It’s fitting that I’m currently reading about cross-cultural parenting, as I am beefing up my thesis intro. I came across an article by Marc Bornstein (a world-known scholar of mother-infant relations and infant development). He contrasts Japanese and American (and presumably Canadian) culture, and I thought I’d share some interesting snippets. I love his descriptions:

“America is typically characterized as an ethnically heterogeneous, self-assertive and doggedly individualistic, future-oriented society. By contrast, Japan is commonly pictured as an ethnically homogeneous and an inward, traditional society where people are largely devoted to collectivity and to the harmony of group identity.”

Doggedly individualist. Future-oriented. That’s what we are. I must admit I struggle with competing demands of my own two cultures: Bulgarian and Canadian. This has become ever-prevalent since I became a mother… My individualism fights against my willingness to connect, to be part of a collective and harmonious group… Bornstein goes on:

“The peoples of Japan and America are exceptionally like-minded in terms of their consensual child-centeredness. Despite recent rapid modernization, however, Japan remains a culturally insulated society in terms of family life, and a value system dating from ancient China continues to underpin conceptions of child-rearing (Azuma, 1986; Kojima, 1986). Thus, Japanese and American parents appear to perceive and treat very young children in fundamentally different ways. The Japanese mother is widely believed to see her infant as an extension of herself, and to organize her interactions so as to consolidate and strengthen a mutual dependence between herself and her infant. By contrast, the American mother is widely believed to promote autonomy in her infant, and to organize her interactions so as to foster physical and verbal independence in the child.”

We already know North American mothers value autonomy. We must know this, for almost all mother-infant interactions in our western culture are geared toward encouraging infants to pursue and achieve autonomous goals. There is a fair amount of object-playing, too, in our cultures, which is also meant to encourage autonomy.

It isn’t as though there are inherently good and bad approaches to this thing we call mothering, right? I mean, aside from neglect and abuse, we’ve discovered that a vast amount of cross-cultural variation exists.

Here are more differences:

Patience, persistence, and accommodation are virtues promoted among Japanese schoolchildren, whereas originality, exploration, and self-assertion are characteristics encouraged among their American counterparts. Japanese mothers expected early mastery of emotional maturity, self-control, and social courtesy in their preschoolers, where American mothers expected early mastery of verbal competence and individual action in theirs.

On this one, I side with Japanese moms. I expect social courtesy, perhaps at the risk of sounding like a wench at times. I’ve been known to yell or have a stern talking-to when my children run in front of an elderly person (or any person, for that matter). Or when in general they don’t look out around them. I don’t believe that kids will notice these things until they’re reminded a million times, but I think that’s more reason to remind them! Being an individual is fine, as long as you keep yourself firmly grounded to this Earth – the place you have to share with others.

I must in fairness mention this article is from 1989.