Ideas about Parenting in Argentina, France, and the United States

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Abstract
Central to a concept of culture is the expectation that different peoples possess different ideas and behave in different ways with respect to child rearing. In this study, we investigated ideas that Argentine, French, and US American mothers hold about their own and their husbands' actual child rearing, as well as what they consider to be ideal child rearing, in three parenting domains: social, didactic, and limit setting. For each domain, we analysed mothers' reports of their actual behaviours and of their husbands' actual behaviours; mothers' ideal expectations of their own and their husbands' behaviours; and mothers' dissonance with respect to parenting (i.e. the extent to which mothers' actual and their husbands' actual behaviours each agrees with mothers' ideal expectations for themselves and for their husbands). The results showed consistent parent, country, as well as parent-by-country effects, interpretable in terms of overarching cultural beliefs. The study of parents' ideas contributes to understanding why and how parents behave the way they do toward children, and provides insights into the broader social context of child development.