Children's self‐esteem, anxiety, interpersonal competence and hostility were assessed from 2699 high school children, their teachers and their parents in eight communities— Canberra, Brisbane, Winnipeg, Phoenix, Berlin, Hong Kong, Taipei and Osaka. Also, family harmony, parental nurturance, protectiveness and punitiveness were assessed from the children and their parents. The hypotheses that children's self‐esteem and low anxiety are associated with familial harmony and parental nurturance, poor interpersonal competence with parental protectiveness, and children's hostility with parental punitiveness were generally confirmed in all samples when the same person (child or parent) reported both independent and dependent variables. Cross‐source correlations were substantially lower, however (though often significant when averaged over cultures), suggesting that there was considerable contamination of perspective in the same‐source correlations. Children's views of the family appeared to be the more valid, on the basis of correlations with their personality characteristics, independently assessed. There was general uniformity over cultures in magnitudes of the correlations, whether based on the same or different sources of