Messages from the Terrae Cognitae of Culture, Development, and Parenting

This issue of the ISSBD Newsletter arrives as found bottles on the shore with diverse messages (and warnings) from some exotic territories of recent exploration. What do we make of these messages, and what do we do about them?

First, what do they say? The eclectic set of papers before you spans a range of topics and locales that intersect culture, development, and parenting. The subject matters encircle parenting values, the composition of parenting, a clinical issue in parenting, parenting programs, and parenting effects, and the dispatches arrive from Indonesia, Israel, the Netherlands, Norway, and the gene pool.

Hakim, Supriyadi, and Yuniarti describe cultural values and parenting practices in Javanese families and implications of these values and practices for parent-child attachment. The authors characterize Javanese parent-young adult child relationships as marked by senses of indebtedness and affectional dependency flowing from a rich description of Javanese culture. Based on interviews with Arab children in Israel, Dwairy lobbies for including inconsistency as a key concept in parenting along with the more frequently studied affection and control and emphasizes their joint effects on multiple aspects of parenting. Søftestad and Toverud paint a qualitative picture of Norwegian parents’ experiences during a time when their child was undergoing an investigation into possible sexual abuse. Participants included parents who were suspected of sexually abusing their child as well as parents who were not suspected. Deković, Asscher, and Manders underscore the importance of understanding why particular parenting programs succeed in changing parenting, suggesting that parents’ confidence in their own ability to parent adequately, above and beyond parents’ knowledge and skills, constitutes a key mechanism of change and therefore an important cognitive schema to target in parenting interventions. Finally, Pluess and Belsky concisely summarize ways that gene-environment interactions have been conceptualized in the past (diathesis-stress models) in contrast to two more contemporary conceptualizations that have received empirical support (differential susceptibility and vantage sensitivity). These new conceptualizations incorporate positive developmental outcomes in addition to negative ones that have been the historic focus of older models.

What positive messages can we take away with these bottles? Each post has rewarding lessons for the attentive beach comber. The vivid emic analysis, such as provided by Hakim and colleagues in “The Contents of Indonesian Child-Parent Attachment: Indigenous and Cultural Analysis,” is revelatory. Javanese adults treasure children, sometimes for their instrumental value, as a guarantor that parents will be cared for in old age, or by religious dictum, as values underlying Javanese culture are influenced by the teachings of Islam, which admonishes that children are gifts from God. The Javanese adage used in Indonesia places a 3-fold onus on parents—asih, asah, and asuh—meaning to love, guide, and care for their children. In revisiting “A Multifactor Study of Parenting as Associated with Adolescents’ Psychological Disorders,” Dwairy adds (in)consistency to authoritarian control and acceptance-rejection as a third pillar in parenting. This paper valuably illustrates how relations between parenting styles and children’s adjustment may differ across cultural groups. In “Suspected Child Sexual Abuse as Context for Parenting” Søftestad and Toverud soberingly recount that in the wake of investigation several parents, irrespective of having been named a suspect or not, did not know whom to trust and felt a need to protect their child from everybody. These parents were haunted because they thought they would never be completely sure whether or not their child was abused. The authors’ qualitative descriptions may be useful for clinicians working with families going through similar experiences. Parenting programs are essentially interventions designed to enhance parental role performance through training, support, or education. Interventions, as Deković and colleagues importantly point out in “Changing Parenting: Lessons (to be) Learned from Evaluations of Parenting Programs,” inform practitioners and policy makers regarding effectiveness and test and refine theories of parenting behavior and child development, as they allow much stronger causal inferences than can even longitudinal studies. Attention to why parenting changes as a function of participation in parenting interventions thus has the potential to increase the effectiveness of parenting programs and enhance knowledge about determinants of parenting. For their part, Pluess and Belsky’s “Parenting Effects in the Context of Child Genetic Differences” insightfully underscores a truism that cross-cuts all these papers, viz. that each child is not equally affected by parenting. Rather, interactions between characteristics of children (e.g., temperament, genotype) and their environment (parenting, culture) are best interpreted in terms of differential susceptibility, that individuals differ in their developmental plasticity. Some children are malleable and so more susceptible to positive developmental consequences of supportive environments and to adverse developmental sequelae associated with negative environments; other less malleable and susceptible children are less affected by parallel environmental conditions.

Should we rush to follow these explorers’ leads? Perhaps, but cautiously so because these reports expose big and small fault lines in the lands whence they come. The ISSBD is centrally concerned with the intersection of culture and development. Together, these papers would benefit, first, from paying more attention to the cultural contexts from which the studies originated and how culture can be better integrated with their messages. With the exception of Hakim et al.’s rich ethnographic description of Javanese Indonesian families, most papers do not convey adequate information about cultural context. One of the benefits of publishing papers that use samples from countries that have been underrepresented in the literature historically is the opportunity to clarify cultural values, attitudes, beliefs, and practices that are indigenous to child development and parenting in under researched contexts. Authors from different lands are uniquely situated to provide faithful emic perspectives on child development and parenting in their respective countries. Are relations between parenting styles and children’s adjustment similar across cultures? Are mechanisms of change in parenting programs the same in different cultural contexts?

A given parenting behavior may have the same effect or different effects in different cultural contexts. Likewise, different parenting behaviors may have the same effect or different effects in different cultural contexts. A challenge for future research will be to delve into mechanisms that account for these similarities and differences. The effect of a parenting behavior likely depends on the meaning that it imparts for parents and children, which is shaped by cultural norms regarding factors such as expectations for parents’ treatment of children, children’s behavior toward adults, and goals for children’s socialization.

These papers would also benefit from adopting a stronger developmental perspective. Understanding contexts of parenting should be sensitive to the development of the child. For example, although parents might (or might not) have similar emotional reactions to sexual abuse investigations regardless of the age of their child, parents’ responses to the child would ideally be tailored to be developmentally appropriate for children of different ages. Aspects of parenting that are salient and optimal change as children develop.

In addition, longitudinal data from multiple respondents would be especially helpful for more rigorous tests of some hypotheses developed here. Methodologically, self-report data from a single point in time, a common design feature, cannot rule out shared method/source variance as accounting for findings or, more importantly, make claims about directions of effects. Individuals’ perceptions are clearly important, but they represent only one perspective, which may or may not converge with others’ perspectives even on the same relationship. Furthermore, because parents influence children’s development, and children elicit particular kinds of parenting, future research that charts reciprocal relations over time between parents and children will be especially useful.

We also should read between the lines of these messages for other methodological flags. A sample of Javanese Indonesian university students was queried about their relationships with parents, and results of qualitative analysis are reported, but no rationale for the coding system is provided, no information on coding reliability is offered, and the coding system is not clearly mapped onto the indigenous “asih, asah, and asuh” scheme. Parents themselves are also sacrificed in favor of questionnaires administered to female and male 10th grade Arab students in asserting that the composition of parenting needs revision. Often, but not always, qualitative reports are presumptive of quantitative study. Program evaluation is limited to child behavior problems, and positive parenting—by far the norm—is eschewed. If “fixing” children is the goal, is it better to fix parents in the indirect hope that parents fix children, or is it better to fix children directly? Furthermore, do changes in the family start with improvements in parental cognitions followed by improvements in parenting practices? Historically dicey relations between beliefs and behaviors undercut proof that change in parenting beliefs has a one-to-one relation with change in parenting behaviors. Different parenting programs emphasize different contents and use different delivery settings, and few test theories behind parenting programs or identify the mechanisms through which parenting programs exert their effects. Moreover, most program evaluation relies on a 2-group design: intervention and control. Intervention study is attractive from practical and from causal inference points of view, and developmental science is sorely lacking in proper intervention studies. However, two groups are woefully inadequate to test the power of interventions. Rather, four groups need to participate in three phases:

	Pretest	Intervention	Posttest
Group 1	X	X	X
Group 2		X	X
Group 3	X		X
Group 4			X

Because pretesting itself may affect development, the four-group design specifies that one group undergoing intervention is pretested, and one group not pretested; postintervention comparisons of pretested and not-pretested groups reveal any effect(s) of pretesting. This design also ensures that the experimental groups are equivalent before intervention, isolates the effects of pretesting on the subsequent intervention, and evaluates the effectiveness of the intervention. Furthermore, participants should be assigned randomly to the four groups. Through a selection of findings emerging from studies of gene-environment interaction we have learned that children are differentially susceptible to the same experience. Relevant here, the same parent-provided experience may affect some children but not others. Culture may be a parent-provided experience, and so differential susceptibility shapes individual differences in socialization. However, this perspective represents only one cell of a 2×2 matrix where, on account of genes and culture, the same parent-provided experiences can affect different children differently, but the same parent-provided experience can affect different children similarly, and different parent-provided experiences may affect different children differently or similarly (Bornstein, 1995).

This is not the first time an ISSBD Newsletter has been devoted to culture, development, and parenting. The 2001 Number 1, Serial 38 addressed similar general issues. More than a decade on, we discover some new messages in old bottles and some old messages in new bottles. Certainly, in the last decade, we have gained a much better understanding of genetic contributions to child development and how genetic and environmental factors interact in ways that confer risk and resilience. Although the ISSBD membership has long recognized the importance of understanding parenting and child development as situated in particular cultural contexts, only recently has the broader scientific community come to embrace this understanding and sought ways to incorporate culture into research, practice, and policy (Bornstein & Lansford, 2010).

We commend the authors of this diverse set of papers for delving into important aspects of parenting and child development in populations that have been understudied in the developmental literature and for sharpening the cutting edge of gene-environment interactions in child development. It is exciting to anticipate what messages might arrive after another decade of enquiry into culture, development, and parenting.