Parental Behavior in Diverse Societies: New Directions for Child and Adolescent Development

The United States is currently engaged in a public discourse over what constitutes good child care, who should do it, and what effects it has on children, occasioned by a rapid increase of childbearing women in the labor force and the lack of an established childcare system. By exploring the contexts of parental behavior in other cultures, we uncover universals and variables in the parental predicament and are able to place our current problems in a broader perspective. This volume of New Directions for Child Development proposes a theoretical model and examines its validity in case studies from three continents, including cross-cultural comparisons of mother-infant observations and parental survey data. This is the 40th issue of New Directions for Child Development. For more information on the series, please see the Journals and Periodicals Page.… (more)