Parental ethnotheories of children's learning

Parental ethnotheories provide a framework for understanding the ways that parents think about their children, their families, and themselves, and the mostly implicit choices that parents make about how to bring up the next generation. Parents’ cultural beliefs about children’s learning, vary widely even within the Western world, both in terms of what children need to learn and how parents can help them in this process. Likewise, cultural models of children’s successful development—as reflected in the qualities parents implicitly choose to highlight when they describe their children—also vary in subtle but profound ways. Understanding these ideas, and their instantiation in the child’s developmental niche of everyday life, can yield new perspectives on children’s learning for the benefit of both research scientists and children’s most ardent fans—their parents.