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Stephen T. Russell, Lisa J. Crockett, and Ruth K. Chao: Asian American Parenting and Parent-Adolescent Relationships Springer, New York, 2010, 130 pp, ISBN: 978-1-4419-5727-6
In Asian American Parenting and Parent-Adolescent Relationships, Stephen Russell, Lisa Crockett and Ruth Chao have garnered a wealth of information on Asian American youth and their families, especially Chinese and Filipino Americans, and provided readers with exceptional insight into parenting influenced by cultural differences. As editors, they have not only gathered relevant studies on the chosen topic but also contributed significantly to the book by offering their own research findings related to cultural variations to parent-adolescent relationships, whose constructs were once surmised to be universal. Their goal was to "tell a new story about the cultural basis for parenting and parent-adolescent relationships" (p. vi) through a varied group of studies of Asian Americans and their families. The book is written as part of a series called Advancing Responsible Adolescent Development, edited by Roger Levesque, and is aimed at advocating research that explores conditions that either challenge or accelerate responsible development of adolescents.
The authors of the various studies incorporated in the book shed light upon the nature and meaning of cultural differences in parenting. The book is a highly informative reference for researchers, clinicians, and graduate students across multiple disciplines, including developmental, clinical, child, and school psychology, sociology, and anthropology as well as ethnic and women's studies. It echoes and further strengthens the words of Francis Galton (1874), who affirmed that the environment is one of the elements "amid which the growth takes place, by which natural tendencies may be strengthened or thwarted, or wholly new ones implanted" (p. 12).
In their quest for understanding the uniqueness of Asian American parenting and parent-adolescent relationship, the editors present a series of studies that employ specific methodological approaches to examine distinctive dimensions of parental support, adolescents' understandings of their parents' support and control and parenting practices influenced by culturally based parental beliefs. In their introduction to the book, Russell, Crockett and Chao provide an overview of current thinking about parentadolescent relationships and parenting in adolescence, the role of ethnicity and available evidence about cultural variation in parenting and parent-adolescent relationships between Chinese and Filipino American groups. They also provide a detailed outline of...