Parenting in context
In her Fellows’ Presentation, Nancy E. Hill, the Suzanne Young Murray Professor at the Radcliffe Institute, attempted to do what she herself acknowledged is almost impossible. That is, step outside one’s own cultural belief system to dispassionately analyze data about parenting styles. As she explained after her May 11 presentation, “Everyone operates from an implicit cultural belief system that shapes how we think and who we are and what we value and what’s important.” People don’t always realize this “because their own implicit beliefs feel natural. And when they are around people who are like them, [beliefs] feel universal — but they are not.” In her talk — “Cultural Worldviews and Belief Systems as Lenses to Understand Ethnic Variations in Parenting and Children’s Development” — Hill described her work disentangling cultural, structural, and economic sources of parenting beliefs and practices across ethnicities. The presentation — the last of Radcliffe’s 2010-11 series — covered...