The Parenting Across Cultures Study

Led by Jennifer Lansford, the Parenting Across Cultures (PAC) Study is a longitudinal study initiated in 2008 to examine the impact of cultural context on parenting behavior and the way that culture might moderate the effect of parenting on children's development. This ongoing prospective study follows 1,209 8-year-old children (50% female; wide variation in race/ethnicity) from 11 diverse cultures globally (China, Colombia, Italy, Jordan, Kenya, Philippines, Thailand, Sweden, and several USA ethnic groups) through young adulthood. This presentation includes two exemplar studies within PAC.

Laura will describe a study examining the predictors and development of future orientation across 10 years and countries with varying levels of income and cultural orientations. In particular, she will explore how maternal and parental monitoring, family obligation expectations, individualism, collectivism, and conformity are related to individuals' ability to envision, plan for, and invest in their future between ages 10 and 20. She finds that future orientation developed significantly differently across countries, following nonlinear trajectories, with parental influences varying by parenting dimension, parent gender, and economic-cultural context.

Ken will describe a study of childhood social information-processing predictors of young-adult success in education and employment, health, mental health, and well-being. He finds that skills of social interpretation, impulse control, social problem solving, and social decision-making robustly predict success in all four domains, even controlling for family socioeconomic factors and nonsocial cognitive skills. In contrast, cognitive skills provide little predictive power after controlling for social information-processing skills. These findings hold across all cultures.

https://scholars.duke.edu/person/dodge
https://scholars.duke.edu/person/Laura.Gorla