaptive development. Eminent scholars discuss major theoretical perspectives on culture and development and…

Examining the adoption of Guatemalan children by US citizens, this article argues that adoptive parents make meanings and form identities through their participation in the adoption process and in their production of both Internet-based and spoken narratives about adoption. Using theories of globalization and narrative theory, the article…

This article examines the 5-year incidence, prevalence, and recurrence of intimate partner violence (IPV) among White, Black, and Hispanic intact couples in the United States. A national multistage household probability sample of couples, age 18 years or older, was interviewed in 1995 with a response rate of 85%, and reinterviewed in 2000 with a…