Culture sets the agenda for parenting and defines what being a good parent entails. In this chapter, we review evidence for this point from both the popular literature and from cross-cultural academic research, including our own. Parenting ideas and practices in the United States, Europe, sub-Saharan Africa, and East Asia are described as they relate to the challenges of being a good parent. Particular attention is given to the role of culturally based parental ethnotheories as a basis for action and reflection on oneself as a parent. The chapter concludes with consideration of how current rapid culture change creates new challenges for being a good parent and thus for emotion regulation and a sense of well-being.

Interest in how children are reared and how they develop in other cultures is probably as old as cross-cultural observation itself, but this chapter's retrospective and prospective reflections are based on a genealogical framework that starts with Franz Boas, the founder of modern American cultural anthropology, as the intellectual great-grandfather of present-day thinking about human development in psychological anthropology. As we develop more of the genealogy and look ahead to future possibilities, this chapter will address the fundamental question of why anthropologists have been interested in human development. I will suggest that within the field of psychological anthropology, interest in human development has been motivated by two main concerns. One is a reluctance to let psychologists define the parameters of normal psychological development on the basis of a highly selected population – that is, the children (mostly white and middle class) of industrialized Western civilization. The second, more central concern that has motivated psychological anthropologists to study human development has been to advance our understanding of culture – what it is, where it resides, and how it gets there. In order to see how this second concern has been expressed, we must look beyond our own ancestors to consider more general intellectual trends in scientific inquiry and its methods. These trends have intersected with psychological anthropologists' research on human development to influence the ways in which we construe culture and the role of human development in cultural processes.

When John Whiting came to publish his dissertation research on childrearing practices in a New Guinea tribe (Whiting 1941), he titled the work “Becoming a Kwoma.” The title was deliberately chosen to express the idea that children are not born with an understanding of their cultural identity, but that they must learn to think and act like members of a particular social group. This theme has received renewed attention under the rubric of “the acquisition of culture” (Schwartz 1981, Harkness 1990), drawing metaphorically from the field of child language to suggest the kinds of mental processes that may be involved in the child's learning of the culture. In both recent models of culture acquisition and earlier formulations of “childhood socialization,” the role of parents is taken as central.

Strangely, however, anthropologists have rarely examined the processes by which parents learn to be parents in a manner consistent with the beliefs and practices of their own culture. In traditional societies where the ethnographer could at least imagine a time before contact with western culture, the task of learning to be a parent as part of learning the culture may have seemed fairly straightforward. Ethnographic accounts of traditional societies in East Africa, for example, detail how children are trained to be child nurses at an early age, how they learn the lore of married life through the circumcision ceremonies, and how they begin married life and parenthood under the close supervision of their elders.