Toddlers, Parents and Culture

Findings from the Joint Effort Toddler Temperament Consortium

Maria A. Gartstein, Samuel P. Putnam

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351788847
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psicología
• Subtopic: Historia y teoría en psicología

One doesn't have to travel extensively to realize that there are intriguing differences in the ways in which people from different cultures tend to behave. Gartstein and Putnam explore whether these differences are shaped during the early years of life, at the moment when children are just beginning to understand how, when, and why they should express some emotions, and not others.

Based on the findings of the Joint Effort Toddler Temperament Consortium (JETTC), which asked parents from 14 different countries multiple questions regarding their main goals and techniques for raising children to be successful in their culture, Gartstein and Putnam analyze how children's characteristics (both normative and problematic) are shaped by different cultural environments. Drawing from insights in anthropology, sociology, and developmental psychology, the book explores the full spectrum of human experience, from broad sets of values and concerns that differentiate populations down to the intimate details of parent-child relationships. The results reveal a complex web of interrelations among societal ideals, parental attempts to fulfill them, and the ways their children manifest these efforts. In doing so, they provide a revealing look at how families raise their young children around the world.

Toddlers, Parents, and Culture will be of great interest to students and scholars in temperament, cross-cultural psychology, parenting and socioemotional development in early childhood, as well as professionals in early education, child mental health, and behavioral pediatrics.

1
INTRODUCTION TO THE JOINT EFFORT TODDLER TEMPERAMENT CONSORTIUM (JETTC)

Maria A. Gartstein, Samuel P. Putnam, Helena Slobodskaya, and Carolina de Weerth

Those who travel beyond their own borders are frequently struck by the differences in how people around the world conduct themselves. These differences have been long acknowledged, however, to this day, such observations typically concern adult behavior, scarcely paying attention to the youngest members of societies. Temperament, defined as early appearing and relatively stable individual differences in reactivity and regulation, is a useful construct for exploring such differences in infants and children. The primary purpose of this book is to conduct such comparative work, considering a range of cultures, as well a variety of contextual effects expected to contribute to temperament development, and often associated behavior problems.

We have pursued the study of temperament, largely influenced by the psychobiological model proposed by Dr. Mary Rothbart, with whom the directors of the current project were fortunate to work as post-doctoral fellows at the University of Oregon. This research focused largely on instrument development, with measures designed to assess multiple finegrained indicators of temperament shown to form three overarching factors: Negative Affectivity (NEG)—tendencies to experience and display fear, anger, sadness, and physical discomfort, Surgency (SUR)—activity level, approach to novel stimuli, and expression of positive affect in contexts of high-intensity stimulation, and Regulatory Capacity/Effortful Control (EFF)—attentional attributes, behavioral control, and enjoyment of calm activities. According to the psychobiological definition of temperament, individual differences in reactivity and regulation are viewed as constitutionally based, and influenced over time by heredity, maturation, and environment (Rothbart & Derryberry, 1981). Although the biological underpinnings of temperament are often stressed, the openness to environment suggests possible cultural effects.

Culture can be viewed as “a dynamic distribution of meanings, practices, and artifacts throughout a linguistic community” (Mascolo, 2004, p. 83). Culture embodies a system of categories and values, as well as emotions, providing a largely shared approach to family life, as parents are motivated to raise their children so that offspring characteristics, including temperament, are aligned with their values and those of their cultural group (Kohnstamm, 1989). Ubiquitous in nature, culture represents a constant backdrop molding the environment of a developing individual. “Multiple trials” of exposure provided within a cultural context can be even more consequential in early childhood due to the rapid development of the central nervous system (Panksepp, 2001). Thus, culture is a powerful force, shaping how emotions are experienced, evaluated, and regulated, influencing behavior of individuals and likely the underlying neural bases. Moreover, culture is not contained or defined by national boundaries, but rather is reflective of less clearly delineated geographic regions. Multiple differentiated cultures are often contained within the same nation, and conversely, cultural groups often span across borders. For the sake of brevity, our descriptions in this book refer to differences between countries, but it should be recognized that we are more precisely referring to variability among distinct cultural groups represented by samples recruited from different countries.

As we considered pathways through which culture could “get inside the brain,” ultimately impacting temperament development, we were influenced by the work of Charlie Super and Sara Harkness, as well as Heidi Keller. The construct of “developmental niche,” described as a function of (1) customs (especially those related to child rearing), (2) settings available to the child, and (3) caregiver psychosocial characteristics (Super & Harkness, 1986), became central to our thinking about the multifaceted influence that broader cultural distinctions, such as Individualism/Collectivism, have on child development. Parental ethnotheories (belief systems held by parents regarding children and how they are to be treated; Harkness & Super, 1996) and socialization goals (qualities parents expect that a child should develop early in life; Keller et al., 2006) represent key caregiver characteristics, especially in the cross-cultural context. Parental ethnotheories and socialization goals have been conceptualized in terms of relational and autonomy-focused domains, which parallel Individualism/Collectivism used to describe cultures as a whole. Instruments developed by Keller to measure these orientations discriminated among samples from different cultures, and were consequential to child social-emotional outcomes, including those relevant to temperament (Keller & Otto, 2009; Keller et al., 2004).

The conceptual basis of the study described in this book integrates the psychobiological theory of temperament with the framework of the developmental niche as the context in which temperament development unfolds, impacting the risk for symptoms of psychopathology (see Figure 1.1). That is, our approach to defining and measuring temperament is consistent with the psychobiological framework, which casts temperament development as “open” to experience. In our model, this experience is defined primarily in terms of the developmental niche, focusing on the caregiving/socialization context. In this overarching model, the philosophies inherent to different cultures govern the goals and presumptions regarding optimal growth held by parents, which are translated into specific parenting behaviors and elements of daily routine that shape individual differences in children’s early emotional tendencies and capacity for regulation. Relations between parenting and child behaviors in this book are largely interpreted as parent-driven in the direction of influence, consistent with our expectations regarding cultural influences. However, the perspective that individual differences in children can have a substantial influence on the environments they inhabit, including parenting to which they are exposed (Bell, 1968; Scarr & McCartney, 1983), is important as well, and is acknowledged by the bidirectional arrows connecting parenting behaviors and child characteristics in Figure 1.1.

FIGURE 1.1 Model of culturally driven influences on child behavioral outcomes: Mediation by parents’ psychology and children’s environment, moderation by culture

Investigating both child characteristics and parental behaviors across multiple cultures provides insight regarding the relative universality, or lack thereof, of links between the two. In developmental science, connections between parenting to child behavior are often regarded as evidence of relations that would hold true in all contexts. This consistency is unlikely, however, as both child characteristics and parental behaviors may hold different meanings across cultures (Bornstein, 1995; Bornstein & Lansford, 2010). Given differences in the acceptability of emotional expression, for instance, certain traits may be discouraged in some cultures but rewarded and unrelated to behavior problems in others. In the same vein, certain parenting behaviors and cognitions may have different connotations in different cultures, leading to inconsistencies regarding the type of child behaviors that may elicit them. We also view culture as capable of modulating biological inputs embodied by temperament, altering the nature of links between these attributes and behavior problems. This moderation has not been widely examined, yet in one example, falling reactivity (infants’ ability to lower level of arousal) was linked with behavior problems in the United States (US), but not Russia (Gartstein, Slobodskaya, Putnam, & Kirchhoff, 2013). Given recent demonstrations of such cultural specificity (e.g., Gartstein et al., 2013; Lansford et al., 2005), it was anticipated that culture would moderate relations between parenting and child outcomes, a process represented by arrows from culture that intercept the connecting lines between parenting and child constructs, and from temperament to behavior problems, in Figure 1.1.

Over the past several years, we have completed a number of small-scale studies documenting cross-cultural differences in the temperament of infants, toddlers, children, and adults. In these efforts, we have only speculated about the underpinnings of the observed differences in temperament, arguing that they are the product of various components of the developmental niche. The Joint Effort Toddler Temperament Consortium (JETTC) was born out of the need to address social-emotional development through a cross-cultural lens in a more systematic manner, directly measuring developmental niche constructs in an attempt to discern contextual foundations of cross-cultural differences in child reactivity/regulation and emerging behavior problems. The JETTC is also in large part a product of our collaborative work on the Rothbart instruments. That is, in the process of disseminating our scales based on the psychobiological model of temperament we developed professional relationships with a number of international colleagues. The idea of reaching out to this group in an attempt to establish collaborations first presented itself at the International Conference on Infant Studies, Vancouver, BC, Canada, in 2008. Now, we have our first set of findings to report that includes all of the JETTC research sites: The US, Brazil, Spain, Mexico, Italy, Russia, Finland, Romania, Belgium, the Netherlands, China, South Korea, Turkey, and Chile.

In addition to directly focusing on aspects of the family environment to help explain early appearing individual differences, the JETTC surpasses earlier cross-cultural work on temperament in its scope. Unlike large-scale personality research that has captured an extensive body of cultures around the world (e.g., McCrae, 2001), the majority of studies examining individual differences in children have focused on only two to four cultures (e.g., the US and Netherlands; Sung, Beijers, Gartstein, de Weerth, & Putnam, 2015) or single narrow dimensions (e.g., shyness; Chen et al., 1998). The current investigation spans three broad components of temperament, examining these in 14 cultures, in order to address these limitations. The array of JETTC cultures also makes it possible to examine geographically and culturally proximal settings expected to be more similar to each other, for example sites in northern Europe (e.g., Finland and the Netherlands), and those distant in terms of geography and cultural orientation (e.g., The US and China). At the same time, sites selected for this research are not characterized by gross differences in the standard of living. That is, all of the countries are categorized as either “very high” (nine countries) or “high” (Romania, Turkey, Mexico, Brazil, and China) on the Human Development Index (HDI; United Nations Development Programme, 2014). As such, samples included in this work all represent relatively developed cultures, reducing potential for confounding of culture and socioeconomic status (see Lansford, 2012).

The JETTC cultures do, however, differ substantially in terms of broad constructs that have proven useful in characterizing the thoughts, values, and behaviors of adults around the world. The dimensional model developed by Hofstede and colleagues (e.g., Hofstede, Hofstede, & Minkov, 2010) comprises six “dimensions of national cultures” reflecting the goals and attitudes of societies. Four original dimensions were developed based on multi-national corporate (IBM) employee data: Individualism/Collectivism (contrasting an emphasis on caring for oneself versus the wellbeing of the larger group), Power Distance (the acceptance of inequality in power among members of a society), Masculinity/Femininity (the extent to which a society is driven by competition, achievement, and success, rather than cooperation, modesty, nurturance, and a focus on consensus), and Uncertainty Avoidance (the degree to which society members are threatened by unstructured or unusual situations). Later, a dimension labeled Long- versus Short-Term Orientation (an emphasis on thrift and the usefulness of shame versus protecting one’s esteem) resulted from Hofstede’s collaboration with Bond (Hofstede & Bond, 1988), and Indulgence/Restraint (allowance of gratification of desires versus expectations of restraint) was developed in collaboration with Minkov (Hofstede et al., 2010). We recently connected these dimensions to temperament in a meta-analysis (Putnam & Gartstein, 2017). The JETTC sample offers the opportunity to replicate these findings, as well as examine the ways in which cultural beliefs are transmitted across generations through parental understandings, goals, and actions.

The participating sites provide sufficient variability in terms of the developmental niche parameters to evaluate a model linking cultural influences to child outcomes. Some of these locations have been previously compared in terms of the niche components, typically parental socialization goals, ethnotheories, and/or daily routine (Carra, Lavelli, Keller, & Kärtner, 2013; Harkness et al., 2011; Keller et al., 2006). Others, wherein such comparisons were yet to be performed (e.g., Chile and Turkey), are associated with considerable contrasts in the cultural milieu, expected to translate into developmental niche differences. Cross-cultural differences in relational vs. autonomy-oriented socialization goals and parental ethnotheories have not been widely investigated to date (e.g., Keller et al., 2006). The daily routine element of the niche is multifaceted in nature, including play, sleep/bedtime, and discipline dimensions. A number of these components have been addressed (e.g., sleep; Super et al., 1996), yet have not been studied together, as they were in this investigation. Other aspects of the developmental niche received even less attention. Parental responses to child temperament have not been studied widely, and their importance in the context of the developmental niche supports inclusion in our conceptual model (Figure 1.1). That is, parental behaviors and socialization practices around child displays of reactivity/regulation are consequential for social-emotional development (Eisenberg, Cumberland, & Spinrad, 1998), with some indication of cross-cultural differences (Camras, Kolmodin, & Chen, 2008; Chen et al., 1998).

We studied these processes during toddlerhood, a period during which the consolidation of temperament traits is profound. NEG and SUR attributes undergo rapid development throughout infancy, typically stabilizing in the toddler period (Lemery, Goldsmith, Klinnert, & Mrazek, 1999). A transition to reliance on the frontally mediated attentional network facilitating executive functions results in rapid development of EFF (Posner, Rothbart, Sheese, & Voelker, 2012). This regulation-related set of attributes enables toddlers to modulate their behaviors and emotions more effectively, with socialization strongly contributing to this improved and more flexible regulation (e.g., Spinrad et al., 2012).

In conjunction with biological maturation, this developmental period marks an important transition in terms of societal expectations for self-regulation and the emergence of clinically significant behavioral/emotional concerns. Toddlerhood can be viewed as a critical window for translation of temperament risk and protective factors into symptoms/disorders via interactions with elements of the developmental niche (e.g., approaches to discipline). Early-appearing behavioral problems represent an important public health concern, as these often continue, exacerbating into identifiable...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction to the Joint Effort Toddler Temperament Consortium (JETTC)
• 2 Methodology of the Joint Effort Toddler Temperament Consortium (JETTC)
• Part 1 Temperament and Emerging Symptoms/Behavior Problems
• Part 2 The Developmental Niche
• Part 3 The Niche and the Child: Links between Parental Psychology, Developmental Context, and Child Outcomes
• Index