ABSTRACT
To state the obvious, parent-child relationships play central roles in infant, child, and adolescent development, and thus it is perhaps not surprising that there is a voluminous corpus of research on these issues. This research ranges from detailed descriptions of parent-infant interactions, to analyses of parents’ childrearing goals and ideas, to investigations of how parents discipline their children in varied situations. Rather than attempting to present an exhaustive overview of this research, a central goal for this chapter is to show that parents in different parts of the world think about childrearing in terms of both independence and interdependence. Another goal is to consider multifaceted or varied cultural ways of thinking about independence and interdependence. This chapter also points to some of the varied ways in which independence and interdependence meanings may be interrelated, as well as to some of the varied ways in which independence and interdependence activity dimensions may be structured in relation to each other. As different studies are considered, several conceptual issues regarding independence and interdependence are addressed, including the importance of going beyond first-glance analyses that seem to point to a cultural preference for either independence or interdependence, how independence and interdependence may vary both within and across cultures, how parents’ independence and interdependence expectations change as children develop, and how independence and interdependence may come into conflict.
