Child Behavior in Mexican American/Chicano Families: Maternal Teaching and Child-Rearing Practices

1988 ◽  
Vol 37 (3) ◽  
pp. 275 ◽  
Author(s):  
Estella A. Martinez
2009 ◽  
Vol 33 (6) ◽  
pp. 520-530 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joey J. Fung ◽  
Anna S. Lau

In a sample of 107 Chinese immigrant families we examined whether cultural child-rearing beliefs moderated the association between parents’ use of punitive discipline and children’s behavioral adjustment. Immigrant parents and their children aged 7 to 17 years completed measures of parental discipline and child behavior problems. Parents also reported on indigenous Chinese child-rearing ideologies regarding shaming and training as strategies for raising competent and moral children. Results of hierarchical regression models conducted with parent-reported data indicated that the negative effects of punitive discipline on child behavior problems were not apparent when parents adhered to training and shaming ideologies. However, the buffering effects of training ideologies were more robust and consistent than shaming. The findings provide some evidence that the discipline—behavior problem link may be moderated by cultural context of caregiver psychology which shapes the meaning and implications of parental behavior.


Author(s):  
Virginia Yans ◽  
Ji-Hye Shin

Margaret Mead (b. 1901–d. 1978), one of the 20th century’s most accomplished and controversial anthropologists, pioneered modern childhood studies. Her ethnographies and popular writings established child socialization as a centerpiece for the transmission of human culture. Mead understood human behavior as a product of complex interactions between biology and the ways in which various human cultures shaped and embellished biological inheritance beginning at birth. When Mead began her career in the 1920s, anthropology’s unique fieldwork methodology and the impending disappearance of “whole cultures” required female scientists: most small pre-literate societies in remote areas of the world would not accept male “participant observers” of women’s daily activities which, of course, included child rearing. Mead’s early 1920s and 1930s fieldwork in Samoa, New Guinea, and Bali emphasized different cultural patterns of child rearing practices and child behavior. Her controversial finding that Samoan adolescent girls moved through adolescence without turmoil initiated her fame. As a young woman cultural anthropologist specializing in child behavior, Mead both engaged and disputed established Western scientific notions of universal, “normal” developmental stages including Freud’s psychosexual stages and Piaget’s innate cognitive development models. The early Samoa and New Guinea fieldwork initiated Mead’s trademark practice of using anthropological knowledge as a social reform tool. Returning to the developed Western world with her field research, for example, she encouraged lay audiences to examine their own child rearing practices. During the 1930s and 1940s, Mead joined the “culture and personality” and “national character” schools of anthropology, two early iterations of today’s psychological anthropology. As an example, her Balinese field studies conducted with her third husband Gregory Bateson (a trained biologist and ethnographer) worked within a neo-Freudian framework emphasizing parent-child interaction and cultural influences. The Balinese field work method involving both hundreds of unstaged, but carefully photographed and filmed, parent-child interactions and accompanying detailed field notes followed her earlier use of projective testing of New Guinea children, all now recognized as innovations. In the post–World War II era Mead’s interests turned to evolutionary change but she retained her interest in youth recognizing that the children of the 1960s faced an unprecedented historical change colloquially known as the “generation gap.” Mead presciently predicted a reversal of thousands of years of generational roles: 20th-century children, she correctly foresaw, would be teaching their less experienced elders how to navigate and survive in a world of rapid social and technological change into which the young were born.


PEDIATRICS ◽  
1975 ◽  
Vol 56 (5) ◽  
pp. 768-773
Author(s):  
Robert W. Chamberlin

In an investigation of child-rearing styles maternal use of "positive contact" was measured by asking the mother how often she played with the child, praised the child, and the like, and combining the responses into a score. Home observations on a sample of families revealed that mothers scoring above the mean used fewer communications in the form of directives and "unmodified power" and more communication in the form of praise and social conversation than mothers scoring below the mean. The mother's use of positive contact was related to her educational level, the birth order of the child and number of children in the family, the father's use of positive contact, and to a friendly outgoing pattern of child behavior. There was no relation to the mother's use of physical punishment, her protectiveness, her tendency to comply with the child's demands, or her child-rearing ideology and other attitudes. Child care workers are in a strategic position to educate parents about the importance of this kind of contact, especially with later-born children in large families.


Author(s):  
Shogo Ishikawa ◽  
Tomoki Shinba ◽  
Shinya Kiriyama ◽  
Shigeyoshi Kitazawa ◽  
Yoichi Takebayashi
Keyword(s):  

1989 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 79-100 ◽  
Author(s):  
David P. Farrington

The Cambridge Study in Delinquent Development is a prospective longitudinal survey of 411 London males from ages 8 years old to 32 years old. This article investigates the prediction of adolescent aggression (ages 12-14 years old), teenage violence (ages 16-18 years old), adult violence (age 32 years old), and convictions for violence. Generally, the best predictors were measures of economic deprivation, family criminality, poor child-rearing, school failure, hyperactivity-impulsivity-attention deficit, and antisocial child behavior. Similar predictors applied to all four measures of aggression and violence. It is concluded that aggression and violence are elements of a more general antisocial tendency, and that the predictors of aggression and violence are similar to the predictors of antisocial and criminal behavior in general.


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