A new special issue of the International Journal of Psychology edited by DUPRI's Jennifer Lansford uses the Parenting Across Cultures Project to investigate how mothers' and fathers' individualism, collectivism and conformity values are related to parenting behaviours and child adjustment during middle childhood. The special issue contains 10 empirical articles, the first nine of which focus on a specific country that participated in the Parenting Across Cultures project. These country-specific articles allow readers to gain a deep understanding of how cultural values in China, Colombia, Italy, Jordan, Kenya, the Philippines, Sweden, Thailand and the United States are related to specific domains of parenting and child adjustment in a way that goes beyond cross-national comparisons to delve deeply into within-country analyses. The tenth empirical article then provides a cross-national comparison of the associations among cultural values, parenting and child adjustment to advance understanding of cultural similarities and differences in human development.
The articles examine both mothers' and fathers' cultural values and parenting. Fathers have taken on more active parenting roles over historical time (Craig et al., 2014), yet differences in gender roles persist and are more pronounced in some countries than others. Thus, it is possible that fathers' cultural values may be more strongly related to parenting and children's adjustment in some cultural contexts than others. Our goal in this Special Issue is to highlight how cultural values that often have been described at the level of entire cultural groups or countries operate at the individual level in mothers and fathers in relation to a wide range of domains that have been the cornerstones of a great deal of parenting theory and research, as well as major indicators of children's adjustment.
The Parenting Across Cultures project began in 2008 with recruitment of a sample of children, mothers and fathers in 13 cultural groups in nine countries (China, Colombia, Italy, Jordan, Kenya, the Philippines, Sweden, Thailand and the United States). These nine countries vary widely in Hofstede Insights's (2023) individualism scores from among the least individualistic to the most individualistic countries in the world: 13 (Colombia), 20 (China and Thailand), 25 (Kenya), 30 (Jordan), 32 (Philippines), 71 (Sweden), 76 (Italy) and 91 (United States). This range enables us to examine whether parents' reports of their own individualism and collectivism values are related to parenting and child adjustment in an international sample that varies at the country level in individualism. Hofstede's rankings presume that individualism and collectivism are opposite ends of a single continuum, as separate collectivism scores are not provided. Conformity values also differ across these nine countries. For example, the countries vary on a looseness–tightness continuum in which loose countries are characterised by weak social norms and high tolerance for deviant behaviour, whereas tight countries are characterised by strong social norms and little tolerance for deviant behaviour (Gelfand et al., 2011), which would imply a wide range of values related to conformity as well.