The structure of parenting styles and vocabulary development in Western and Eastern Europe: Insights from three different countries

Parenting brings into play several interpersonal skills and responsibilities, and it exerts a significant influence on multiple aspects of the development of the child, including language acquisition. Usually, when one becomes a parent, one adopts parenting practices learned, in turn, from their own parents. Passing on values to their offspring is often one of the goals that parents try to pursue when raising children (Grusec, 1997). When parents’ methods and values are passed on across generations, both desirable and undesirable practices are employed. Given the importance of the role of caregivers in children’s lives, a plethora of scholars have dedicated their careers to studying parent-child interactions and all the potential external and internal factors that could influence the relationship in any way. Research has shown that parental attitudes and behaviors are influenced by a plethora of factors, including culture, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, as well as intuitive parenting theories (Conger et al., 2012; Hewlett & McFarlen, 2010; Mistry et al., 2013; Hembacher & Frank, 2020). The present study was born with the aim of investigating whether the Early Parenting Attitudes Questionnaire (EPAQ) by Hembacher and Frank (2020) could be used to assess aspects of intuitive parenting theories cross-culturally. In addition to that, we estimated the extent to which the scales identified in the first part of the analysis predicted language comprehension and production. The first chapter of this thesis is based on the description of parent-child interactions and language development in children. The first section of the chapter focuses on parenting: it includes the debate on Early-Later experiences, an overview of the main theories of child development, and a description of Baumrind’s parenting styles (Baumrind, 1968; Maccoby & Martin, 1983). The second section of the first chapter is based on the developmental trajectories of language. It includes a description of the main language milestones and of the biological and environmental factors that might underlie or influence the process of language development. Moreover, it comprises an outline of Chomsky’s language acquisition theory (Chomsky,1957) and Skinner’s theory (Skinner, 1957). The first chapter ends with a paragraph that introduces the main topics of interest of the study that will be deepened in the second chapter, namely the role of culture on parenting attitudes and intuitive theories of parenting. The second chapter presents the detailed procedures used in conducting the research and the results obtained. It starts with a description of the objectives of the study and of the sample, which includes 3333 parents of children from Norway, the U.K., and Russia. Then, the instruments used are presented and described in detail. These include the Early Parenting Attitudes Questionnaire (EPAQ) by Hembacher and Frank (2020), and the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories (CDI; Fenson et al. 2007). The chapter continues with a description of the analyses employed, which include exploratory factor analyses to test for the measurement invariance of the three-factor solution proposed by Hembacher and Frank (2020) and to propose alternative factor solutions, and a full-null comparison framework to estimate the extent to which the scales that were established in this step predicted the CDI scores. The second chapter ends with a thorough presentation of the results obtained, which will be further discussed in the following chapter.