In the context of increasing ethnic and racial diversity in the United States, we summarize research on parenting among African American, Latinx, White, and Chinese parents in three domains: academic socialization, cultural socialization, and teaching about discrimination. Academic socialization, intended to support children’s and adolescents’ educational success, reflects a goal that is widely shared among adults in the U.S., although there are ethnic-racial differences in how such socialization is manifest due to cultural and contextual variations across groups. Cultural socialization reflects many ethnic-racial minority parents’ desire for their children and adolescents to remain connected to their heritage and to retain the cultural values of their group. Teaching about discrimination reflects many ethnic-racial minority parents’ awareness of their groups’ social position in the U.S. and their anticipation of or reaction to their children’s discrimination experiences. We also describe interventions aimed at supporting the parenting tasks that ethnic-racial minority parents encounter.

This chapter discusses parental emotion socialization (ES), or the ways in which parents teach children about the experience, expression, and regulation of emotions. The foundational theories of ES suggest that socialization can occur through a variety of mechanisms that vary with children’s age. Parents’ practices can broadly be either supportive or unsupportive. Methods for measuring and categorizing parents’ ES practices include questionnaires, naturalistic observation, and real-time discussion techniques. Research on ES involving these methods has revealed that supportive versus unsupportive practices are linked to differential effects on children’s emotion regulation skills, physiological self-regulation, psychological adjustment, and neural networks underlying emotion processing and regulation. In this chapter, we review the current findings on ES across infancy and early childhood, middle childhood, and adolescence and young adulthood. These findings are contextualized by the discussion of research on the roles of fathers and culture in the ES process. Further, interventions focused on improving ES and emotion regulation in the parent-child relationship are highlighted. The chapter concludes with recommendations for future investigations of ES and relevant policy implications.

The quality of the caregiving environment is one of the most impactful elements on youth’s development, with evidence suggesting these experiences are embedded at the neural level. This chapter reviews empirical research characterizing relations between parenting and child and adolescent brain development with respect to a full continuum of maladaptive to adaptive parenting behavior. We consider evidence directly linking parental factors on neural indices of development, as well as growing evidence characterizing individual differences in neurobiological susceptibility to the caregiving environment. We conclude with a discussion of future directions for this research.

The child welfare system is primarily designed to serve children who have been maltreated, a form of parenting that is arguably the most deleterious that children can experience. The latest national data indicate that there were 618,000 children in the U.S. Who were maltreated in 2020, at a rate of 8.4 per thousand children (Administration for Children and Families, 2020). Beyond being direct victims of child abuse and neglect, they may experience a multitude of environmental risks, including poverty, parental mental illness, parental substance use, and family and community violence (Hecht & Hansen, 2001; McKenzie et al., 2011). These contextual risks lead to a variety of adverse outcomes for maltreated children that span developmental domains (Jonson-Reid et al., 2012; Jones Harden et al., 2016; Toth & Manly, 2019). The features of the parenting that maltreated children experience may exacerbate or compensate for these contextual risks, and influence their short- and long-term developmental trajectories.

In this chapter, we begin with the definition of culture and a discussion of theoretical frameworks for understanding the influences of culture on parenting. We discuss the meta-analysis studies examining the links of parenting styles and child outcomes across culture groups. We then provide a qualitative review of selected empirical studies on parenting in four cultural contexts: (1) low- to middle-income countries of sub-Saharan Africa, (2) Southeast Asian countries, (3) refugee families from sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia, and (4) refugee and immigrant families in Western destination countries. These four cultural contexts were selected because: (1) parenting practices in these cultural contexts have been understudied, despite the strong need for research-based interventions to prevent/reduce risks and promote resilience in children living in those communities; and (2) the unique sociocultural characteristics or processes of these contexts create several new directions for parenting research. Implications of the research findings for policy and intervention are also discussed. We conclude the chapter with a summary of new themes in the research on culture and parenting.

In 2019, migration due to humanitarian crises has reached an unprecedented high with more than 272 million people not residing in their homes. As around 50 percent of recent refugees and immigrants worldwide were underaged, adverse experiences linked to migration hit them during critical periods of youth development. Strong families can provide resources to protect youth development amid seeking refuge and immigration. Specifically, effective parenting behavior was found to buffer the negative impact of adversity. In response to the increasing numbers of migrants and refugees worldwide, several receiving countries have modified their refugee policies, with consequences for the post-migration living circumstances of refugee and immigrant families. The purpose of this chapter is to discuss the impact of selected refugee policy domains (right to asylum, detention, family unification) on parenting behavior. We focus on the United States and Germany as the two Western countries with the largest populations of immigrants and refugees based on their population sizes. Although to different extents, both countries restricted their refugee policies since immigration has started to increase in 2015. Mechanisms through which refugee policies affect parenting include parent-child separation, hardship, access barriers to support services, experiences of community violence and demanding asylum policies. Apart from specific regulations for unaccompanied minors in Germany, children’s needs for positive development are left widely unattended in the current refugee policies of both countries. Interdisciplinary research needs to empirically substantiate cascading effects from refugee policies to family- and individual-level processes such as parenting and child development. A better understanding of these links can contribute to support immigrant and refugee families upon arrival, reduce emerging disparities and promote pluralistic societies of tomorrow.

Employment and earnings are the cornerstone of economic well-being for families worldwide, with the responsibilities of parenting occurring alongside paid work. For this reason, as well as for early educational enrichment, children spend a fair amount of time under the care and supervision of nonparental providers or in settings other than their home environment while caregivers work. This chapter focuses on families with young children age 0-5 and considers the context of work and employment for parents, the role of child care and early education as supports for working parents, and the theoretical and empirical linkages between parents’ work contexts and parenting. Many employment circumstances, such as unpredictable work schedules, work during nonstandard hours, and temporary work arrangements, make the combination of work and parent roles more difficult, while other characteristics, such as flexible work schedules, can support parents in fulfilling their dual roles. Early care and education can provide crucial support for parents’ work but is not always affordable or available during parents’ work hours. The chapter concludes with a discussion of U.S.-based public policies that can support work, earnings, and child care and thus promote economic security and stability for families and parenting.