PARENTING VALUES, ATTITUDES, BEHAVIORS, AND GOALS OF AFRICAN-AMERICANMOTHERS FROM A LOW-INCOME POPULATION IN RELATION TO SOCIAL AND SOCIETAL CONTEXTS

There is broad consensus among family and child development researcher s that variations in parenting styles and practices contribute to indi vidual differences along a range of child outcomes. Although the liter ature implies a continuum of parenting styles, research on ethnic mino rity and low-income families has often implied that these groups are h omogeneous with respect to parenting practices and has compared them t o standard samples (usually ethnic majority and middle class). In reje cting these assumptions, we examined the diversity of parenting styles in a sample of a low-income, African American families served by Head Start. Analyses revealed a range of child-rearing beliefs yielding di screte patterns of parenting that were distinguished in terms of belie fs about desirable child attributes and community-level attributes, an d were associated with children's social competence. Findings suggest that crude group comparisons are inadequate to describe or explain the effects of parenting values and parent-child interactions in low-inco me, minority ethnic status samples.