Maternal Responsiveness to Infants in Three Societies: The United States, France, and Japan

Abstract

This study examines and compares prominent characteristics of maternal responsiveness to infant activity during home-based naturalistic interactions of mother-infant dyads in New York City, Paris, and Tokyo. Both culture-general and culture-specific patterns of responsiveness emerged. For example, in all 3 locales infants behaved similarly, mothers also behaved similarly with respect to a hierarchy of response types, and mothers and infants manifest both specificity and mutual appropriateness in their interactions: Mothers responded to infants' exploration of the environment with encouragement to the environment, to infants' vocalizing nondistress with imitation, and to infants' vocalizing distress with nurturance. Differences in maternal responsiveness among cultures occurred to infant looking rather than to infant vocalizing and in mothers' emphasizing dyadic versus extradyadic loci of interaction. Universals of maternal responsiveness, potential sources of cultural variation, and implications of similarities and differences in responsiveness for child development in different cultural contexts are discussed.

Supporting Early Vocabulary Development: What Sort of Responsiveness Matters?

“…M ATERNAL responsiveness or "prompt, contingent, and appropriate reactions" to infant behaviors [6] is a multidimensional construct that has been found to be positively related to the infant's later socioemotional and cognitive development [1], [7], [29], [43]. In particular, verbal responsiveness has been found to be positively correlated with a variety of language outcomes including lexical, syntactic, and literacy skills [32], [39], [44], [46].…”

Parenting and Preschool Child Development: Examination of Three Low-Income U.S. Cultural Groups

“…However, there is not universal agreement as to the degree to which physical closeness and verbal interactions constitute important aspects of responsiveness across cultures (Bradley and Corwyn 2005). Concerns have been raised as to whether there might be important cultural variations in the manner in which mothers manifest responsiveness to children (Bornstein et al 1992).…”

French parents’ cultural models and childrearing beliefs

“…In this domain, studies of French parenting are somewhat inconclusive. On the one hand, French mothers have reported being very concerned with the affective needs and psychoaffective developmen t of their children (Gueniou, T anguy, & Sabatier, 1993 ) and with openly displaying affection to their children (Best, House, Barnard, & Spicker, 1994 ;Bornstein et al, 1992). Yet in the realm of holding and carrying infants.…”