Parenting and Child Academic/Social Behavior

Parenting and Child Academic/Social Behavior

Introduction

The aim of this paper is to examine cross-ethnic variation in the relationships between parenting behaviors, child behaviors, and children's concurrent social and academic functioning in Kindergarten. Children's experiences with their parents at home lay the groundwork for how they learn and interact with others at school, which suggests that parenting behaviors and children's interactions with their parent may be important variables in how they perform in school. Indeed, extensive research exists on the relationship between various parenting behaviors and social and academic functioning in children. Participants in these studies, however, consisted mainly of homogeneous samples of middle-class, White parents and children. Thus, researchers have questioned the universality of relationships between parenting behaviors and child developmental outcomes across different ethnic and cultural groups.

As the ethnic and cultural makeup of the U.S. has become increasingly diversified, researchers have begun to turn their attention to examining ethnic differences in commonly studied parenting behaviors. Some relatively recent studies have examined the association between parenting behaviors and children's social and academic outcomes in more ethnically diverse samples. Nevertheless, most research on the relationship between parenting behaviors and child social and academic outcomes has not focused on the role of culture or cross-ethnic variation in these relationships.

Literature Review

Parenting and Parent-Child Relationships in Context

The importance of studying the ecological context of parenting and child socialization has been emphasized in the literature. Culture is deemed an integral determinant of parenting. The influence of culture can operate through cultural values, expectations, history, and heritage. Researchers suggest that the combination of cultural background and ecological context of families impacts parenting and child development. While ethnicity has been commonly proposed as a marker variable for a range of common cultural elements, the fact that families can vary in these areas within ethnic groups has also been emphasized (Fowler 2002).

Due to criticisms of early deficit models, which considered White parenting to be the norm and interpreted ethnic differences in parenting behaviors as deviations, researchers have created new approaches to the literature of parenting and child development (Fowler 2002). Two models that have been used frequently in the literature of ethnicity and parenting are the ethnic equivalence and cultural values models. In ethnic equivalence models, the main emphasis is that socialization experiences between parent and child are similar across cultures, suggesting that there would be similar relationships between parenting behaviors and child outcomes regardless of ethnic group. In contrast, the ecological context is emphasized in a cultural values model, suggesting that there are different relationships between parenting and outcomes across ethnic groups (Fowler 2002). According to Achenbach (2001), some researchers developed an integrative model of development for ethnic minority children. They warned against making group comparisons without consideration of macro-level social, economic, and political factors. Their model suggests that ethnic minority families develop adaptive strategies to face ecological challenges such as poverty, segregation and racism, thereby affecting parenting and child outcomes. Socioeconomic status (SES) is another important contextual factor to examine, particularly ...