Constructing Autonomous Selves Through Narrative Practices: A Comparative Study of Working-Class and Middle-Class Families

Cultural Differences in Maternal Beliefs and Behaviors: A Study of Middle‐Class Anglo and Puerto Rican Mother‐Infant Pairs in Four Everyday Situations

“…(1) demonstrating coherence among long-term socialization goals, maternal beliefs regarding strategies for realizing those goals, and the structuring of motherinfant interactions in four everyday situations; (2) providing evidence for the usefulness of 'individualism' and 'sociocentrism' as general heuristic devices for understanding broad cultural differences in the context of child development; and (3) suggesting that more localized, intragroup variations in childrearing beliefs and practices need to be understood within the context of broader cultural belief systems, goals, and values. As Wiley, Rose, Burger, and Miller (1998) note, an appreciation of the "subtle patterns of similarities and differences within and across cultural groups . .…”

Constructing Emotional and Relational Understanding: The Role of Mother–Child Reminiscing about Negatively Valenced Events

“…Within the context of storytelling, children routinely were taught to assert and defend themselves from mock challenges (see Reminiscing and Sociomoral Development 313 Miller & Sperry, 1988). Working class mothers have also been shown to demand a higher level of factual information from their children and to contradict children until children gave the expected answer in the context of storytelling (see Wiley, Rose, Burger, & Miller, 1998). Thus, working class mothers may demand more authority to obedience, more truth telling, and more assertive and aggressive behavior to provocations than middle class mothers, all of which are values that are central to success in economic hardship.…”

What Do Grandmothers Think about Self‐esteem? American and Taiwanese Folk Theories Revisited

“…This is surprising in light of mounting evidence that construals of the self are culturally variable and that North Americans consistently score higher on measures of self-esteem than their Asian counterparts (Greenfield & Cocking, 1994;Heine & Lehman, 2003;Heine, Lehman, Markus & Kitayama, 1999;Markus & Kitayama, 1991;Triandis, 1990). The cultural plurality of selves raises a fundamental developmental question: What are the processes by which different construals of self are created (Miller, Fung & Mintz, 1996;Wiley, Rose, Burger & Miller, 1998)? How can we explain, for example, how children living in certain cultural communities (e.g., middle-class, European American) come to define themselves in terms of their individual choices and preferences or why they grow up to have a need for positive self-regard?…”