As part of a longitudinal study of family coping with pediatric leukemia, 28 former patients (16 male; 12 female; M age = 19.1 years) and their parents (23 mothers; 12 fathers) participated in a follow-up study at 10 years posttreatment. Measures included the Current Adjustment Rating Scale, the Brief Symptom Inventory, the Ways of Coping Scale, the Family Coping Scale, and a semistructured interview. Long-term survivors and their parents continued to be well-adjusted to life posttreatment. Coping and perceived adjustment in long-term survivors were positively related to socioeconomic status and mother's coping and negatively related to academic problems. A strong bidirectional relationship was found between survivors' and mother's adjustment. Coping strategies were variable and not significantly correlated with coping adequacy or adjustment.

Six psychiatry inpatients were observed during mealtimes to determine and evaluate staff intervention techniques. To extend and further elaborate the findings of a previous work (Pines, Kupst, Natta, & Schulman, 1985), staff behaviors (positive, punitive, isolating, and neutral) were investigated for their potential relationship to subsequent child behaviors (positive, negative, and inactive) via a lag sequential analytic approach. Staff punitive and isolating behaviors tended to be associated with significant increases in the likelihood of subsequent child negative behaviors and with significant decreases in child positive behaviors. Staff positive behaviors tended not to be related to a subsequent increase or decrease in any of the coded child behaviors. Findings demonstrate the utility of assessing conditional probabilities of sequences of staff-child behaviors in psychiatric inpatients.

A set of videotaped public service announcements was developed to illustrate ways in which parents affect a child's self‐esteem. Each vignette showed two ways of dealing with a problem, a punitive method and a self‐esteem‐enhancing method. Study 1 included 20 parents and 20 school‐age (6–10 years of age) children who were seen at a pediatric visit. Most parents perceived the messages correctly. By contrast, children saw the message in terms of the specific issue (50%) or communication (40%); few (10%) understood its self‐esteem link. In Study 2, 53 seventh‐graders perceived the messages correctly. It is interesting to note that they viewed the positive version as more desirable and the negative version as more likely to accomplish the desired behavior change.