ABSTRACT
I can pinpoint the occasion when I truly realized how deeply cultural values are embedded in the ways we rear and educate our children. It happened during a lecture I was giving for a course on the role of the family in children’s social development. It was my first semester as a visiting professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, which enrolls a substantial number of foreign students. The topic for the day was discipline. I briefly ran through an introduction to the literature, citing studies that showed the relationship between authoritative (that is, firm, democratic) discipline by parents and a variety of outcome measures, including school performance, self-confidence, verbal assertiveness, and the like. At some point, I paused for questions. One student, a middle-aged man from India spoke up: “What research has been done to discover what makes children show respect for their parents?” My snappy response was basically, “Uhhhh….” The student had exposed the Achilles’ heel of developmental psychology: the choice of outcome measures—the “gold standard” by which parenting and educational practices are evaluated—is heavily influenced by culturally based values. In selecting certain outcome measures, we set up a system that identifies “good parents” as those who utilize the practices that support those culturally desirable outcomes and “bad parents” as those who do not. Respecting one’s elders has not made it onto the list of child competencies favored by American researchers.
