European American and Chinese parents' responses to children's success and failure: Implications for children's responses.

Abstract

The authors examined cultural differences in parents' responses to their children's performance. In Study 1 (N = 421), Chinese 5th graders reported that their parents de-emphasized their academic success and emphasized their academic failure, whereas their American counterparts reported that their parents did the opposite. This partially accounted for Chinese (vs. American) children responding less positively to success and more negatively to failure. In Study 2 (N = 128), Chinese and American mothers' responses to their 4th and 5th graders' performance were observed in the laboratory. The cultural differences in children's reports of parents' responses documented in Study 1 were replicated; mothers' responses were also associated with children's subsequent performance. In addition, Chinese mothers were more involved than were American mothers, but their affect was similar. Taken together, the results suggest that parents' responses to children's performance may be a channel for cultural transmission and perpetuation of responses to performance.

Chinese American immigrant parents’ emotional expression in the family: Relations with parents’ cultural orientations and children’s emotion-related regulation.

“…Though parents of different cultures may vary in their patterns of emotional expression (Camras, Chen, Bakeman, Norris, & Cain, 2006;Ng, Pomerantz, & Lam, 2007;Parker et al, 2012), the effects of parents' emotional expression on children's development appear to be consistent across cultures (S. H. Chen, Zhou, Eisenberg, Valiente, & Wang, 2011;Eisenberg, Liew, & Pidada, 2001).…”

Measuring Parents’ Involvement in Children’s Education

“…Hence, variability due to such factors as the type or difficulty of schoolwork is minimized; some studies also control children and parents' perceptions of how good children are at the task (e.g., Ng et al 2007). However, such standardization can also be a drawback as it creates an artificial situation.…”

“…Trained observers who do not have prior ties to the family code parents' actual behavior, thereby permitting heightened objectivity. In this vein, Ng et al (2007) had trained observers code mothers' involvement as manifest in teaching children how to solve the problems on the Raven's Progressive Matrices, checking children's work on the problems, looking at the problems to see what they were like, doing the problems themselves, and paying attention when children showed them the problems. However, more often, investigators have capitalized on the heightened objectivity of behavioral observations, as well as the detailed level of analysis permitted by this method, to assess the quality of parents' involvement, which is rarely assessed in parents, children, and teachers' retrospective reports (for some exceptions, see, Ginsburg and Bronstein 1993;Gottfried et al 1994).…”

“…In a different vein, Hyde and colleagues (e.g., Else-Quest et al 2008;Hyde et al 2006) gave children and mothers math problems that most children of the target age had not yet learned; mothers were provided with information about the problems along with strategies to solve them. To examine parents' responses to children's success and failure, Ng et al (2007) observed mothers with children for 5 min after mothers learned children did poorly or well on a set of Raven's Progressive Matrices in which children had to identify the patterns used in a set of sequences to determine the missing element of each matrix (see Raven et al 1977).…”

Differences between Japanese children and Chinese children in behavioral responses to puzzle tasks

“…They reported that Japanese children showed less shame and sadness in response to failures, and less pride and more exposure embarrassment in response to success than American children. Moreover, Ng, Pomerantz, and Lam (2007) reported that when school-aged children failed at a task, East Asian parents emphasize the importance of making progress, whereas American parents focused on success.…”