The present report accomplishes three goals. First, to provide an empirical rationale for placing parental monitoring of children's adaptations as a key construct in development and prevention research. Second, to stimulate more research on parental monitoring and provide an integrative framework for various research traditions as well as developmental periods of interest. Third, to discuss current methodological issues that are developmentally and culturally sensitive and based on sound measurement. Possible intervention and prevention strategies that specifically target parental monitoring are discussed.

Parental monitoring and the prevention of child and adolescent problem behavior: a conceptual and empirical formulation.

Examining the association between parenting and childhood anxiety: a meta-analysis.

This article presents a 3-component model of parenting that places emotion at the heart of parental competence. The model emphasizes (a) child, parent, and contextual factors that activate parents' emotions; (b) orienting, organizing, and motivating effects that emotions have on parenting once aroused; and (c) processes parents use to understand and control emotions. Emotions are vital to effective parenting. When invested in the interest of children, emotions organize sensitive, responsive parenting. Emotions undermine parenting, however, when they are too weak, too strong, or poorly matched to child rearing tasks. In harmonious relationships emotions are, on average, positive because parents manage interactions so that children's and parents' concerns are promoted. In distressed relationships chronic negative emotion is both a cause and a consequence of interactions that undermine parents' concerns and children's development.

The affective organization of parenting: Adaptive and maladaptative processes.

A meta-analysis of 47 studies was used to shed light on inconsistencies in the concurrent association between parental caregiving and child externalizing behavior. Parent-child associations were strongest when the measure of caregiving relied on observations or interviews, as opposed to questionnaires, and when the measure tapped combinations of parent behaviors (patterns), as opposed to single behaviors. Stronger parent-child associations were also found for older than for younger children, and for mothers than for fathers. Finally, externalizing was more strongly linked to parental caregiving for boys than for girls, especially among preadolescents and their mothers. The meta-analysis helps account for inconsistencies in findings across previous studies and supports theories emphasizing reciprocity of parent and child behavior.

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Parental caregiving and child externalizing behavior in nonclinical samples: A meta-analysis.

Socioeconomic status (SES) is a pervasive predictor of child development; parenting is a large part of the reason why. This chapter deals with a historical introduction to research on SES and parenting, followed by a discussion of definitions of SES and approaches to its measurement. It summarizes the literature on differences in parenting cognitions and parenting practices associated with SES. The chapter traces pathways of influence from SES to parenting and identifies the separable effects of its constituents, income, education, and occupation. It discusses remaining questions and future research directions in the study of SES and parenting. Parenting practices are the behaviors parents produce in interactions with their children, the home environments parents create for children, and the connections to the world outside the home that parents both enable and permit. Parents from different socioeconomic levels expect different developmental timetables.

Socioeconomic Status and Parenting

Describes historical use of surveys to assess parents' global child-rearing attitudes and reviews the structure and content of the 83 parent attitude questionnaires published from 1899 through 1986 designed to quantify variations in parental attitudes and, presumably, parental behavior. Inspection of the surveys' psychometric properties reveals marginally acceptable levels of reliability and questionable validity. One suspected source of problems with the instruments, the use of vague and ambiguous items, was confirmed in a study of mothers' reactions to one survey. In addition to instrument errors, conceptual problems associated with assumptions about the structure of parental attitudes and how attitudes relate to parental behavior are discussed. Alternative methods for assessing parental social cognitions and individual differences in parents are advocated. One of the oldest and most important questions in psychology concerns the role the environment plays in the development of an individual. At least in the opening scenes of ontogeny, parents are generally recognized to be the protagonists and the family to be the "primary arena" for socialization (Maccoby, 1984). Parents have frequently been implicated as principal causal agents in their children's behavioral, emotional, personality, and cognitive development. This influence is achieved through a variety of active and passive, reactive and nonreactive processes (Baumrind, 1980; Radke-Yarrow & Zahn-Waxler, 1986; Scarr

Lee A. Edwards

Papers

Parental attitudes toward child rearing: Instruments, issues, and implications.