This second edition of Helaine Selin’s successful Parenting Across Cultures comes at a time where interest in parenting has increased across the world as a result of the COVID pandemic, as parents and children were put into different and often challenging conditions. This new edition, like the first, contains chapters from countries in Asia, Africa, and South America as well as from indigenous cultures of several Western countries. The chapters were revised to include new research in the post-pandemic world. They show that there is a strong connection between culture and parenting: there are differences in affection and distance, harshness and repression, and acceptance and criticism. Some parents insist on obedience; others are concerned with individual development.  This clearly differs from parent to parent, but there is just as clearly a connection to culture, which these chapters explore. In addition to the chapters on individual countries, the second edition includes a section on the pandemic, as well as new research on parenting and technology, gender, religion, adoption, step parenting, divorce, single parents, racism, gay parents, disabilities, autism, eating habits, transgender, attachment, migration, bullying, and refugee resettlement.

Helaine Selin was a Faculty Associate and Science Librarian at Hampshire College, Amherst, Massachusetts, USA, from which she retired in 2012. She is the editor of the Encyclopaedia of the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine in Non-Western Cultures (3rd ed. Springer 2016) and eight books in Springer's Science Across Cultures series, on Astronomy, Mathematics, Medicine, Nature, Childbirth, Parenting, Happiness, Death and Aging.