Parental teaching behavior in diverse cultural contexts

Mealtime conversations between parents and their 2-year-old children in five cultural contexts

“…Mothers seemed to be the driving force behind this pattern: they spoke the most, initiated most themes and most of the themes they were involved in also included the child. This aligns with the former analyses of these videos showing that mothers teach more compared to fathers (Köster et al, 2022) and a recent study by Broesch et al (2021) who described mothers as the primary interaction partners for young children across five cultural settings. Fathers spoke less and were less likely to be involved in a conversation with the child.…”

“…However, the urban/rural split was by no means complete in that some of the families from Brazil and Ecuador were assigned to the urban cluster and some families from Argentina were grouped in the rural cluster. A similar difference between urban and rural settings was found when analyzing parental teaching behavior for these samples but with a stronger sub-clustering of families in the urban cluster (Köster et al, 2022). Taken together, these results show that variation in communicative interactions did not -at least not primarily -originate from the languages that were spoken, but was likely due to norms, values and beliefs prevalent in the respective cultural settings.…”

“…Assertions were the most common type of speech act for all speakers in all settings, followed by questions and imperatives. However, mothers and fathers form Brazil and Ecuador were more likely to use imperatives, mirroring the findings from Köster et al (2022) that parents used a higher number of prompts towards their children in these contexts. The number of themes -parts of coherent utterances -tended to be longer and involved more people in Brazil compared to the other settings.…”

“…However, to our knowledge, there are very few quantitative comparisons. While ethnographic descriptions offer important and rich MEALTIME CONVERSATIONS IN FIVE CULTURAL CONTEXTS 7 insights into individual cultural settings (see e.g., De León, 2011;Gaskins, 2006), quantitative comparisons are essential for understanding gradual cultural differences (Broesch et al, 2021;Hewlett, Lamb, Shannon, Leyendecker, & Schölmerich, 1998;Köster et al, 2022) and offer core input for theory building (see language input studies discussed earlier).…”

“…Such activities, however, are very specific to industrialized societies and less frequent or absent in other cultural contexts. A cross-culturally recurrent, and hence particularly promising, context for cross-cultural research is mealtime: across societies, meals are social events that are structured by -and used to transmit -cultural norms, values and beliefs (Blum-Kulka, 2012;Fjellström, 2004;Köster et al, 2022;Ochs & Shohet, 2006). Furthermore, mealtimes have been a fruitful context for studying caregiver-child communication, for example, in the U.S.…”