This compelling volume advances the understanding of what parenting and related sociodemographic, demographic, and environmental variables look like and how they are associated with child development in low- and middle-income countries around the world.

Specifically, expert authors document how child growth, caregiving practices, discipline and violence, and children’s physical home environments, along with child and primary caregiver sociodemographic characteristics and household and national development demographic characteristics, are associated with central domains of early childhood development across a substantial fraction of the majority world using contemporary 21st-century data from the UNICEF Multiple Indicator Cluster Surveys and the UNICEF Early Childhood Development Index. The lives of nearly 160,000 girls and boys aged 3 to 5 years in nationally representative samples from 51 low- and middle-income countries are sampled to address 7 principal questions about children, caregiving, and contexts. Parenting and Child Development in Low- and Middle-Income Countries takes an authentically international approach to parenting, the environment, and child development in cultural contexts that more fully characterize the world’s diversity.

Parenting and Child Development in Low- and Middle-Income Countries is essential reading for researchers and students of parenting, psychology, human development, family studies, sociology, and cultural studies, as well as governmental and non-governmental professionals working with families in low- and middle-income countries.