© Kamla-Raj 2004 Anthropologist, 6(3): 201-208 (2004) Parental Concepts About Preschool Education Neeru Sharma, Sumati Vaid and Rishta Dhawan INTRODUCTION Parents play an important role in the early childhood education and development. This fact is becoming increasingly popular (Lau and Leung, 1992). Parents transmit cultural values and expectations to their offsprings and create for them an environment of competence. The child internalizes his parental expectations and tries to make the parents happy by conforming to them. This forms the ‘developmental niche’ (Harkness and Super, 1991), which has been conceptualized in terms of three components i) the physical and social settings in which the child lives, ii) culturally regulated customs of child care and child rearing, iii) psychology of the caretakers. The Child’s developmental environ- ment is shaped by ‘parental ethno theories’, because the parents, while taking decisions about their children’s socialization, use these. Harkness and Super (1991) view ‘parental ethno theories’ as expressed in the ways that parents assign their children to different kinds of physical and social settings. They also posit that many customs of child rearing function as instantiations of parental ethno theories and thus are of special importance in translating parental thinking into action that has developmental consequences. Parental socialization practices are shaped according to their culture. The cultural expec- tations are activated through these customs of childcare and development, which are further built into the parental schema. Parental beliefs are outcome of a large number of factors in- cluding culture, socio-economic status, parents’ own socialization, residence (rural/urban) etc. (Sharma, 1999). Models of socialization stress the adoption and internalization of parental goals as a critical step in promoting developmentally appropriate and socially valued outcomes. Work in this area provides consistent and convincing evidence that parents aspirations for success influences the Child’s academic achievement (Wentzel, 1998). Similar observations were made by Bradley and Caldwell (1986). They found that early environment and academic performance were moderately related. Children who have parents that are more responsive and nurturing early in life are likely to behave in a more consi- derate manner in school and perhaps show a greater degree of overall adjustment. Owing to the societal and cultural pressures to achieve high parents may become ‘pushy’ too. Parents who use formal academic instruction, choose learning activities for their children, believe in early timetables for children’s acquisition of skills, and use drill and practice have been defined as displaying ‘hot housing’, parental behaviors (Hyson et al., 1991). Such ‘Hot Housing’ may lead to academic burnout at a later stage in educational ladder, but Asian children have been found to score high academically even though Asian parents have been found to be more ‘ controlling’, and ‘authoritarian’. Chao (1994) argues that these concepts are embedded in a cultural ‘tradition’ that European Americans do not necessarily share. She further says that these concepts may have very different implications when considered in light of the culture, and may not be useful for understanding Asian parenting. Hence parenting should be understood in the cultural context. What transpires at home shapes the child’s capacities and this reciprocal relationship shapes parenting and parental beliefs. Going back to Harkness and Super’s postu- lation about parental ethno theories and the ‘development niche’ one must try to understand what parents in different cultures expect from their child and how they shape the learning environment. The developmental results of differing parental ethno theories and their expression in the organization of settings of daily life and customs and child rearing in Kokwet and Cambridge is that children’s competence in culturally marked areas is accelerated, while development in other domains lags, if indeed it is even recognized (Harkness and Super, 1991). While children in Kokwet learn daily life skills, Cambridge children may be highly precocious verbally, in cases speaking full sentences by the age of two. (Harkness and Super, 1991) Thus parental ethno theories are activated into customs of childrearing. The present paper focuses on parental beliefs about early childhood education among the Dogras of Jammu region