1 Introduction

Parents have two modes by which to influence their children’s behavior. The indirect mode involves manipulating opportunity structures (in the social and ecological environments, for example) to create more favorable influences on childhood behavior and development. Indirect influence may also mean mobilizing social capital with the intention of transferring influence, social credentials, information, and behavioral reinforcement to one’s children (Lin 2001, p. 20). The direct mode involves practicing a specific pattern of supervision and control within an emotionally close and involved relationship with one’s children. The way that these underlying modes correspond to more specific parenting “styles” (Maccoby and Martin 1983; Lamborn et al. 1991) continues to be debated and researched in studies of parenting among immigrant groups.

Studies on parenting practices in the United States have been shown to differ substantially by culture, measured as race or ethnicity. Reportedly, parents of East Asian descent are significantly more likely to be identified as “authoritarian” than European American parents (Chao 2001; Kao 2004; Pong et al. 2005). Authoritarian parenting (i.e., when parents insist on obedience without considering their children’s feelings) was related to lower educational success among white students but to higher educational success among Asian American students (Dornbusch et al. 1987; Steinberg et al. 1992), although this effect vanishes in the assimilation process (Chao 2001). There is overwhelming and consistent empirical evidence that European American students benefit most from an “authoritative” parenting style, which is characterized by a combination of “demandingness” and emotionally warm “responsiveness” (Maccoby and Martin 1983; Dornbusch et al. 1987; Baumrind 1991; Lamborn et al. 1991; Steinberg et al. 1994; Pong et al. 2005; Chan and Koo 2011). However, the relationship between an authoritative parenting style and educational success for East Asian students is unclear and has also been discussed controversially due to arguments that “Western” constructs of parenting styles may lack cross-cultural validity (Sorkhabi 2005, 2012; Pong et al. 2010). Whereas previous research demonstrated a negative relationship between authoritarian parenting and school performance among European American adolescents but not among Asian American adolescents, the same studies of Asian adolescents showed that the distribution of differences between authoritative and authoritarian parents was small, with only slightly more authoritarian parents among Asian American and Asian students. Pong et al. (2010, p. 71) concluded that their findings “support the argument that cultural differences may be over exaggerated. We found that authoritarian parenting is negatively associated with children’s school achievement in both the United States and Taiwan and among European Americans and Asian Americans alike.”

The analyses presented below have the following two main objectives. First, they report on the empirical distributions of parenting styles of three groups of mothers with children from four different age groups between 3 and 18 years of age. These data were gathered from native German, Turkish immigrant, and Vietnamese immigrant mothers living in Germany. This design follows to some extent the designs of studies in the United States that have compared European American parents (living in the USA for three or more generations) to Asian American and Latin American immigrant parents. This replication allows a test of whether the US findings are influenced by or are a reaction to specific conditions in American society or whether they are invariant across receiving contexts and thus primarily reflect the respective cultures of origin. One major difference between the United States and Germany for the adaptation of migrant families may be seen in the two countries’ respective welfare regimes. Germany has a moderately extensive welfare state in the conservative continental European tradition, whereas the United States follows the Anglo-Saxon liberal tradition of a minimal welfare state (Esping-Andersen 1990).

These are the first comparative data on parenting styles in migrant families in Germany to be provided to date. The very few previous studies were based on constructs that are difficult to compare, were focused on single migrant groups, or provided descriptive results for work-migrant minorities only (Nauck 2000), or compared educational attitudes and socialization practices of Turkish immigrants living in Germany, German natives, and Turks who never emigrated (Nauck 1989, 1997). The study of Vietnamese immigrants provides an opportunity to compare the Turkish migrant minority to migrants of a very different cultural background and allows testing of the assumptions about differential effects of migration contexts on parenting styles.

The second objective of the analysis is to account for internal variability within the three ethnic groups (Sorkhabi 2005) and to thus avoid a potentially misleading single-minded emphasis on cultural differences (Pong et al. 2010) and the fallacy of cultural determinism. A theoretical model was developed that relates a two-dimensional construct of parenting styles to parental expectations about the costs and benefits of their offspring’s resources and their own resources. These resources are assumed to vary considerably both within and across ethnic groups. Controlling for the distribution of these resources may then give a more conclusive answer to the question of culture-specific parenting styles. Moreover, doing so allows us to locate research on German migrant families more precisely within the context of theoretical arguments developed in the North American context on “segmented assimilation”, which were based mostly on comparisons of Vietnamese families with other ethnic groups (Zhou 1997; Bankston and Zhou 1997; Zhou and Bankston 1998). Comparative research in Germany, which includes East-Asian ethnic groups may also reveal that they follow a different pathway of incorporation into the receiving society than the classical work migrant nationalities.

However, parenting styles within families depend also on the opportunity structures in the social context and related opportunities to perform indirect modes of manipulating influences on the child’s development. The provision of opportunity structures for the children of immigrant minorities differs considerably from the situation of the majority population, not only because of ethnic segregation (Friedrichs and Triemer 2009) but also because of income differentials, which may limit financial investments into a favorable learning environment. Research from the United States provided empirical evidence that East Asian families make greater average financial investments in the educational success of their children and in within-family social capital as compared to all other ethnic groups, but they are less likely to maintain strong school-related social contacts or to attend school events (Kao and Tienda 1995; Sun 1998). In all migrant families, the use of within-family social capital to supervise and control offspring has a more positive effect on school success, but there are significant differences between ethnic groups that cannot be explained by resource differences alone (White and Glick 2000; Glick and White 2004). Bankston and Zhou concluded in their comparative study on social capital in families of different ethnic backgrounds that, generally, “intergenerational closure among parents and children, the organizational involvement of both parents and children, and parental education and occupational status are all associated with relatively strong academic performance” (Bankston and Zhou 2002, p. 312). However, their findings also indicated that “Asian families have less intergenerational closure than other families” and “infrequent interactions between Asian parents and children and low levels of parental involvement in the social networks of Asian children… Put simply, Asian children do well in school in spite of their relatively weak ties to their parents” (Bankston and Zhou 2002, p. 313 f.).

In a Dutch network study, Völker et al. (2008) found that migrant minorities, including those of Turkish descent, had less social capital than the Dutch majority. In their study of social networks and social capital of German, Turkish, and Vietnamese mothers, Nauck and Lotter (2014) similarly reported that German native mothers had more social capital and larger resource networks of less closure. Notably, differences between German and Turkish mothers could be explained by differences in educational and occupational status, but Vietnamese families showed a distinct pattern of strong reliance on intra-family resources. These findings suggest to include in the analysis effects of the social environment of the families on the performed parenting style.

2 Explaining differences in parenting styles

Baumrind (1971) first conceptualized three types of parenting styles: (1) permissive parenting, (2) authoritarian parenting, and (3) authoritative parenting. These were later categorized by Maccoby and Martin (1983) along the two dimensions of “demandingness” and “responsiveness,” resulting in the additional style of (4) neglectful parenting.

"Demandingness refers to the standards and demands set by parents for their children (e.g. control and supervision), and responsiveness refers to parent’s response to and communications with their children (warmth, acceptance, involvement). Thus, neglectful parents are low on both demandingness and responsiveness and are unengaged in their children’s activities. Parents who are permissive are very accepting of their children, making few demands for mature behavior and allowing their children substantial self-regulation. By contrast, authoritarian parents are high on demandingness and low on responsiveness. Between these extremes are authoritative parents, who are high on both demandingness and responsiveness. Parents who are authoritative set clear standards for mature behavior while simultaneously encouraging autonomy in their children" (Pong et al. 2010, p. 62).

The two-dimensional conceptualization of parenting styles has since become the “gold”-standard approach, as it has proven to be robust under various operationalizations and using various instruments of measurement. It has been used not only to analyze parenting in different family and social status settings, it has also been used for explaining parenting in immigrant families as well as cross-cultural variation in parenting.

Explaining differences in parenting styles can be based on two sets of theoretical arguments. The first set of arguments is based on structural, cultural and situational preconditions, such as variations in the family setting and in the positioning in the societal status system (structure), the ethnic identification (culture), and the belonging to a migrant minority or to the residential population majority (situation). The second set of arguments is based on the assumption that parenting styles are a core part of parental investment strategies into the future welfare of their offspring. These investment strategies are based on their perceived instrumentality, i.e. the perceived costs and benefits of long term investments such as schooling. The theoretical model thus assumes that these investment strategies mediate the relationship between the structural, cultural and situational preconditions and parenting styles.

The theoretical argument related to family settings is based upon several assumptions about the availability of parental control. First of all, two-parent families are thought to have more means to control their offspring than single-parent families (Astone and McLanahan 1991). Accordingly, one may hypothesize that strictness and supervision is more salient in single-parent families and that they will be characterized by a lower proportion of self-perceived indulgent and neglectful parenting styles. As family settings are unequally distributed among the three ethnic groups, with more single-parent families among the German families, this will also have an indirect effect on the distribution of parenting styles.

The theoretical argument related to social status is derived from the tradition of class specific socialization styles (Kohn 1977; Chan and Koo 2011). The assumption is that class-specific work values are transformed into parental preferences for their offspring’s characteristics and into specific forms of parental discipline. As middle-class occupations involve high work complexity and require a high level of job identification, creativity, and self-reliance, these work values are transformed into a parenting style of indirect control, enhancing early moral autonomy and high emotional involvement. And as working-class occupations are routinized and closely supervised by others, they require conformity to authority and discipline, and so these work values are transformed into a disciplinary style of direct control and distance between generations. Accordingly, one may hypothesize less acceptance and involvement in working-class families and higher proportions of authoritarian and neglectful parenting styles. As a much greater proportion of working-class families are found among Turkish and Vietnamese migrants, this will also have an indirect effect on the distribution of parenting styles among the three ethnic groups. German mothers should be more likely to exercise an authoritative or indulgent parenting style.

The theoretical argument related to cross-cultural differences is derived from the tradition of classifying cultures according to basic value dimensions (Hofstede 1980; Trommsdorff 2007, p. 460 ff.) and to how they are transformed into culture-specific “lay theories” of child-rearing and human development (Super and Harkness 1997). Parents structure the environment of the child and act according to these subjective child-rearing theories. Specifically, the assumption is that in terms of their respective subjective theories, parents from collectivistic cultures differ from parents from individualistic cultures. “In contexts in which individualism is emphasized, parents pursue children’s independence as an important socialization goal and highly value individuality and self-expression. On the other hand, children’s dedication to their family and social in-groups is a crucial socialization goal for parents living in cultures in which interdependence is emphasized because group harmony and self-restraint are highly valued” (Ziehm et al. 2013, p. 1). It has been repeatedly argued that parents from collectivistic cultures show higher levels of strictness and supervision than parents from individualistic cultures and more pronounced intergenerational distance based on respect and authority (Pong et al. 2005; Kagitcibasi 2005, 2007). Accordingly, Chinese adolescents in the United States were significantly more likely to rate their parents as authoritarian as compared with European American adolescents (Chao 2001), and Asian parents were more reluctant to share decision making with their children than European parents (Kao 2004). European American mothers and Asian American mothers also differed in terms of their contribution to fostering schooling and learning. Whereas European American mothers follow a “facilitative” model of parenting, Chinese American mothers view their contribution to their children’s learning as a more direct mode of intervention, tutoring, and training (Chao 1996, 2000). On a societal level, Vietnam was classified by Hofstede (1980) as having a predominantly collectivistic culture (20 points on the individualism score). Germany was classified as predominantly individualistic (67 points). Although Turkey belongs to the group of collectivistic cultures, it was classified as less collectivistic than East Asian countries (37 points). One may thus hypothesize that mothers of Vietnamese origin are more likely to practice an authoritarian parenting style than Turkish and especially German mothers.

The theoretical argument related to migrant minority status is based again upon assumptions about the availability of mechanisms of cultural transmission to the offspring outside of family custody. While members of the majority population find rich personal and institutional support in the transmission of parental cultural orientations and practices, similar opportunities for migrant families are scarce or have to be self-organized with high effort (and low probable effectiveness, given the low level of cultural and economic resources of migrants in Germany). For Turkish families, it was observed that migrant parents showed higher levels of authoritarian control and protectiveness than the native population in the receiving country and than non-emigrants in the country of origin (Nauck 1989, 1997). Accordingly, one may hypothesize that Turkish and Vietnamese mothers show higher levels of strictness and supervision than native German mothers. More generally, one may hypothesize that those mothers with access to higher levels of social capital show lower levels of authoritarian control.

These four hypotheses may be considered as parts of a general explanation of parenting styles. They cover structural components such as social status and class membership as well as situational components such as migrant status and the respective family setting. They also cover cultural components such as belonging to a collectivistic or individualistic culture of origin. An open theoretical question, however, relates to the potential interactions of these partial explanations, as all of them were derived from independent lines of reasoning. Some predictions derived from the four hypotheses are identical and others augment each other, but how they might aggregate to a consistent overall explanation remains quite unclear.

The second set of arguments is based on the assumption that parenting styles are a core part of parental investment strategies into the future welfare of their offspring. These investment strategies are based on their perceived instrumentality, i.e. the perceived costs and benefits of long term investments such as schooling. The theoretical model thus assumes that these investment strategies mediate the relationship between the structural, cultural and situational preconditions and parenting styles.

The theoretical argument related to parental investment strategies is based on the relationship between parental behavior and expectations about the instrumentality of formal education of the offspring for the production of welfare (Lindenberg 1996; Nauck 2014). These expectations are thought to mediate the relationship between cultural and structural factors and parenting. If the parents expect high instrumentality either for their own future physical well-being or for that of their child, they have higher incentives to increase supervision and be more strict in their demands. For example, Vietnamese minority communities seem to reward educational success by showing increased social approval for the parents (Zhou 1997). This observation can be related to the distinction between collectivistic and individualistic cultures (Hofstede 1980). In the latter culture, social esteem and social recognition is primarily based on individual achievements, whereas (non-)achievements of related others are rather unimportant. This is different in collectivistic cultures, where this distinction between the individual and his/her social group is not as pronounced and school success of an offspring is directly attributed to the competence, effort, resources of the responsible parent. Thus, educational success of the offspring in collectivistic cultures, such as the Vietnamese, directly pays to the social esteem of the parent, whereas this incentive typically does not exist for German parents, for whom parental investments are primarily based on family altruism (Becker 1991). If parents expect high social costs of investments in formal education, they have less incentive to encourage educational success. For example, Turkish parents  – despite high educational aspirations (Relikowski et al. 2012; Gresch et al. 2012; Salikutluk 2013)  – may have reservations about the German educational system because they fear becoming alienated from their children who may become educationally successful. This risk of alienation becomes more pronounced, the more cultural distance exists between the migrant minority and the educational system of the majority population.

The empirical analysis describes in a first step the frequency distribution of the mediating instrumentality expectations and the perceived social costs of investments into formal education. It also describes parenting styles in the respective ethnic groups. This step alone provides empirical evidence relevant for some of the initial hypotheses. In a second step, multivariate analyses reveal the dominant main effects of parenting styles and tests whether instrumentality expectations mediate parenting styles in the respective groups.

3 Data and instruments

3.1 Data

The following empirical analysis is based on data collected in the research project “Origin and Educational Success” (Herkunft und Bildungserfolg, abbreviated as “HeBe”). Data collection took place in the 12 month period ending in the autumn of 2013 and followed a 2 × 3 × 4 design: two receiving contexts with three different nationalities of origin of mothers with four age groups of children. In total, data from 1523 mother-child dyads were included in the analysis.

The samples were drawn in the two federal states of Saxony (in the three largest cities Chemnitz, Dresden, Leipzig) and Hamburg. The receiving contexts are thus characterized by different compositions of migrant populations. Vietnamese make up the largest migrant minority in Saxony with a share of 8.1 % of all foreigners (in Hamburg 0.7 %); Turks are the largest minority in Hamburg with a share of 20.7 % (in Saxony 4.0 %) ( Statistisches Bundesamt 2013, p. 87 ff.).

The nationality of origin of the mothers includes three nationalities, i.e. a sample of equal size of German, Vietnamese, and Turkish mothers. This selection of nationalities picks up on relevant characteristics for the analysis such as differences in the culture of origin, residential status, length of stay in the receiving country, and distribution of socio-structural characteristics such as the level of education, occupational status, and living arrangements. In comparison to Turks, Vietnamese in Germany were relative late-comers in the immigration process. Most Vietnamese are settled in East Germany as former contract workers of the German Democratic Republic. In contrast to the majority of other migrant minorities in Germany, Vietnamese are a visible minority and cannot escape from their minority status through simple behavioral change. In comparison, Turks in Germany immigrated in large waves as work migrants before the European Union ended labor force recruitment in 1973. Thus, there are more Turks with a long-term residential permit and a large proportion of mothers who were born as part of a “second generation” in Germany. Both ethnic groups are similar in their high socio-cultural distance to members of the receiving society. Moreover, both countries of origin lie outside the European Union, which diminishes the legal rights of members of both groups.

The age groups of the children mark four transitions in the German educational system: the transition to Kindergarten (at the time of data collection: the birth cohorts 2007–2008), the transition to elementary school (2005–2006), the transition to the lower level of secondary schooling (2000–2002), and the transition to the higher level of secondary schooling or entry into vocational training (1995–1998).

The overall sample was drawn in both federal states in the municipal statistical offices as a register sample of all three nationalities. The nationality of the mothers and the age of the child in the same household were the criteria for drawing the random sample from the register. This sampling strategy has implications for the marginal distribution of relevant variables and differs from a sampling based on migration background, as naturalized immigrants are not included among the Turkish and Vietnamese migrants, but may be included among the German mothers. However, naturalized Germans are extremely rare in the age group of the mothers (Gresch and Kristen 2011, p. 218). Because the main focus of the analysis are ethnic differences in parenting styles and to a lesser extent assimilation processes, a sampling strategy based on nationality is superior: it is closer related to ethnic identity, which may shift along the naturalization process.

The sample for analysis consists of 544 German dyads, 508 Vietnamese dyads, and 471 Turkish dyads. Turks in Hamburg and Vietnamese in Saxony were oversampled to create roughly equally-sized groups overall. Otherwise, due to the small size of the respective smaller minority, a near complete-population survey of these groups would have been necessary. For the analyses, marginal deviations from the sampling plan, which was based on equal distribution in the four age groups and the three ethnic groups, were levelled out using a weighing procedure.

Data in this analysis were collected with a standardized questionnaire in computer assisted personal interviews (CAPI) of mothers by bilingual interviewers. Mothers were allowed to choose whether the interview was conducted in German or in the language of the respective country of origin. The equivalence of the bilingual questionnaires was ensured by independent translations and back-translations.

3.2 Instruments

The analysis of instrumentality of schooling and parenting styles is based on the following set of indicators. Mother’s expectations about the benefits of schooling, i.e. its instrumentality for the future welfare of the child, are based on a score, derived from a set of 10 items. On the question “How strongly do you expect that…” it includes items such as “… the child will earn more money with a high school degree,” “… schooling is very important for the development of personality,” or “… a happy life of the child depends on good schooling”. Ratings range from (1) “very strongly” to (5) “not at all.” Items were personalized via pre-loading with the name of the respective target child. Negative items were reversed in their scaling. Reliability tests revealed a Cronbach’s Alpha of .70 for the total sample, .73 for the sub-sample of German mothers, .60 for the Turkish mothers, and .62 for the Vietnamese mothers.

Mother’s expectations about the costs of schooling are based on an additive score, derived from a set of 10 items. On the question “How much do you fear that…” it includes items such as “… the child will distance him or herself from the culture of the family because of school influences,” “… the school will separate the child from me,” or “…schoolmates will have a bad influence on the child.” Reliability tests revealed a Cronbach’s Alpha of .84 for the total sample, .83 for the sub-sample of German mothers, .85 for the Turkish mothers, and .85 for the Vietnamese mothers.

The parenting style of the mother was captured with a set of two constructs. In the tradition of research on parenting styles, the dimension of warmth/involvement was distinguished from strictness/control (Baumrind 1978, 1991; Maccoby and Martin, 1983; Dornbusch et al. 1987; Lamborn et al. 1991; Steinberg et al. 1994; Chan and Koo 2011). The warmth/involvement scale is based on a set of 6 items, including items such as “I show my child with words and gestures that I like him/her,” “I cheer up my child when he/she is sad,” or “I praise my child”. Reliability tests revealed a Cronbach’s Alpha of .72 for the total sample, and .73 for the sub-sample of German mothers, .62 for the Turkish mothers, and .72 for the Vietnamese mothers. The strictness/control scale is based on a set of 5 items, including “I criticize my child,” “If my child does something against my will, I punish him/her,” or “I yell at my child because he/she did something wrong.” Reliability tests revealed a Cronbach’s Alpha of .67 for the total sample, .66 for the sub-sample of German mothers, .62 for the Turkish mothers, and .69 for the Vietnamese mothers. The answer categories for all parenting style items ranged from (1) “never” to (5) “very frequently”; items were personalized via pre-loading with the name of the respective target child.

The scales were checked for cross-cultural equivalence. The ultimate aim was to compare in pairs the pooled solution with the respective country solutions. The computation of target rotation (van de Vijver and Leung 1997, pp. 88–99) was performed, which provides factor-specific agreement coefficients. The proportionality coefficient was used to assess structural equivalence. The results revealed that the structural equivalence of the measurement of both “warmth/involvement” and “strictness/control” across ethnic groups was high: The square root of mean squared difference per factor was .08 for German and Turkish mothers and .09 for Vietnamese with regard to “warmth/involvement”, and .07/.07/.08 with regard to “strictness/control”, respectively. The proportionality coefficient (Tucker’s phi) was .99 for both for “warmth/involvement” and for “strictness/control” of German and Turkish mothers, and both .98 of Vietnamese mothers. Similar results for measurement equivalence were obtained for the instrumentality and the social costs of formal education (Tucker’s phi for “schooling benefits”: .99 for all three groups; .97/.96/.91 for “schooling costs”).

The following variables were included in the analyses as predictors.

  • With regard to thefamily setting, the mothers were asked whether they were currently married or live in a partnership or not. At the time of the interview, 12 % of the German mothers, 11 % of the Turkish mothers, and 26 % of the Vietnamese mothers had no husband or partner.

  • With regard to migration status, the mothers were differentiated according to whether they were born in Germany (native mothers and “second generation” immigrants), migrated before completion of schooling (“1.5 generation”), or migrated afterwards as adults (“2nd generation”). No Vietnamese mother was born in Germany, 43 % came to Germany as adults. Eleven percent of the Turkish mothers were born in Germany, and 37 % came to Germany as adults. Immigrants were also present among the German mothers: 5 % came to Germany as children and 2 % as adults.

  • Pronounced differences were found with regard to the educational level of the mothers. Educational degrees from the country of origin and the receiving country were classified according to the international ISCED-classification (UNESCO 2006) into five categories. One percent of the German mothers, 2 % of the Vietnamese, and 9 % of the Turkish mothers achieved no educational degree. A university degree was achieved by 35 % of the German, 18 % of the Vietnamese, and 4 % of the Turkish mothers (Eta = .56). The overrepresentation of academic decrees as compared to the total population in Germany is presumably due to the fact that the register sample was drawn exclusively in cities with universities.

  • Language competence in German was assessed with a relatively differentiated self report (Klinger 2015). Six items ordered according to their level of difficulty were asked regarding the four language skills of “verbal comprehension,” “speaking,” “reading,” and “writing.” The items ranged from “understanding some words or parts of sentences” to “composing fluent, stylistically appropriate reports, essays, and sophisticated letters” and were thus also applicable to German mothers. Nevertheless, group differences were large (Eta = .73). German mother’s mean score was 21.6, Turkish mother’s mean score was 13.5, and Vietnamese mother’s mean score was 11.1.

  • The social status of the family was assessed according to the international ISEI-classification 2008 of occupational status (Ganzeboom and Treiman 1996, 2003). The highest occupational status of either the mother or the father was chosen. Germans achieved a mean score of 54.1, Vietnamese scored 26.5, and Turks scored 30.6 (Eta = .57).

  • Social capital was captured with a position generator (Lin and Dumin 1986; Lin et al. 2002; van der Gaag et al. 2008). Mothers were asked whether someone of their kin, friends, or acquaintances practice any of 14 listed occupations of varying prestige. A prestige score derived from the ISEI-classification 2008 (Ganzeboom and Treiman 1996, 2003) was assigned to the 14 positions. These scores were added for all contacts of the mother. Maximum social capital could be achieved by having contact to members of all occupational positions.

  • The structure of mother’s ego-centered networks was captured with a combined name and resource generator (van der Gaag und Snijders 2005; Hennig et al. 2012, p. 86 f.). With six questions about resources derived from social interaction (sharing ideas and emotions, engaging in leisure activities, seeking advice in practical and educational matters, and obtaining help with child rearing and school matters) up to 10 network members could be identified. Also the kinship relationship, emotional closeness, proximity, and ethnic membership of each network member was collected. Characteristics of 6068 members of mother’s ego-centered networks were obtained (Nauck and Lotter 2014). Information was aggregated for each respondent in terms of network closure (Coleman 1988) (measured as the percentage of kinship members within the network) and in terms of mean multiplexity in the generation of resources (measured as how many of the six resources were generated with the same person on average). The share of kinship members in the ego-centered network was 53 % for German mothers, 64 % for Turkish mothers, and 66 % for Vietnamese mothers. The mean multiplexity of activities with the network members was .20 for German mothers, .29 for Turkish mothers, and .39 for Vietnamese mothers.

4 Descriptive results

The following tables display first the bivariate relationships between ethnic membership and expectations about the instrumentality of formal education and the dimensions of parenting. These are then combined to the four types of parenting styles.

Table 1 Costs and benefits of formal education and parenting dimensions by ethnicity (ANOVA: means, standard deviations in brackets)
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The most pronounced differences existed regarding mother’s expectations about whether formal education is instrumental for the future production of welfare, i.e. the relationship between schooling and future job attainment, income, and social esteem. Mothers from both migrant minorities had significantly higher expectations in this regard than the mothers from the German majority population. This finding is consistent with previous findings of high educational aspirations of immigrants as reported for various groups and receiving societies. At the same time, the expected social costs of formal education were modestly higher for migrant mothers than for native mothers. This indicates that at least some of the migrant mothers had concerns about alienation in their relationship with the child because of school influences.

Pronounced differences were also found for the parenting dimensions. Vietnamese mothers showed a significantly higher level of strictness and control in their self-reported parenting behavior than the Turkish and the German mothers. At the same time, the level of warmth and emotional involvement of the Vietnamese mothers was lowest, with the German mothers reporting the highest level and the Turkish mothers in between.

Considering the model values, parenting differences were most pronounced between the German and the Vietnamese mothers. Parenting by German mothers is characterized by lower expectations about both positive and negative consequences of formal education, lower levels of strict control, and high levels of emotional involvement. The Vietnamese mothers instead reported high expected gains and costs of formal education in combination with marked intergenerational distance. The Turkish mothers located themselves somewhere in between. They shared with the Vietnamese mothers high expected benefits and costs of formal education, but shared the less strict and emotionally involved parenting style with the German mothers.

The two dimensions “strictness/control” and “warmth/involvement” were combined to the typology of parenting styles in the tradition of Maccoby and Martin (1983) and Lamborn et al. (1991), i.e. both dimensions were dichotomized at the median and combined to the four types “authoritative” (+ /+ ), “indulgent” (-/+ ), “authoritarian” (+ /-), and “neglectful” (-/-). Dichotomizing on the median is based on the responses within this specific sample. Thus, the categorization only represents the individual type relative to the responses of others in this sample. This means that different categorizations might have been generated had other ethnic groups, receiving contexts, fathers, age groups, etc. been included or had only one ethnic group been analyzed. Accordingly, the classifications should not be interpreted as characteristic of the groups generally (Table 2).

Table 2 Parenting style by ethnicity (in percent)
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According to this classification method, the parenting style of the Vietnamese mothers was predominantly authoritarian (54 %), followed by an authoritative style, whereas only few Vietnamese mothers were categorized as neglectful or indulgent. The high level of emotional involvement of the German mothers is reflected in a relatively high proportion of authoritative parenting (32 %), but even more so in indulgence (43 %). Indulgence among German mothers on the one hand and the authoritarian style among the Vietnamese on the other hand (always only relative to the other ethnic groups) thus characterizes the major difference in parenting styles. Again, the Turkish mothers were located in between and showed a less distinct profile, but they did report the largest share of the neglectful parenting style (30 %).

Comparisons of mothers with children in different age groups revealed significant changes in parenting styles across children’s ages in the respective ethnic groups, which allows some conclusions about culture-specific developmental time-tables (Table 3).

Table 3 Parenting styles by age of the child and ethnicity (in percent)
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The German mothers showed a significant decrease of authoritative parenting from preschoolers to children of upper-secondary school age from 45 to 16 %. The proportion of authoritarian and neglectful parenting increased with the age of the child, and the proportion of indulgent parenting remained at its high level. Thus, parenting styles with high emotional involvement (authoritative and indulgent) decreased from 90 to 48 %. This pattern signifies a self-perceived pronounced shift from intergenerational closeness with young children to intergenerational independence with adolescent children and clearly represents the socialization of individuation that is part of the individualistic culture.

The Turkish mothers showed only a modest decrease of authoritative parenting and a sharp increase of neglectful parenting with children in the oldest age group, whereas indulgent and authoritarian parenting styles remained almost on the same level in all age groups. This pattern signifies a parenting style with only marginal age-specific changes. The Vietnamese mothers remain even more stable in their parenting style with their modest decrease of authoritative parenting from 31 to 19 % and a modest increase of neglectful parenting from 13 to 22 %. Remarkable is the predominance of authoritarian parenting in all age groups, as it never drops below 50 % and even increases a bit in the two older age groups. The relatively high stability of the self-perceived parenting styles across the children’s age groups obviously signifies a different pattern of intergenerational relationships. It appears to be much less dynamic than in the German case, based on the stable role-set of the family and on the related mutual normative expectations characteristic of a collectivistic culture. However, the content of the collectivistic culture seems to differ between Turkey and Vietnam, with Turkish mothers emphasizing much more emotional involvement and the Vietnamese mothers emphasizing strictness and control (Table 4).

Table 4 Parenting styles by sex of the child and ethnicity (in percent)
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Gender-specific variations in parenting styles were found in the same low intensity among the mothers of all three ethnic groups and were statistically insignificant (Eta = .10 in all three groups). German mothers tended to control their boys a bit more than girls; indulgent parenting is a bit more frequently applied to girls. Turkish mothers showed no difference in their control of boys and girls, which runs counter to the popular perception that Turkish girls suffer from extreme parental control. However, a preference of Turkish mothers for sons is seen in that emotional involvement was a bit more common with sons but neglectful parenting was more frequent with girls. The Vietnamese mothers were specifically authoritarian with their sons, whereas girls were more often a target of a neglectful style; no gender-specific differences were reported with regard to emotional involvement. Thus, indications of a patrilineal kinship system with its boy preference are found in both migrant minorities, but this preference is obviously not very pronounced or at least not transformed into distinct parenting styles.

5 Multivariate results

The multivariate analysis was conducted in two steps. In the first step, bivariate correlations of relevant predictors were compared to results of multiple regressions (Table 5). These predictors include ethnic membership and migration status, family setting, individual cultural and social resources, expectations about formal education, age of child, and sex of child. In this step, the main effects of the respective predictors on the parenting dimensions and spurious correlations were identified. This step is important for the identification of socio-structural selection effects between the ethnic groups, as family settings and individual resources are unequally distributed among the mothers. In a second step, predictors with significant main effects were chosen for a multiple stepwise regression on the parenting styles (Table 6). In a stepwise procedure, ethnic membership, family setting and individual resources, expectations about formal education were consecutively introduced.

Table 5 Correlations and multivariate regressions of parenting dimensions
Full size table
Table 6 Multinomial stepwise regression of parenting styles (Exp (B) coefficients with “neglectful parenting” as reference and with standard errors in brackets)
Full size table

As seen in the descriptive statistics, Vietnamese mothers showed a higher level of strictness and control, but lower levels of warmth/involvement than the reference group of German mothers in the bivariate correlations. Turkish mothers showed less strictness than the German mothers but did not differ in their emotional warmth. The stark differences between the German and the Vietnamese mothers also showed up in the comparison between migrants and non-migrants.

Single-parent mothers perceived more control in their parenting than their married or partnered counterparts, but they did not differ with regard to involved parenting. Better-educated mothers were more consistent in their parenting and showed a higher level of emotional involvement and control than less-educated mothers. Language assimilation had a very strong impact on parenting. Mastering the German language, which characterizes both the majority of the native mothers and the highly assimilated group of immigrant mothers, was strongly associated with emotionally warm and involved parenting (r = .41), but also with reduced strictness (r = −.16). Almost the same effect showed up for access to social capital, i.e. the relationship to many individuals with varying occupational prestige, as it was also associated with emotional warmth in combination with less strict control. Mothers whose network primarily consisted of kinship members or who generated social resources from a small set of persons showed a more distant relationship to their children, were more controlling. Mothers with high expectations about the benefits of formal education or regarding high social costs of schooling were more distant and controlling with their children. Emotional warmth and strict control generally decreased with the age of the child. Mothers did not differentiate between boys and girls in their emotional warmth, but were less strict in their controlling of girls.

Results between bivariate correlations and multiple regressions differed substantially, as many bivariate correlations turned out to be spurious. Other results remained almost stable, such as the relationship between age and sex of the child and mother’s parenting.

Controlling for ethnic membership and individual resources reduced the effects of migration to insignificance, as it did with the effect of single parenthood. Controlling for the level of education of the mother reduced the effect of social status of the family significantly. The moderate effects of a kinship-centered network and of the degree of multiplexity in network relationships were inversely related to the dominant effect of the social capital of the mothers (Nauck and Lotter 2014), i.e. mothers with access to social capital tended to mobilize social resources among more individuals, including non-kinship members.

Differences in parenting between ethnic groups remained substantial after controlling for individual resources. Especially the parenting of the Vietnamese mothers was hardly affected by their distinction from German mothers in individual cultural and social resources, as the b-coefficients only marginally differed from the r-coefficients. Once resource-differences were taken into account, Turkish mothers were less warm in their parenting than German mothers, but they did not differ with regard to strictness. Education level, access to social capital, and especially the mastery of the language of the receiving society (even if education and social capital in the receiving society were controlled for) all had a strong effect on emotional closeness in the parent-child relationship but had no effect on parental control. Expectations about the costs and benefits of formal education had a significant effect on parenting, even if ethnicity and cultural and social resources were controlled for. Holding these factors constant, mothers who expected schooling to be beneficial for their child (or for the social esteem of the parents) tended to show greater emotional closeness with their child but did not differ with regard to controlling. The perceived costs of schooling, i.e. if the mothers expressed concerns that school may have a negative influence on the child or on their relationship, were associated with greater emotional distance and increased strictness in control. Obviously, these concerns result in higher efforts of situational control but are accompanied by feelings of reduced self-efficacy.

Based on the results from Table 5, models of parental styles were estimated in which ethnicity, cultural and social resources, and expectations about the costs and benefits of schooling were introduced successively (Table 6). The models were based on the full set of variables discussed, but display only results for significant and theoretically relevant effects, mentioning the respective control variables at the bottom of the table. Neglectful parenting was the reference in the multinomial stepwise regression models. Exponential (B) coefficients were used to estimate the changes for the respective predictors in relation to the reference category.

In the first model, only the parenting styles of Turkish and Vietnamese mothers were compared to those of the German mothers. The model showed again the much greater likelihood of an authoritarian parenting style among Vietnamese mothers and the decreased likelihood of an indulgent style. Turkish mothers were less authoritative or indulgent as compared to German mothers. Whereas the effects for the Vietnamese mothers remained almost stable when their cultural and social resources were also included in the second model, this was not the case for the Turkish mothers. Thus again, differences in parenting styles turned out to be a mere effect of their lower level of education, lower level of mastery of German, and lower access to social capital. All three factors showed no effect on the likelihood of authoritarian parenting but changed the likelihood of authoritative or indulgent parenting considerably. Higher levels of education increased the likelihood of authoritative parenting, whereas access to social capital was associated with indulgent parenting and mastery of the language of the receiving society had a positive effect on both  – always in relation to neglectful parenting and always controlling for ethnic membership. However, the amount of additional explained variance due to the addition of individual cultural and social resources to ethnic membership was rather small. The third model, in which mother’s expectations regarding formal education were also included, revealed finally that these expectations had an additional significant effect on parenting styles, as the coefficients for ethnic membership and individual resources did not change much. High expectations of benefits from formal education on the child’s welfare were strongly associated with emotional involvement and parental control, i.e. authoritative parenting, but also increased the likelihood of indulgent parenting. High expectations of costs of formal education, however, were strongly associated with authoritarian parenting and with the absence of indulgence. Separate analyses of the last model for all three ethnic groups (not shown) revealed some variations within the respective groups, but no differences in the direction of effects. This confirms the basic model of the relationship between ethnicity, individual cultural and social resources, educational expectations, and parenting style.

Main result of the multiple stepwise regression analysis was that the mediating effect of the family resources and of the costs and benefits expectations of schooling on parenting styles was small. In the case of Turkish mothers, the availability of resources reduced the difference to German mothers to insignificance (p = .291), with small additional effects of differences in expectations (p = .153). In the case of the Vietnamese mothers, differences in parenting styles remain significant (p = .000) in all three regression models, which indicates that their parenting style can not be “explained” by differences in family resources or expectations about the instrumentality of schooling. Instead, controlling for these factors even slightly increases their difference in parenting styles.

6 Summary and discussion

Due to the design of the study, the results presented have several limitations. (1) They cover the self-perceived parenting styles of mothers but not of fathers. Because parents may divide the labor of parenting in different ways within different cultures (especially patrilineal versus bilineal kinship cultures), a full understanding of the complexity of parenting in practice will require more than just understanding mothers’ roles alone. (2) Results are drawn from cross-sectional data. Although equal proportions of mothers with children from different age groups were included, age-specific differences in parenting can be interpreted only cautiously as age-dependent changes in parenting across the biography of individual children. Moreover, mothers in the sample may have had children in multiple age ranges and may have generalized their answers to all their children. (3) The analyses are based on information self-reported by the mothers. Although the results are widely consistent with other assessments based on children’s reports, information on parenting styles is of best quality when complemented by measurements from multiple perspectives and by studies that focus on how control, supervision, and parental emotional involvement is transformed into everyday behaviors as perceived both by parents and children. (4) Due to their application in a cross-cultural environment, some of measures were limited in their internal consistency and need further improvement in future research in this domain. However, measurement equivalence checks did not reveal any systematic measurement bias.

Within these limitations, the present study’s findings cast light on theoretically derived explanations of variation in parenting styles expressed as hypotheses about the effects of family settings, social status, ethno-cultural differences, and migrant minority membership, and about the effects of perceived instrumentality of formal schooling and its possible social costs.

As expected, family settings were associated with variations in parenting styles. Single mothers were more likely to be authoritarian (38 %) than mothers in dual-parent families (27 %), whereas the latter were more likely to be indulgent (26–22 %) or neglectful (21–15 %), with no difference in authoritative parenting. The multivariate analysis (Table 5), however, revealed that the bivariate relationship between single parenthood and increased self-perceived strictness and control disappeared after controlling for ethnicity, migration status, and individual resources. Accordingly, the net effect of family settings (which were significantly unequally distributed among the three ethnic groups) on parenting styles was negligible and did not explain inter-ethnic differences or differences according to migration status.

Social status was also correlated with variations in parenting styles. Mothers with extended education, with mastery of the language of the receiving society, with access to social capital, and from families with higher social status were more likely to show high levels of emotional involvement in their parenting. The education level of the mother was positively associated with strict parenting; but social status, German language competence, and social capital were significantly negatively associated. A cross-tabulation of families with high vs. low social status revealed that mothers from lower-status families have a significantly higher prevalence of an authoritarian parenting style (37 %) than mothers from higher-status families (20 %), whereas these were more likely to be indulgent (35 %) than mothers from the lower status families (16 %). Social status had no effect on the likelihood of authoritative or neglectful parenting styles. Because emotional involvement increased and direct parental control decreased with social status (Table 5), the study’s results are consistent with and confirmed explanations of class-specific socialization styles (Kohn 1977). More importantly, these effects remained significant even after controlling for ethnic background and mother’s migration status, albeit with a reduced effect size. Resource-rich mothers with regard to education, German language competence, and social capital are in all ethnic groups less likely to practice a neglectful parenting style and are especially more likely to be either authoritative or indulgent. These associations underscore the strong association between personal resources and reduced (emotional) intergenerational distance.

It was assumed that German, Turkish, and Vietnamese mothers derive their subjective child-rearing theories from their respective cultures of origin, which differ significantly on the individualism-collectivism dimension (Hofstede 1980; Kagitcibasi 2005, 2007). The empirical results indeed revealed stark differences in parenting styles among the three ethnic groups. Moreover, these differences were consistent with the pattern of a strong emphasis in individualistic cultures on the parental facilitation of each child’s individual development versus the active control and intervention common to collectivistic cultures. The Vietnamese mothers were predominantly authoritarian and the German mothers were primarily either indulgent or authoritative. Turkish mothers were located between both poles, which again is consistent with the location of the respective national cultures on the individualism-collectivism dimension (Hofstede 1980). A major finding of the multivariate analyses in Tables 5 and 6 was that the difference between the respective culture of origin of the Vietnamese and German mothers on their self-perceived parenting styles remained stable even after controlling for individual resources, whereas the difference between the Turkish and German mothers became insignificant and is thus explained by differences in the respective access to cultural and social resources.

Being a migrant minority may also have an important effect on parenting styles, as members of the majority population have greater institutional means of intergenerational transmission of culture and social status. As immigrant families strive to compensate for this deficit, higher levels of parental control may result. In the sample, migrant mothers indeed had a significantly higher likelihood of practicing an authoritarian parenting style (38 %) than native mothers (10 %), and they had also a higher likelihood of practicing a neglectful style (23 vs. 15 %). Native mothers were more likely to be indulgent (43 %) than migrant mothers (17 %) and also more likely to be authoritative (32 vs. 23 %). These results point to the importance of parental supervision and control in migrant situations. However, the direct effect of the migrant situation turned out to be rather marginal in comparison to the effects of ethnic culture and individual resources. In multivariate analyses (Table 5), the effects of belonging to a first-generation or “1.5”-generation migrant generation became insignificant for all three dimensions of parenting, and the assimilation effect of mastering the German language became insignificant for controlling behavior and inconsistent parenting. Also, the strong bivariate association with emotional involvement was reduced drastically in effect size (from 0.41 to 0.25). Thus, acculturation had the clear effect of increasing emotional closeness between generations.

Expectations about the instrumentality of formal education for the production of social welfare of children and parents by increasing the child’s income potential and the social esteem of both parents and children are strongly associated with parenting styles. Mothers from both immigrant minorities had equally high expectations about the benefits of schooling, but also equally high concerns about its social costs, i.e. fears of alienation from their child (Table 1). Cost expectations were highly predictive of parenting styles even after controlling for ethnic membership and individual resources. They were significantly associated with decreased emotional involvement, increased control (Table 5). High expectations of schooling benefits were by far the strongest predictor for authoritative parenting and for an indulgent parenting style (as opposed to neglectful parenting). High cost expectations were by far the strongest predictor of an authoritarian parenting style (Table 6). These findings suggest that cultural differences separating the three ethnicities translated into differences in parenting styles not directly but rather primarily indirectly via the respective perceived importance of formal education. Cultural differences did not translate into different perceptions of child development or gender differences. In all three ethnic groups, parenting styles differed only marginally between boys and girls, with a tendency that neglectful parenting toward daughters was more prevalent among Turkish and Vietnamese mothers, who were thus more emotionally involved and controlling with their sons. Finally, all three ethnic group’s parenting styles were significantly less authoritative toward children in the older age groups and were instead more neglectful.

These results confirm in many ways findings on ethnic differences in parenting styles, showing a prevalence of authoritarian parenting in families of East Asian origin and a prevalence of authoritative parenting in European American families, which had then become a starting point for reasoning about ethnic differences in educational success (Dornbusch et al. 1987; Steinberg et al. 1994; Chao 2000; Kao 2004; Pong et al. 2005, 2010; Hsin and Xie 2014). Similarities in the findings on Vietnamese families in America and Germany suggest that their parenting styles are hardly influenced by situational conditions in the respective receiving societies.

The “remaining” or unexplained cultural differences between German and Vietnamese mothers in Germany  – after controlling for differences in the distribution of individual resources  – could be consistently interpreted from the framework individualistic vs. collectivistic values and the resulting self-concepts of the parenting role combined with perceptions of the role of formal education for the production of welfare. These conclusions also provide a backdrop for the results on the parenting style of the Turkish mothers in Germany. Although they had come from a collectivistic culture of origin, their parenting style resembled more the style of the German mothers than that of the Vietnamese mothers, as long as differences in education, German language competency, social capital, and social status were taken into account. In fact, Turkish mother’s parenting styles depended much more on these socio-structural factors than did the styles either of German or Vietnamese mothers. This suggests that the Turkish mothers in the sample had been much more influenced in their behavior by acculturation processes than Vietnamese mothers, who at the time of sampling “still” firmly adhered to their culture of origin. Whether this is a result of the different durations of exposure to the receiving society or whether it will prove to be a stable difference is an interesting question for future research.

These results again raise questions about the adequacy of the parenting styles concept coming out of the tradition of Baumrind (1971) and Maccoby and Martin (1983). Critics have questioned the applicability of the typology to collective cultures (Chao 2000, 2001; Sorkhabi 2005), and based on the present findings, this concern may well be extended to the conceptualization in general and especially to the adequacy of the wording of parenting types. The label “authoritarian” is quite negatively value-laden in the contrast to “authoritative,” and the labels “indulgent” and “neglectful” are value-laden in and of themselves. These labels suggest that “authoritative” parenting is the most positive parenting style because of its beneficial effects on children in some social contexts. This makes the other three labels appear suboptimal or even harmful. This labeling may have been motivated by the evidence-based promotion of a parenting style that is emotionally warm and committed and also sets clear standards for the child. In cross-cultural comparisons, however, the labels lack analytical precision and may thus be subtly misleading. This has been pointed out already for “authoritarian” parenting, which typically is meant to indicate behaviors in Asian societies like direct parental tutoring, supervision, and control based on intergenerational authority. The present study suggests that the criticism should be taken one step further. “Indulgent” and “neglectful” parenting styles may well represent indirect modes of control that involve providing an adequate and stimulating environment to the child in the sense of a “facilitative” model of parenting or of “concerted cultivation” (Lareau 2003; Cheadle 2008). Thus, neither type necessarily indicates less interest in the development of the child.