Contextual and Cultural Variations in Parenting of Toddlers: A Comparison Between US and Turkish Mothers

The quality of parents’ interaction with their young children in various contexts is predictive for positive long-term development (e.g., Riksen-Walraven et al., 1996). Supportive presence, i.e., managing own feelings and supporting the child in challenging situations, and structuring/limit setting, i.e., guiding the child towards the task goal, are important parts of proactive parenting (Denham et al., 2000) in task-related situations. The goal of this paper is to compare Turkish and US mothers’ proactive parenting during two tasks that differed in the level of structure required. Due to a stronger independence training in the US, we expected that US mothers display higher support and less structuring, while Turkish mothers may show an opposite pattern. These cultural differences may be especially evident in the structured task. The relations between maternal behavior and child characteristics may be similar for both groups. A total of 110 mother-toddler dyads (64 Turkish; 46 US) were observed in a structured (puzzle) and an unstructured task (coloring). Based on the adapted coding system by Erickson, Sroufe, and Egeland (1985), two Turkish and two US coders provided reliable codes. Preliminary results partly confirmed our hypotheses: in the structured task, US mothers showed higher supportive presence than Turkish mothers, who structured more than US mothers. Interestingly, the same effect occurred in the unstructured task. Mothers showed consistency across the tasks and child compliance affected maternal behavior in the structured task. The implications of the results are discussed in a cultural perspective.