Humans, unlike any other species, have adapted to diverse environments across the globe due to cultural knowledge, skills, and practices. In early childhood, parent–child interactions play a pivotal role in cultural learning, but controversies about what constitutes teaching have stymied the systematic assessment of variation and similarities in parental teaching across cultures. We used a functional definition of teaching as behavior that evolved to facilitate learning in others and observed parents and their two-year-old child (N = 106) in a standardized setting (mealtime) in five diverse cultural contexts (rural: Brazil, Ecuador; urban: Argentina, Germany, Japan). Detailed coding of parental teaching (8520 teaching events in 1898 min of interactions) revealed that six teaching behaviors (prompts to do, prompts to stop, abstract communication of knowledge, demonstrations, providing choices, negative feedback) occurred frequently (> 5%) across contexts. At the same time, we found that the relative frequencies of these behaviors varied between contexts: Parents in rural contexts frequently used prompts towards their children. Parents in urban contexts often used abstract communication, demonstrations, and the provision of choices. We also identified nuanced differences between the urban samples regarding parental demonstrations (Japan) and the provision of choices (Germany). Our findings suggest that parents from all contexts mainly relied on a set of five teaching behaviors, but that there was cross-cultural variation in how frequently behaviors occurred. Our study provides a cultural map of children's early learning experiences which lay the ontogenetic foundation for human cultural diversity.