Maternal Ethnotheories About Infants’ Ideal States in Two Cultures

Abstract

Accumulating evidence suggests that ethnotheories about ideal states of infant affect and activity vary across cultures in important ways. However, most previous studies have not directly identified such ethnotheories but rather inferred them from observational studies on mother-infant interaction. To fill this research gap, we interviewed mothers from two cultural milieus—mothers from Münster (urban Germany) and mothers who identify themselves as Kichwas (rural Ecuador), as these contexts presumably offer different construals of the self—to determine their ideal states of infant affect and activity and their self-reported co-regulation tendencies. The interview was based on short video clips of a German and an Ecuadorian infant displaying different combinations of affect (neutral, low-arousal positive or high-arousal positive affect) and activity (low or high). As expected, mothers in Münster preferred higher levels of positive affect than Kichwa mothers. Regarding co-regulation tendencies, we found cultural similarities and differences: Across samples, mothers tended to stimulate affect, and activity, especially when infants were neutral or inactive, but differed in their modality of co-regulation. More specifically, Münster mothers advocated more distal co-regulation modalities than did the Kichwa mothers. Taken together, the present study is the first to provide explicit evidence that maternal ethnotheories about infants’ ideal affect vary across cultures. The cross-cultural differences in ideal affect were not accompanied by differences in self-reported co-regulation of affect, suggesting an indirect link between ideals and (self-reported) parenting behavior.