The proposed research aims at extending the growing research on how parents foster their young children's development through structuring the children's activities and guiding them in social interaction. Most of this research has involved families in the U.S. and Western Europe. Hence, there is a need to determine whether the supportive guidance observed in recent research is characteristic of parent-child interaction in widely differing cultural settings or whether it is unique to the culture of the researchers. We expect that in widely differing cultures, parents will show similarity in their attempts to provide a bridge between familiar skills or information and those needed to handle a new situation, their arrangement and structuring of learning situations with the young child's collaboration, and their gradual transference of responsibility for managing situations to the child. At the same time, we expect variations in the goals of socialization and the means used to implement them (e.g., differing values regarding explicitness or subtlety in verbal and nonverbal communication, the adaptation of children to the adult world or vice versa, and the accessibility of caregivers to infants through proximal and distal forms of communication). Interactions between caregivers and toddlers (aged 12 and 24 months) will be observed in three cultural settings that vary in child-rearing practices: Middle-class Urban U.S., Hindu Indian village, and Moslem Turkish village. Each of these countries is represented by one or more of the collaborators on this project. Twelve child-caregiver dyads will be observed in each cultural setting in universal routine activities that provide an opportunity for guidance: feeding, dressing, playing social games, and exploring a novel object. Each of these tasks will be observed three times for each dyad. The interactions will be videotaped, coded and analyzed statistically and ethnographically. In addition, each family will be interviewed and observed to provide demographic data on the family and information on child-rearing practices. The data will allow specification of similarities and differences across cultures in parent-toddler interaction in routine survival and socialization activities.
