Parental Attitudes and Children’s Language Development: A Cross-Cultural Evaluation of the Early Parenting Attitudes Questionnaire

The Early Parenting Attitudes Questionnaire (EPAQ; Hembacher & Frank, 2020) was developed in the U.S. to assess parents’ beliefs, knowledge, ideas, and attitudes about parenting. Given the diversity of parenting practices among cultures, it is essential to establish the cross-cultural validity of the instruments used to measure them. For this reason, this study aims at (1) assessing the psychometric properties of the EPAQ in Norway, Russia, and the U.K. and (2) investigating whether the underlying structure aligns with the original one observed in the U.S. Moreover, we aimed at (3) exploring the potential relationship between parental attitudes and children’s language development using MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories (CDI; Fenson et al. 2007). Our sample consisted of 3333 parents of children between 0 and 156 months from Norway (n = 1060), the U.K. (n = 656), and Russia (n = 1617). Analyses revealed a different factor solution in the countries of our sample, as compared to the original three-factor solution found in the original American sample. Especially in Russia, the structure of parental attitudes as measured by the EPAQ differs both from the original factor solution and from the factor solution identified in Norway and the U.K. Therefore, at least in the Russian context, different culture-sensitive scales need to be developed and, generally, new items for the EPAQ should be developed for further refinement. Moreover, our analyses highlighted a significant negative association between the factor Communicative and Emotional Detachment and vocabulary scores as a function of the child’s age in Russia. © 2025 University of California Press. All rights reserved.