Parenting and Child Development in Low- And Middle-Income Countries

This compelling volume advances understanding of what parenting looks like and how it is 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 3 to 5 years of age in nationally representative samples from 51 low- and middle-income countries are sampled to address seven 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.

The key questions concern:

• How central domains of early childhood development (literacy-numeracy, socio-emotional development, physical development, and approaches to learning) compare across low- and middle-income countries;
• How child and primary caregiver sociodemographic characteristics and household and national development demographic characteristics relate to central domains of early childhood development;
• How girls and boys fare on measures of child growth, caregiving practices, discipline and violence, and physical home environments;
• How national development relates to child growth, caregiving practices, discipline and violence, and physical home environments;
• How child growth, caregiving practices, discipline and violence, and physical home environments uniquely relate to central domains of early childhood development;
• How child growth, caregiving practices, discipline and violence, and physical home environments, child and primary caregiver sociodemographic characteristics, and household and national development demographic characteristics taken together rank in predicting and accounting for unique variance in central domains of early childhood development.

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.