Toward a Decolonial Parenting Science Through Centering Majority World Parenting: A Commentary on “Parenting Culture(s): Ideal-Parent Beliefs Across 37 Countries”

Abstract

In “Parenting Culture(s): Ideal-Parent Beliefs Across 37 Countries,” Lin et al. examine reports of parents from 37 countries regarding the qualities they consider in an ideal parent and then use a method called Leximancer Semantic Network Analysis to identify broad culture zones across the 37 countries based on shared notions of an ideal parent. I appreciate this substantial effort to explore parenting beyond Euro-American samples, upon which a bulk of parenting science literature is based. I also concur with a data-driven exploratory approach and examination of ideal-parent beliefs across parents with differing educational levels. However, I argue that to advance parenting science, we need more than inclusion of samples from the Majority World (i.e., regions where the majority of the world’s population resides). Future parenting research should be grounded in (a) decolonial epistemology that involves generating localized knowledge by exploring parenting in various communities in the Majority World that are formed through intersecting influences of neighborhood composition, religion, region, social class, urban, rural, and suburban residence, along with other locally relevant social dimensions, (b) decolonial research methodology that values different ways of generating knowledge and includes local communities as partners in the knowledge generation process, and (c) understanding and interpreting parenting in Majority World communities from a cultural resource rather than a deficit framework.