Commentary for “Parenting Culture(s): Ideal Parent Beliefs Across 37 Countries”

Abstract

Culture is a puzzle. Despite decades of discussion about what “culture” is, the term remains elusive. Within the academic context, culture was long the domain of anthropology, and definitions by anthropologists abound. At the most general level, anthropologists have described culture as the way of life of a people, including both the external, socially constructed environments for living and the internalized rules, expectations and values that guide communication, thinking and behavior. More recently, anthropologists have focused on the inner, cognitive aspects of culture as experienced by individuals: as Robert LeVine puts it, “a shared organization of ideas that includes the intellectual, moral, and aesthetic standards prevalent in a community and the meanings of communicative actions” (LeVine, 1984, p. 67). Roy D’Andrade’s definition of culture extends this focus to the emotions and motivations that accompany cognitions—as he states, culture consists of “learned systems of meaning, communicated by means of natural language and other symbol systems, having representational, directive, and affective functions, and capable of creating cultural entities and particular senses of reality” (D’Andrade, 1984, p. 116). As implied by both these anthropologists, the “culture” of a people is not a random collection of customs, beliefs and values, but rather an organized and meaningful system, even though it may (and probably does) contain internal contradictions. Within this system, parents play a crucial role as mediators and creators of culture for their children (Harkness & Super, 1996). This brings us to a second way that culture is a puzzle: metaphorically, cultures can be seen as multi-dimensional puzzles (as in the table-top games that sometimes occupy families on vacation) consisting of many pieces—some large, some tiny—that together form a meaningful picture. In putting together such a puzzle, one looks for pieces that may fit with the piece already in one’s hand, and from there to larger groupings of pieces. Color as well as shape may provide a clue to how pieces fit together; if this seems too challenging, one can always start from pieces that evidently form the border of the puzzle. As the groups of pieces grow and merge, aspects of the whole picture become increasingly evident. In this paper, the authors present us with one tiny piece of the cultural puzzle of each place they studied, namely parents’ beliefs about characteristics of an “ideal parent.” This one piece of the whole cultural puzzle is diminished even further by the method used to elicit it from individual participants: requiring that responses consist of five (no more, no less) one-word descriptors. The results are intriguing, both for the analytic strategy used and for the interpretations suggested by the authors. This project, and its outcomes, invite us to ask how much