ABSTRACT
Ethical parenting above all is responsible caregiving, requiring of parents enduring investment and commitment throughout their children’s long period of dependency. The effort people put forth to be responsible parents, as in other areas of their lives, is a function of their self-attributions concerning the relation between their effort and outcome. As Bugental, Blue, and Cruzcosa (1989) have shown, parents who attribute a child’s dysfunctional behavior primarily to the child’s disposition or to peer influences rather than to their own practices are less likely to attempt to alter their disciplinary style when it is ineffective or developmentally unapt, or to attempt to alter their child’s behavior when it is changeworthy. Greenberger and Goldberg (1989) found that high-investment parents, as part of their identity, believed that they could meet their children’s needs better than other adults, and therefore willingly sacrificed other personal pleasures to bewith their children. Such parents (whom the authors identified as authoritative) had higher maturity expectations, were notably responsive, and viewed their children more positively than did less invested parents The remarkable achievement of native and immigrant Asian children in the United States is often attributed to their parents’ high investment in parenting fueled by a Confucian-based belief that original nature is uniform and that phenotypic differences in academic performance are due to childhood experiences constructed largely by parents and teachers.
