Abstract
Parents’ self-construal, their socialization goals for their children and their behaviour as parents are the products of their cultural environments. This project outlines a profile of parents’ self-construal, autonomy-relatedness socialization goals and their mental state and rule and behaviour talk in the New Zealand and Malaysian cultural contexts. Utilizing measures that are contextually sensitive and reflect the multiple ways in which independent and interdependent traits may be conceptualized, the socialization goals and self-construal of parents from urban areas in Malaysia (n = 38) and New Zealand (n = 37) were obtained. The parents also engaged in a picture description task with their children, from which the parents’ mental state and rule and behaviour talk was examined. The Malaysian parents’ self-construal, socialization goals and talk with their children shared many features with the New Zealand parents and did not demonstrate an overall emphasis on interdependence and relatedness. Rather, parents from both countries were relatively independent in their self-construal profile and tended to endorse more long-term autonomy goals, which was reflected in the preponderance of their mental state talk. However, between country differences were apparent in the differing weight that parents from each country placed on individual autonomy socialization goals, their usage of rule and behaviour talk and the Malaysian parents’ use of desire talk. This study demonstrates the utility of using a range of measures to capture subtleties of parents’ individual orientation in cross-cultural studies, while also studying their mental state and rule-behaviour talk with their children.