Abstract

Does the effectiveness of teaching/parenting practices used to promote self-regulation among children and adolescents depend on culture? New evidence shows that teaching practices might have opposing effects on students’ achievement, metacognition and executive functions across cultures. However, there is a lack of comprehensive knowledge about such a cultural educational phenomenon and how this might also apply to parenting. To bridge this knowledge gap, a systematised review methodology was carried out to synthesise cross-cultural studies looking at adult promotion of children’s and adolescents’ self-regulation. 800 titles and abstracts were screened, 14 relevant studies were identified. Results show that most teaching/parenting practices have a culture-specific effect (varying between positive, negative, and null) on children’s cognitive self-regulation and emotion regulation. Specifically, for cognitive self-regulation, teacher/parent directiveness, guidance, autonomy support, emotion talk, strategy training, closeness/conflict with children showed culture-specific effects. For emotion regulation the same culture-specific pattern emerged with regards to parental sensitivity, soothing and co-regulation. Nevertheless, the results also show a culturally invariant positive effect of non-controlling guidance, limit setting, body contact, object stimulation and mutual gaze on autonomous behavioural compliance. The review calls for future research to explore the reasons underlying its findings and warns against inadequate cultural appropriations of teaching/parenting practices.