Parenting and Children’s Social Emotional Development across Cultures

The main goal of this program of research is to understand the cultural processes underlying the beliefs and practices of parents with regard to their young children’s social and emotional development. The original cross-cultural comparison involved European American, Mainland Chinese and South Korean families. Recently, we have added Canadian Aboriginal, European Canadian, Malaysian, Turkish and Hmong (in Thailand) mothers and children. We are interested in the universal and cultural-specific aspects of parenting that lead to adaptive social development in children.

Project PACIFIC

In collaboration with colleagues at Brigham Young University (Utah, USA), Beijing Normal University (Beijing, China), Chiba University (Chiba, Japan), HELP University (Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia), and Maejo University (Chiang Mai, Thailand), a new cross-cultural project examining parenting and children's social and emotional development has been launched.

The major focus of this study is to examine the links between parenting (both universal and culturally indigenous forms) and preschool children’s social and emotional outcomes across different Asian cultures.  Contextual factors (e.g., marital and familial environment; family stress or support, parental psychopathology, childcare arrangements) and mediating (e.g., child emotion regulation, effortful control, self-perceptions, psychopathology, and social information processing) and moderating (e.g., parent and child gender, child temperament) factors that might prove influential in the parent-child linkages of interest will also be assessed.

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