Parenting and Child Development in Low and Middle-income Countries

This compelling volume advances the understanding of what parenting and related sociodemographic, demographic, and environmental variables look like and how they are associated with child development in low- and middle-income countries around the world.

Specifically, expert authors document how child growth, caregiving practices, discipline and violence, and children’s physical home environments, along with child and primary caregiver sociodemographic characteristics and household and national development demographic characteristics, are associated with central domains of early childhood development across a substantial fraction of the majority world using contemporary 21st-century data from the UNICEF Multiple Indicator Cluster Surveys and the UNICEF Early Childhood Development Index. The lives of nearly 160,000 girls and boys aged 3 to 5 years in nationally representative samples from 51 low- and middle-income countries are sampled to address 7 principal questions about children, caregiving, and contexts. Parenting and Child Development in Low- and Middle-Income Countries takes an authentically international approach to parenting, the environment, and child development in cultural contexts that more fully characterize the world’s diversity.

Parenting and Child Development in Low- and Middle-Income Countries is essential reading for researchers and students of parenting, psychology, human development, family studies, sociology, and cultural studies, as well as governmental and non-governmental professionals working with families in low- and middle-income countries.

Marc H. Bornstein holds positions at the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, the Institute for Fiscal Studies, and UNICEF. He is President Emeritus of the Society for Research in Child Development, Founding Editor of Parenting: Science and Practice, Editor Emeritus of Child Development, and Editor of the Handbook of Parenting.

W. Andrew Rothenberg is a research scientist at Duke University and a postdoctoral associate at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine’s Mailman Center for Child Development. His specialties are preventing and treating the intergenerational transmission of deleterious parenting and child mental health.

Andrea Bizzego is a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Psychology and Cognitive Science of the University of Trento. His research focuses on improving methodological procedures and reproducibility in neuroscience and psychology.

Robert H. Bradley is the director of the Center for Child and Family Success at Arizona State University. He developed the Home Observation for Measurement of the Environment Inventory and the Family Map.

Kirby Deater-Deckard is a professor and program director of Developmental Science at the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences of the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He is Associate Editor of the Handbook of Contemporary Family Psychology and co-editor of Frontiers in Developmental Science.

Gianluca Esposito is a professor of Child Development and Chair of the PhD program in Cognitive Science at the University of Trento. He is Senior Associate Editor at Research in Developmental Disabilities.

Jennifer E. Lansford is a a research professor at the Sanford School of Public Policy and a faculty fellow at the Center for Child and Family Policy of Duke University. She leads the Parenting Across Cultures project, a longitudinal study of children, mothers, and fathers from nine countries.

Diane L. Putnick is a staff scientist at the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. She serves on the editorial boards of Developmental Psychology, Parenting: Science and Practice, and Family Process.

Susannah Zietz is a postdoctoral scholar at the Center for Child and Family Policy of Duke University Sanford School of Public Policy. Her research focuses on relations between exposure to adversity in childhood and aggression and health risk behaviors in adolescence and adulthood.