and Family Studies

01--Harkness etal--5-39 5/10/07 8:13 AM Page 5 Abstract: Parental ethnotheories—the shared, abstract, and often unconscious mental schema for understanding children, families, and the self as parent—organize parental be-haviors. This paper focuses on parental ethnotheories and developmental agendas con-cerning the regulation of infant states of arousal, as expressed in interviews by 96 mothers in five cultural communities (in Italy, Korea, the Netherlands, Spain, and the United States). Transcriptions of the hour-long home interviews were coded for nine themes of child development and 34 related caretaking practices. A Salience Index was derived for each theme to reflect both the frequency of its occurrence in the interview and the number of practices associated with it. Statistical analysis of these indices demonstrates clear dif-ferences among the groups in how aspects of infant state are framed and which themes con-stitute culturally defined developmental agenda. Qualitative analysis elaborates the unique cultural frameworks used by these mothers. Each framework is fully adequate for manag