A cross-national study of self-evaluations and attributions in parenting: Argentina, Belgium, France, Israel, Italy, Japan, and the United States.
This study investigated and compared ideas about parenting in Argentine, Belgian, French, Israeli, Italian, Japanese, and U.S. mothers of 20-month-olds. Mothers evaluated their competence, satisfaction, investment, and role balance in parenting and rated attributions of successes and failures in 7 parenting tasks to their own ability, effort, or mood, to difficulty of the task, or to child behavior. Few cross-cultural similarities emerged; rather, systematic culture effects for both self-evaluations and attributions were common, such as varying degrees of competence and satisfaction in parenting, and these effects are interpreted in terms of specific cultural proclivities and emphases. Child gender was not an influential factor. Parents' self-evaluations and attributions help to explain how and why parents parent and provide further insight into the broader cultural contexts of children's development.
Child and Family Research, Laboratory of Comparative Ethology, National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, Maryland 20892-2030, USA. Marc_H_Bornstein@nih.gov
M H
MH
Bornstein
O M
OM
Haynes
H
H
Azuma
C
C
Galperín
S
S
Maital
M
M
Ogino
K
K
Painter
L
L
Pascual
M G
MG
Pêchuex
C
C
Rahn
S
S
Toda
P
P
Venuti
A
A
Vyt
B
B
Wright
D000328:Adult; D001118:Argentina; D001290:Attitude; D001530:Belgium; D002657:Child Development; D003466:Cultural Characteristics; D005260:Female; D005602:France; D006801:Humans; D007223:Infant; D007557:Israel; D007558:Italy; D007564:Japan; D009034:Mother-Child Relations; D016487:Parenting / Q000208:ethnology*; D012649:Self Concept; D012647:Self-Assessment; D014481:United States