ABSTRACT
For some time now, analyzing the interrelations between parents’ ideas and
parent-child interactions has represented a simultaneously problematic and
promising theoretical and empirical developmental issue. It is readily recognized
that both parents’ ideas and parent-child interactions are important aspects of a
developing child’s social and cultural context, making it important to understand
the content of parents’ ideas in relation to the structuring of parent-child
interactions. In addition, analyses of parents’ ideas and parent-child interactions
can further our understanding of some of the ways that individual, social, and
cultural factors intersect as they shape children’s developmental experiences.
That is, analyzing parents’ ideas and parent-child interactions in relation to each
other can provide information about: first, how individual, social and cultural
processes shape the construction of parents’ ideas; second, how individual, social
and cultural processes shape the structuring of parent-child interactions; third,
how the construction of parents’ ideas and parent-child interactions are linked to
form wider patterns of culturally meaningful activity; and fourth, how individual,
social and cultural processes intersect as children actively participate in modes of
parent-child interactions that are linked to particular parental ideas.
