Cultural Learning at the Kitchen Table

• In Event: 2-126 - Informal Teaching and Socialization across Cultures – Key Processes and Developmental Outcomes

Integrative Statement

It is a major developmental task for children in the first years of life to acquire the practices and beliefs of their social group. It has been suggested by anthropologists as well as cultural psychologists that the family, as the proximate social context, plays a major role in the process of cultural transmission of knowledge, beliefs and skills (e.g., Kağıtçıbaşı, 1996). In particular, Keller (2007) describes early parent-child interactions as the cradle of cultural learning. Mapping similarities and differences in parental socialization styles across cultural contexts is a challenging task: While experimental studies narrowly focus on specific parenting behaviors (e.g., task assignment; Köster et al., 2016), anthropological approaches mostly provide broader, descriptive accounts (e.g., Ochs & Izquierdo, 2009).
In the present study, we observed parents and children in five different cultural contexts at home, during their daily mealtime interactions. Thereby, we aimed to get a broad overview of similarities and differences in parental socialization across cultures, in an ecological but standardized setting. Specifically, we video-recorded 2 typical mealtime situations of mother, father and child triads, with children aged 2 to 3 years from urban Japan, urban Germany, urban Argentina, rural Brazil and rural Ecuador (N = 100, 20 triads per context, with two meals á 10 minutes). We coded both parental teaching styles and the content of parents’ teaching. Following Kline’s suggestion (2015), we defined teaching as any behavior where parents modify their behavior to facilitate learning in their children.
Based on Kline (2017), we have developed a comprehensive coding manual for teaching styles and content and could establish good too very good interrater reliabilities. This coding scheme comprises teaching by social tolerance, providing opportunities to learn, evaluative feedback, guiding attention, and direct active teaching, subdivided into several subcategories. Regarding teaching content, our coding focused on content relevant for the mealtime situation, including any practical knowledge, conventions and rituals. We will present the results with regard to our main hypothesis that the way parents teach their children is highly variable across cultures, while content categories may be rather stable. This is, while all parents may transmit rituals, conventions, and food related knowledge, they will do so using different teaching styles. For example, we expect deliberate teaching styles in urban Germany (e.g., providing children with choices of food), but more assertive teaching styles in rural Brazil and Ecuador (e.g., prompting children to eat a certain food). The findings will be discussed in the light of children’s lifeworlds, which were assessed in an additional interview.
Overall, our approach offers a new avenue to study cultural transmission by assessing parental teaching in a standardized, daily setting. By doing so, the approach directly puts to test the ecological commitments made in experimental designs (Dahl, 2015) and allow a direct comparison of observed behaviors across contexts, which goes beyond the limits of anthropological approaches. Our study will thus contribute to a better understanding of the versatile developmental processes that give rise to cultural diversity.

Authors

• Moritz Köster, Free University Berlin
  Presenting Author

• Joscha Kärtner, University of Münster
  Non-Presenting Author

• Marta Giner Torréns, University of Münster
  Non-Presenting Author

• Lilia Cavalcante, Universidade Federal do Pará
  Non-Presenting Author

• Shoji Itakura, Kyoto University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Patricia Kanngiesser, Freie Universität Berlin
  Non-Presenting Author