Bilateral (Hong Kong): Cultural and Individual Influences on Parenting During Infancy

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Advice for new parents is ubiquitous, though frequently contradictory. In a New Yorker article called "Sleeping with the Baby," John Seabrook told of his bewilderment as a new father, reading contradictory advice on how to get his infant to sleep, from Arlene Eisenberg's advice to leave infants crying in their cribs to William Sears' advice to share a bed with the baby, or co-sleep. Little is known about how parents respond to advice and why they choose certain caregiving practices over others, but at least in some cases, they are clearly disregarding advice. The results of the UK-wide Infant Feeding Survey in 2005, for instance, indicated that only 25% of 6-month-olds are breastfed, despite NHS recommendations that infants should be breastfed for at least six months. We propose that parents differ in their support of two basic principles, structure and attunement, and that their support of these principles influences specific caregiving practices such as feeding and sleeping arrangements. Alice Winstanley and Merideth Gattis have developed a measure to study parenting principles and practices, the Baby Care Questionnaire (BCQ). In this measure, structure refers to reliance on routines and schedules, and attunement refers to reliance on the infant's cues. Structure and attunement are often presented as opposites, as in a Guardian article called "Why isn't there more research into parenting regimes?" in which Oliver James contrasted parents who follow strict routines (schedulers) with parents who are infant-led (huggers). Research in the UK indicates, however, that although structure and attunement are weakly related, they each make a distinct contribution to parenting. In studies by Winstanley and Gattis, some parents were high in structure and low in attunement, while others were high in attunement and low in structure, but importantly, some parents were high in both structure and attunement, and other parents were low in both structure and attunement. The aim of the current proposal is to develop and evaluate a cross-culturally valid measure of parenting principles and practices during infancy based on the BCQ, and to use that measure to assess parental support of structure and attunement in the UK, Hong Kong, and Mainland China. We propose three studies to develop and evaluate the reliability and validity of the BCQ. Gathering evidence across cultures and nations will help us build a more accurate understanding of these two parenting principles and how they relate to each other, as well as how they relate to specific caregiving practices. Similarities and differences in caregiving practices between Hong Kong and the UK suggest that this will be an especially informative comparison. In particular, breastfeeding rates are very similar between Hong Kong and the UK, but sleeping arrangements are very different. Understanding variation in principles as well as practices is important because preliminary data from Winstanley and Gattis (2011) indicates the two are related. In particular, in a study of 347 parents in the UK, they found that parents who were high in attunement were more likely to breastfeed their infants, and parents who were high in structure were more likely to have infants who slept alone. The proposed project will allow us to evaluate whether such relationships are specific to certain cultures and/or socioeconomic conditions, or are more general. The resulting measure will be a valuable tool for addressing a wide range of theoretical and practical questions, including how parenting environments during infancy influence social and cognitive development, how changing socioeconomic and political conditions around the world are influencing families, and how risk factors surrounding birth, such as preterm birth, interact with individual and cultural factors, such as parenting principles and practices.