Cultural models and developmental agendas: implications for arousal and self-regulation in early infancy.

Parental ethnotheories—the shared, abstract, and often unconscious mental schema for understanding children, families, and the self as parent—organize parental behaviors. This paper focuses on parental ethnotheories and developmental agendas concerning the regulation of infant states of arousal, as expressed in interviews by 96 mothers in five cultural communities (in Italy, Korea, the Netherlands, Spain, and the United States). Transcriptions of the hour-long home interviews were coded for nine themes of child development and 34 related caretaking practices. A Salience Index was derived for each theme to reflect both the frequency of its occurrence in the interview and the number of practices associated with it. Statistical analysis of these indices demonstrates clear differences among the groups in how aspects of infant state are framed and which themes constitute culturally defined developmental agenda. Qualitative analysis elaborates the unique cultural frameworks used by these mothers. Each framework is fully adequate for managing the arousal states of infants and leading them to a more mature pattern of self-regulation, building a platform for their future engagement in the social, emotional, and educational life of their developmental niches.