Are the qualities of good parenting good the world over?

23 April 2008

The meaning of what a caregiver says (or does) depends on the interpretation of the hearer. Take the Chinese character An-mei in the novel The Joy Luck Club. She recalls that her grandmother often told her and her brother that they had fallen to earth out of the inside of a goose – “like two unwanted eggs, bad-smelling and bad-tasting”.

Not exactly a loving turn of phrase – abusive even – unless one understands the cultural background. In An-mei’s case she realizes that her grandmother, Popo, said this “so that the ghosts would not steal us away. . . . To Popo we were also very precious”.

Some research suggests that good parenting is good parenting regardless of country or culture. Supportive, non-punitive parents rear well-adjusted kids – end of story. On the other hand, other research suggests that what constitutes effective parenting depends on culture.

Children of Eastern cultures may experience their parents’ strictness, firm control, and demand for obedience as warm and caring and, as a result, not suffer from the same emotional or behavioral problems as their Western counterparts with similar rearing.

Because the evidence on the relationship between parenting, culture, and children’s well-being is so inconclusive, a team of University of Toronto researchers decided to take another stab at it. They looked at information gathered from parents and teachers about nearly 15,000 Canadian children of various ethnic backgrounds between the ages of four and 11.

Their findings suggest that culture does matter – but perhaps not a great deal. Children in European Canadian families who experienced harsh parenting were more likely to be aggressive than similar children with more supportive parents. But children in South Asian Canadian families experiencing harsh parenting tended to be less aggressive than similar children with different types of parents.

However, the contrast between European Canadian and South Asian Canadian families only held true when considering teachers’ perspectives on children’s aggressiveness. When only parents’ reports of their children’s aggression were considered, those with harsh parents were more likely to be aggressive than those with more supportive parents – regardless of culture. Similarly, culture did not appear to have any impact on the relationship between harsh parenting and children’s emotional problems.

The study had some significant limitations, however. Notably, there was nothing in the data to say that harsh parenting causes children’s problems or vice versa. And nearly all the children were born in Canada. Thus they may have been more influenced by the culture of their home country than by their parents’. As ever, more research is needed.

• Summary of “Cultural Differences in the Relationship Between Parenting and Children's Behavior” by Caroline Ho, Deborah N. Bluestein, and Jennifer M. Jenkins in Developmental Psychology, March 2008, Vol. 44, No. 2, pp 507–522.