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Parenting styles and mother-child interaction were examined with 97 Mainland Chinese mothers (M age ¼ 29.64 years, SD ¼ 3.64) and their young children (M ¼ 24.30 months, SD ¼ 4.57). Mothers completed questionnaires about their parenting styles, orientation to Chinese cultural values, perceived parenting stress, and sources of social support. The regression analyses showed that mothers' adherence to Chinese values was associated with both authoritative and authoritarian parenting styles. Other characteristics of the family contexts, such as perceived parenting distress, social support, and years of education, also contributed to Chinese mothers' parenting styles. Mother-child dysfunctional interaction was associated with mothers' heightened parenting distress, a lack of perceived social support, and perceptions of children's difficultness. Group comparisons revealed that Chinese mothers who had high scores for both authoritative and authoritarian parenting styles adhered most strongly to the Chinese cultural values. The findings suggest that the aspects of families' eco-cultural settings such as mothers' endorsement of Chinese cultural values and perceived parenting stress contribute to their parenting styles and interaction with their children.

This study examined children's early literacy skills in both English and Spanish at entry to preschool to investigate the pattern of association among these skills and their families' home language and literacy practices. The participants were 392 primarily Latino immigrant (85%) families and their children. Mothers completed questionnaires about their families and their home literacy environment (HLE), and children's emergent literacy skills were measured in English and Spanish at the outset of the preschool year. Project assistants interviewed mothers in their homes and tallied the presence of literacy-related materials. Results of structural equation modeling showed that the 3 preliteracy skills were significantly associated within and across English and Spanish, suggesting the possible transfer of these early preliteracy skills across languages. For the English language HLE, parents' literacy-related behaviors, sibling-child reading, and families' literacy resources were all associated with children's English oral language skills, and their English print knowledge was associated with their home resources. For the Spanish language HLE, only parents' literacy-related behaviors were related to children's Spanish oral language and print knowledge skills. There were no significant cross-linguistic relations between any aspect of the English HLE and children's Spanish preliteracy skills, whereas parents' literacy-related behaviors in Spanish were negatively associated with children's English oral language and phonological awareness skills. Given the importance of oral language and vocabulary in promoting children's literacy, these results indicate that parents can support this skill in both languages, but their relative impact seems to be within rather across language.

This study examined the additive and interactive effects of temperament and harsh and indulgent parenting on Chinese children's proactive and reactive aggression. Participants were 401 children (M age = 9.29 years, 203 girls) and their parents who were recruited from 2 elementary schools in Shanghai, People's Republic of China. The results showed that children's sensation seeking was associated with proactive aggression, whereas anger/frustration was associated with reactive aggression. Both subtypes of aggression were negatively related to children's effortful control but positively related to harsh parenting. Significant Temperament x Temperament and Parenting x Temperament interactions were also found. The findings point to similarities and differences between proactive and reactive aggression in relation to children's temperament and harsh and indulgent parenting in the Chinese context.

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