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The amount of community violence that children and adolescents are exposed to is unsettling. Intensifying the issue, the amount of community violence that is wit-nessed or experienced directly by children and adolescents is increasing with time. It has been documented that children and adolescents who are exposed to community violence display a wide array of psychological symptoms, ranging from depression and anxiety to antisocial and suicidal behaviors. Many variables have been studied in an attempt to determine correlates, moderators, and mediators of exposure to community violence. Furthermore, many intervention strategies have been developed from the discovery of relationships among these variables. Despite these efforts, many children continue to suffer from the negative effects of exposure to community violence. The purpose of this article is to encourage mental health professionals to mobilize their efforts to help children, adolescents, and their families cope with the effects of community violence.

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Families with an adolescent between the ages of 11 and 18 years participated in a study examining the relationship between parental depressive and anxiety symptomatology and parental ratings of adolescents’ functioning. This study indicated that mothers, fathers, and adolescents exhibited significant cross‐informant correspondence (i.e. correlations) and very few significant differences in ratings of adolescents’ functioning. After controlling for demographic variables and the ratings of other informants, mothers’ depressive symptomatology was a significant predictor of mothers’ ratings of adolescents’ internalizing and externalizing behavior problems and competence. With regard to fathers’ ratings, fathers’ depressive symptomatology was a significant predictor of adolescents’ internalizing behavior problems and competence, whereas fathers’ depressive and anxious symptomatology was a significant predictor of adolescents’ externalizing behavior problems. The findings of this study suggested the importance of considering maternal and paternal depressive symptomatology when parents are asked to provide ratings of their adolescents’ functioning.

College students and a subsample of their mothers and fathers participated in a study examining their retrospective reports of childhood emotional and behavioral problems experienced by college students. College students and their mothers and fathers exhibited moderate correspondence in their recollection of internalizing and externalizing problems that college students experienced during their childhood. In contrast, college students tended to endorse significantly greater levels of both internalizing and externalizing problems relative to their mothers and fathers. Current psychological symptoms predicted the greater endorsement of childhood internalizing and externalizing problems by college students and the greater endorsement of college students' childhood internalizing problems by their mothers. Further, college students' current perceptions of their parents predicted their endorsement of childhood internalizing problems, and college students' current masculinity and femininity predicted their endorsement of childhood externalizing problems. Results of this study emphasized the importance of noting factors that may be related to retrospective reports.