CULTURE OF OBEDIENCE

Obedience is a form of social influence in which person acts in response to a direct order. The person usually giving the order is usually an authority figure. As i discussed in my previous blog, my mother practice authoritative parenting and an important aspect to that style of parenting is control. Control comes in various form but in this case the form of control my mother instilled was to be obedient or face the consequences otherwise. I choose to focus on obedience due to the cultural implications it presents. A study done by Blake et al 2015 provided statistical evidence that obedience is culturally distinctive to an extent. The study basically found that parents in the United States taught their kids to be more independent than that of the Indian children thus the Indian children were more obedient to their mothers.  Cultural differences are a factor and transferable to many cultures including my Nigerian one. Growing up my mother was very strict, even up until my late teen years i couldn't be out late. My mother based her parenting on how obedient we were, if she told us to do something it had to be done right away. i modeled majority of my behaviors in retrospect to my mother, she taught all my morals and how to live by them, she taught be respect and many more. I am about to generalize here so please excuse me but within African American families there is an extremely high value is placed on respecting, obeying, and learning from elders or authority figures. Don't get me wrong many other ethnicities hold the same values highly but i based my statement on the people i was raised around and the obvious differences in the parenting styles which do have implication on the child's development.