Parents’ cultural beliefs about maladaptive behavior in young children: A comparison of across two cultures

Parents’ cultural beliefs are associated with their children’s socialization and development. Researchers have examined these associations through the lens of parents’ ethnotheories, which refer to parents’ implicit beliefs about children’s developmentally appropriate behavior. In contrast to prior work focused on parents’ ethnotheories of desirable behaviors and qualities, there has been a considerable lack of research examining ethnotheories about children’s maladaptive behavior. In this article, we address this gap in knowledge by examining cultural differences and similarities in Spanish and American parents’ beliefs about the causes of children’s maladaptive behaviors. A semi-structured interview was used to assess parents’ causal attributions of children’s internalizing and externalizing behaviors in a sample of 50 parents from the United States and 51 parents from Spain. Results revealed that US parents made more attributions to children’s internal states, social learning, and power motives than Spanish parents for externalizing behaviors. Conversely, Spanish parents made more attributions to attention seeking and material gains than US parents for the same behaviors. There were no cross-cultural differences in attributions for internalizing behaviors. Parents had strikingly different theories of children’s disruptive behaviors than they did for children’s internalizing behaviors. Differences in parents’ explanatory styles may reflect and maintain broader cultural differences between Spain and the United States. This study lends evidence to the growing literature on the relevance of parents’ ethnotheories in the context of child development and extends it to the topic of parental attributions regarding maladaptive child behaviors.