Parents and Caregivers Across Cultures: Positive Development from Infancy Through Adulthood

This book explores diverse parent-child relationships from around the world, drawing on connections between culture and parenting values and challenges. It identifies parenting practices within various countries’ unique historical, political, and cultural backgrounds, reframing parenting as a cultural process whose goals are to encourage culturally-specific child behaviors and outcomes. Chapters focus on parenting research in a range of countries, such as Australia, Bolivia, China, Egypt, Guatemala, India, Rwanda, Namibia, Saudi Arabia, and the United States. Chapters also discuss social, emotional, and physical developmental topics throughout the lifespan, including infancy, early childhood, adolescence, emerging adulthood, and adulthood. 

Topics featured in this book include: 

• The link between cultural differences in academic success to parents’ academic socialization practices. 
• The impact of culturally-specific parental engagement in positive developmental outcomes in children. 
• Transgender children and their parents. 
• The relationship between religious and secular values and their influence on creating polygamous teenagers. 
• How to implement a micro-cultural lens to studying parent-child relationships during emerging adulthood. 
• Differences and similarities in grandparenting among different cultures. 

Parents and Caregivers Across Cultures is a must-have resource for researchers, professors, graduate students as well as clinicians, professionals, and policymakers in the fields of developmental and cross-cultural psychology, parenting and family studies, social work, and related disciplines. 

Brien K. Ashdown, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor of Cultural Psychology in the Department of Psychological Sciences and an affiliated faculty member of the Latin American Studies Program at Hobart & William Smith Colleges in Geneva, NY, USA. He graduated with his doctorate in cultural and developmental psychology from Saint Louis University in 2009 (with a doctoral minor in research methods and statistics), and spent two years as an Assistant Professor at the University of Alaska Fairbanks before moving to Hobart & William Smith. He regularly teaches courses in cultural psychology (including Introduction to Cultural Psychology, Topics/Seminar in Cultural Psychology, and Research Methods in Cultural Psychology), Adolescent Development, Statistics and Design, and Introductory Psychology.

He has authored or co-authored nearly 30 empirical articles and book chapters, and been an author on more than 60 conference talks and posters. He’s a formal Participating Member of the Rohner Center for the Study of Interpersonal Acceptance and Rejection, and received early career awards from both Division 52 (International Psychology) of the American Psychological Association and the Society for Cross-Cultural Research. Finally, he currently serves as president of the Society for Cross-Cultural Research (2019), president-elect of the International Society for Interpersonal-Acceptance Rejection, and the Executive Director of Education for the Children USA.

Amanda N. Faherty, B.A., is a doctoral student in Developmental Psychology in the Hiatt School of Psychology at Clark University in Worcester, MA, USA. She is currently working under the mentorship of Dr. Jeffrey Jensen Arnett, Ph.D. Her research investigates broad and microlevel sociocontextual influences on the parent-emerging adult (EA) child relationship and development during emerging adulthood with particular emphasis on culture. In two complementary lines of research, she examines a) parenting practices in relation to emerging adult well-being and adjustment, and b) identifies microlevel cultural foundations of the parent-emerging adult child relationship in order to tease apart the construct of “culture.” She received her Master’s degree in Developmental Psychology from Clark University in 2018. Prior to that, she graduated magna cum laude with honors in psychology from Hobart & William Smith Colleges in 2015.

She has authored or co-authored six empirical articles in peer-reviewed journals, and has been an author on six conference presentations and nine conference posters. She has received the best graduate student paper award from the Society for Cross-Cultural Research. Amanda is currently on the student committee for the International Society for Interpersonal Acceptance-Rejection, and serves on her department’s Diversity & Inclusion working committee.  Finally, she also has served as the student coordinator for the 2019 Society for Cross-Cultural Research Annual Conference and her cohort’s graduate representative for Clark University’s psychology student committee.