Sociocultural Variation in Mothers' Control over Children's Behavior

Prior findings of strict control of middle‐class Estonian mothers have not been consistent with middle‐class parent–child interaction patterns reported in other studies. The current study sought to find out to what degree the tendency to be more controlling toward children can be explained by the Estonian mothers' own experience of growing up in a totalitarian society. With this aim, measures of maternal controlling attitudes and actual verbal control of children were employed in a second country with a similar history of Soviet occupation—Latvia— and compared with previous data on Estonian, Finnish, and Swedish mono‐ and bicultural mothers. The questionnaire data revealed that Estonian (including Swedish–Estonian) and Latvian mothers placed higher emphasis on controlling children than did Finnish and Swedish mothers. At the same time, in their real‐life interactions, only Estonian mothers living in Estonia exhibited a highly directive conversational style. Finally, the discussion focuses on possible reasons for cultural variability in maternal controlling attitudes and actual control of children.