Abstract: Chapter 2 reflects on a key assumption about the “traditional Chinese family,” the “child-training” paradigm that emphasizes parenting and overlooks children. The chapter draws from interview and observational data with mothers and children to contrast an important local cultural model of parenting, that is, preventing children’s fights, with the reality of prevalent fighting and conflict among children. Weaving together qualitative, quantitative and machine learning analyses of texts, the chapter uncovers the experiences of “dis-obedient children” which departs from the parental ideal of training obedience. After debunking the myths of “Chinese parenting,” I explain the inefficacy of parental punishment through the lens of children’s sociomoral cognition, against the popular assumption and paradigm of reinforcement learning. These findings remind anthropologists to pay more attention to the ethical experience and reflections of young children, “the punished,” and urge adults to see the world through children's eyes.

An overview of existing approaches to less powerful states’ strategies in international relations shows that no theory explains the behaviour described in the introduction. By most logics, they should evade international attention or, if they do approach larger actors with ulterior motives in mind, they should become socialized to valuing the norms they once invoked with cynicism. On no account should they draw the attention of larger actors whose global missions they not only undermine, but depend on undermining for domestic stability. This chapter introduces two scope conditions that begin to explain this conduct. Domestically, these states rule by patronage, a logic of rule that distributes money, jobs, political voice and physical security as privileges rather than by right. Internationally, they are peripheral, which means that they lack material and agenda-setting power in relation to other countries. As such, when patronage rule brings them into conflict with the global rights-based order, they cannot afford to change the offending practices, but neither can they withdraw or bear punishment. A historical account of political development in several post-colonial regions illustrates why peripherality and patronage, while they do not always overlap, correlate highly.

The intense socialization of law school is where students are introduced to the pressures that dehumanize the lawyering culture. The law school environment, featuring extreme competition, isolation, and alienation, undermines well-being and can transform students into dispirited zombies. Rather than inspiring positive emotions and the formation of new and robust relationships, the intense workload and stressful learning environment promote negative emotions and deterioration of relationships, when students are forced to compete with each other for the few high grades at the top of the grade curve. Engagement and meaning are thwarted by the mandatory grade curve and the frustration and learned helplessness it generates. The culture of legal practice is not an improvement, with overwork and chronic stress as its key features. Much like the grade curve that drives the competitive learning environment at law schools, the billable hour drives the tradition of overwork in legal practice. Stress intensifies, meaning and purpose are lost, social support deteriorates, and negative emotions take over. International Bar Association research indicates there is a global crisis in lawyer well-being.

Frontline crisis teams are typically very cohesive, characterized by strong bonds between members. Cohesion ensures that team members look out for each other in dangerous work environments, operate resiliently in crisis contexts, and can rapidly coordinate in stressful situations. This explains why many crisis organizations are total institutions. Yet, cohesion may also produce dysfunctional group dynamics, as open debate about the crisis and the required response is avoided. Contestation in crisis teams is often deplored and might escalate into conflict, but it does ensure a thorough analysis of the situation from diverse viewpoints and thus facilitates the adoption of a well-considered, mindful response. The simultaneous need for cohesion and contestation creates a dilemma. To deal with this dilemma, it is important to note that team tensions are varied. Crisis organizations, particularly those with complex tasks, can pursue task-related contestation, while upholding relationship-related cohesion. This requires an investment in mutual trust and respect, so that team develops a safe space for open interactions without risking hostility or disintegration.

The Strong Black Woman (SBW) schema exemplifies how many Black women are socialized to experience themselves in relationship to the world. The image of a strong Black woman is embodied by unyielding strength and unlimited capacity when navigating daily roles, interpersonal interactions, and life tasks. Examples include “Black women don’t cry in public” and “Black women have no choice but to be resilient.” Specifically, personifying the SBW schema can make it difficult for Black women to seek and engage in healthy romantic interpersonal relationships. This chapter reviews the history and development of the SBW schema and how this schema manifests in the lived experiences of Black women in romantic relationships. Understanding this context provides better comprehension of the challenges Black women may face when dating and developing healthy intimate partner attachments and can also provide more advantageous clinical insight when working with Black women clients in therapy.

A final possible path for change is from outside the system – that is, from the public and/or consumers of college sports advocating from the outside in. We theorize that fans will be less supportive of gender equity initiatives than the general public, given their investment in the product and the overwhelming media bias that places higher value on and coverage of men’s sports. We also predict those men who participated in formalized sports in high school will be more inured to gender inequalities and less supportive of aggressive change – a downstream socialization effect from participating in a sex-segregated system. We find strong support for our hypotheses, using a novel measure of fandom. We also find that parents with daughters who play sports express greater support for gender equity initiatives; however, this effect is dwarfed by the fandom and enduring high school sports dynamics. This shows barriers to change from the marketplace and the enduring impacts of sex-segregated institutions preventing change from the outside in.

This chapter offers an overview of research on the socialization of coping and emotion-related regulation. We begin the review with our conceptualization of coping and regulation. We then provide an overview of research on the socialization of coping and regulation. Specifically, we cover the role of the quality of the parent–child relationship, parental disciplinary practices, and emotion-related socialization practices on children’s coping and emotion-related regulation. We next consider applications of this research to interventions. We conclude with a discussion of complexities in this research, with a particular focus on the cultural context, bidirectional/interactional relations, and methodological factors.

How to chart the final chapters of your life. Planning for end of life. Getting everything you want; everything you set out to do.

Broad constructs of positive parenting (e.g., sensitivity, warmth) have been shown to contribute to children’s prosociality across a variety of ages and cultures. However, because both prosociality and parent-child relationships are complex, multifaceted constructs, a more fine-grained analysis is needed in order to understand the different pathways by which parents can facilitate children’s prosocial development. This chapter offers such an analysis, by reviewing work on how distinct features, or domains, of parenting can promote different motivations and skills that support prosocial action. Bidirectional effects and cultural influences are also considered, and implications for research and practice are outlined.

In the empirical exploration of ethical pedagogies, a quartet of themes are salient. The classic theme of and debate over the relative weighting of nature over nurture is inescapable. A second concerns the extent to which any given repertoire of norms, values, exemplars, and ideals are written in sociocultural stone versus the extent to which they are malleable, fluid, of unstable valence, and liable to elimination or supplementation. A third concerns the degree to which the techniques of the ethical pedagogue are informal or formal. A fourth concerns the place that ethical students occupy within the dynamics of incorporation and objectification. Neglect any of these themes and infelicities can result. Among them, the crucial role that childhood socialization plays in ethical formation might not receive the acknowledgement it is due. The distinction between ethics and ethos might suffer conflation. Worst of all, the anthropologist of ethics might run the risk of slipping into methodological or – even worse – ontological individualism. Proper attention to ethical pedagogies can ameliorate such infelicities. It can also facilitate recognizing that pedagogies, at whatever stage in the life course, are foundational to ethical formation, deformation, and reformation.

In many policies for and practices of education for democratic citizenship it is assumed that the democratic community is a community of shared democratic values. On such an account, education has the task of including “newcomers” into this community by ensuring that they adopt and internalize the common democratic values. In this chapter, I discuss the work of two authors, Chantal Mouffe and Jacques Rancière, who both have challenged this understanding of democracy and the democratic community. Both authors highlight the contested (Mouffe) and sporadic (Rancière) nature of the democratic community, thus bringing into view the work done to constitute the political community. They also highlight that this constitution does not happen before democratic politics can take place, but actually is an essential part of it. I provide a reconstruction of Mouffe’s and Rancière’s ideas and explore the implications for education.

The focus of this chapter is the development of pragmatic and sociolinguistic competence among second language learners during study abroad. In contrast to the foreign language classroom at home, study abroad offers learners a range of settings in which to engage in real-life intercultural encounters. These opportunities for social interaction, in turn, can have an impact on the learning of pragmatic and sociolinguistic dimensions of the second language, including speech acts and implicit meaning in the case of pragmatics and stylistic, and social factors in the case of sociolinguistics. Being able to accurately comprehend the intended message of utterances in the social context and to adequately express desired meanings are crucial components of intercultural competence. However, given that languages vary with regard to how pragmatic functions are realized and how sociolinguistic variation is signaled, the development of these areas in a second language represents a challenge for learners. While previous research suggests that study abroad can facilitate pragmatic and sociolinguistic development, such development is not guaranteed and the learning outcomes for individual learners are subject to a wide array of personal, social, and programmatic factors.

This chapter presents a comprehensive review of vague language studies from a pragmatic perspective. An utterance is vague when it conveys unspecific meaning. For example, “Many friends attended her birthday party,” how many is many? 20, 100 or 200? Our interpretation of “many” may vary from individual to individual, from context to context. Vague language is fluid, stretchable, and strategic. It consists of various types, including approximators, vague quantifiers, placeholder words, vague category identifiers, general terms, intensifiers, softeners, and epistemic stance markers. This chapter serves as a guide for understanding the characteristics of vague language. The discussion involves the conceptual frameworks and features of vague language, which are illustrated by examples and research drawn from intercultural corpora. This chapter reviews the theorization of vague language, its linguistic categories and pragmatic functions, vague language use in intercultural communication, and includes suggestions for future research. Vague language plays a crucial role in intercultural communication and its pragmatic functions, such as mitigation, politeness, and self-protection, form an important part of the strategic moves used in effective language interactions. This chapter provides an important contribution to the field of intercultural pragmatics.