Permalink : http://hdl.handle.net/2115/42959

KEYWORDS : Maternal beliefs;Images of childhood;Parental ethnotheory;Cross-cultural research;Metaphors

The present study examined mothers' thinking about child development, childhood, and childrearing. Participants were mothers of children attending middleclass preschools in the cities of Provo, Utah, U.S.A. (n = 101), Seoul, Bucheon, and Incheon, South Korea (n = 221), Jakarta, Indonesia (n = 312), and Sapporo, Japan (n = 172). There were both cross-cultural differences and similarities on most measures. With regard to basic issues of development, mothers in all four cultures tended to agree more with the influence of environment than heredity on their children, and more with the idea of unique paths of development than universal stages. With the exception of the Jakarta sample, mothers agreed most strongly with the image of children as pure by nature, less so with the image of children as blank slates, and least with the image of children as mischievous. Again with the exception of Jakarta mothers, the cross-cultural tendency was to agree more with the formism root metaphor of child development (Pepper, 1942), second most strongly with the contextualist metaphor, and less so with the mechanistic and organismic root metaphors. Regarding images of childrearing as analogous to plant cultivation vs. animal training, the general tendency across cultures was to prefer the plant cultivation analogy, although the Seoul and Jakarta mothers responded more favorably than the Sapporo and Provo mothers to the animal training analogy. In response to analogies of growing up, mothers in all four cultures were more in agreement with the image of growing up as akin to crossing a stream together with the mother, although Seoul mothers rated the image of children crossing a stream alone more positively than did the other three samples. Sapporo mothers were notable in their agreement with the image of children as lonely. Among the four samples, only Sapporo mothers tended to disagree with the statement that "religion plays an important part in my thinking about children," whereas Provo mothers were in near-unanimous agreement with the impact of religious beliefs. Very few main effects were found for either maternal level of educational background, or for religious affiliation, on any of the preceding variables. Despite sampling and measurement limitations, the data showed both significant cultural group differences and similarities in how mothers think about their children, and indicated that metaphors, images, analogies, and beliefs mothers have about their children are not mutually exclusive. In fact, individual mothers have some degree of belief in multiple competing images of child development. There were indeed substantial individual differences in the data, suggesting that each mother invokes both a cultural ethnotheory and a uniquely personal understanding of children, child development, and childrearing.