BEHAVIOR

EARLY CHILDHOOD DEVELOPMENT
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respond contingently to the child’s ongoing activity,
while expanding that activity to direct it in more challenging
directions. Through incremental learning with
emotional and cognitive support, scaffolding enables
children to gradually develop the abilities necessary to
solve tasks independently. Scaffolding can be strengthened
through appropriate interventions, as the final
section of this chapter will discuss.
Since effective scaffolding frequently involves childdirected
language, caregivers’ skill in using contingent,
situation-specific linguistic guidance also plays
a role in the development of children’s emerging selfregulatory
abilities. Mothers who provided more positive
verbal stimulation with their toddlers at age two
had children who were better able to stay focused on a
task and to delay gratification at age six, Olson, Bates,
and Bayles (1990) found. Mothers who display a sensitive
and scaffolding parenting style also have children
who have lower cortisol levels and better executive
function skills (Blair and others 2011). Thus the quality
of parenting and verbal stimulation in infancy plays
a critical role in shaping the child’s stress-response
system and the development of critical noncognitive
skills, as well as the development of language and cognitive
skills more broadly.
Parents’ beliefs and caregiving
practices differ across groups,
with consequences for children’s
developmental outcomes
How different parenting styles evolve and
adapt differently to different economic
contexts
Many studies in the United States have found dramatic
differences in caregiving behaviors among families.
Parents with greater education and wealth tend
to provide more cognitive and positive socioemotional
stimulation for their infants than do parents with less
education and fewer economic resources. Within SES
groups, there is substantial variability as well. But how
relevant are these findings to caregivers and children
across the much broader range of contexts in developing
countries?
There has been little longitudinal research in developing
countries that examines parenting behaviors in
relation to well-defined child outcomes. On the question
of how parenting practices differ across societies,
however, ethnographers provide a rich literature of
descriptive data. Many anthropological studies of
mother-child interaction in agrarian societies report
that parents are highly attentive to the safety and nutritional
needs of infants, yet do not regularly engage in
social interaction or direct speech with children who
have not yet begun to talk (Kağıtçıbaşı 2007). For example,
in rural villages in Kenya, Gusii mothers avoided
eye contact with infants because of traditional beliefs
that direct gaze can be dangerous; thus the mothers
only rarely directed affectionate or social behaviors to
their babies, Dixon and others (1981) observed. While
Gusii mothers were quick to protect, comfort, and feed
a crying infant, they tended to respond with touch and
rarely with language. The use of contingent conversational
communication strategies with young children,
including the practices of verbal turn-taking and scaffolding,
were not observed. As children grew older,
parents spoke to them more often, but frequently used
commands to direct the children to do something,
rather than using language to elaborate on their children’s
interests.
How can such variation in parenting behaviors
across different cultural groups be explained? The
cultural psychologist Cigdem Kağıtçıbaşı (2007) provides
functional explanations for cultural differences
in parent-child relations by situating parental beliefs,
values, and behaviors in their socioeconomic contexts.
When a child is expected to make material contributions
to the family, as in subsistence economies, then a utilitarian
value can be attributed to the child. Thus parents’
mental models of child rearing might be goal oriented,
although not explicitly or consciously formulated
in those terms. The child in a stable agrarian society
whose future depends on mastering a traditional craft,
such as weaving, could be socialized to develop that
competence through nonverbal observation of adult
weavers, with no need for extensive cognitive and language
stimulation early in life. However, as Kağıtçıbaşı
points out, “Teaching and learning limited to non-verbal
observational learning and non-inductive obedienceoriented
child socialization appear not to be optimal
for the promotion of high levels of cognitive and linguistic
competence in the child” (2007, 83). In fact, she
argues that these traditional socialization goals may
be disadvantageous in contexts of social change—for
example, when uneducated parents must help their
children prepare for formal education. To meet the new
challenges of schooling, children need foundational
skills in language and executive function to acquire
the higher-order cognitive abilities that are critical to
creative problem solving and success in school.
How parenting practices compare across
countries
How do parenting practices differ across high-,
middle-, and low-income countries? The association
between two types of positive parenting practices—
cognitive caregiving and socioemotional caregiving—
and the country’s level of development, as measured