FRHD 3040: Lecture 5

Cultural Perspective on Parenting, Part 1:

Defining Culture: What Culture is Not:

- Society: a group of people with common territory, interaction and culture
- Nationality/citizenship: relationship of a person to a particular state
- Ethnicity: the group to which people belong, and/or perceived to belong, based on
certain shared characteristics
- Race: the group that a person belongs to, based on a mix of physical features

Defining Culture:
- Polysemous term
- Historical background
o Stems from “cultivation” (producing or developing)
- France in the 18th century, single term culture
o Sense of training or refinement of the mind or taste
- Late 19th century anthropologist Edward Tylor referred to culture as complex whole
o Ex: knowledge, beliefs and any other capacities

Culture Across Disciplines: Cultural Psychology:

- “Cultural psychology is the study of the mental life of individuals in relation to the
symbolic and behavioural inheritances of particular cultural communities”
- There is always both types of inheritance
o Symbolic inheritance
o Behavioural inheritance

Culture Across Disciplines: Psychology:

- Some group of people who belong together, shared features
- Semiotic (sign) mediation, part of the system of organized psychological functions (inter
and intrapersonal)

Types of Cultures: Personal:

- Cultural developmental psychology as process-focused
- Personal culture
o Internal subjective phenomena (intra-mental processes)
o Immediate (person-centered) externalizations
o Personal culture is publicly visible
o Created meanings projected to the world through personal arrangement of
things personally important
 Ex: symbolic domains and interpersonal interaction rituals

Types of Cultures: Collective:

- Collective culture: externalizations of personal meaning system of always limited groups
of persons
 - Collective culture: utilized in construction of personal culture
- Collective culture as dynamic process
o Communicative interchanges between persons
o Variety of parallel forms of collective culture

Challenge to Dichotomous Cultural Systems:

- Child socialization as individualistic in the West and Collectivistic in the East
- Survey data
o 1989 – 2010
- More endorsement of independence in East than West
- Less endorsement of obedience in East than West
- Obedience, not a popular socialization goal
- More endorsement of determination/perseverance, hard work and responsibility by
parents in East

Influences on Cultural Understanding:

- Location
- Perception
- Language
- Interpretation
- Use of language
- Understanding of concept based on cultural meaning
- Cultural application of concepts

Culture: Impacts on Parental Beliefs and Childrearing Practices:

- Influence parent-child interactions
- Culture as source of parental beliefs
- Child development as product of societal culture or collective culture
- People and cultural values
- Construal of the self

Construal of the Seld: