The two central purposes of this volume are to review the historical, conceptual, and empirical literatures on parental psychological control and to advance the rapidly growing scientific literature on this aspect of the parent-child relationship. Chapter 2 addressed the first task with a review of published material that has specifically investigated psychological control or variables that are conceptually similar to it. From this review of the historical conceptualizations of parental psychological control, we concluded that psychological control is a psychologically oriented, intrusive, constraining, and manipulating form of parental control in which parents appear to maintain their own psychological status at the expense and violation of the child's self. From the review of the empirical literatures, we further concluded that parental psychological control has been consistently linked to difficulties in child functioning, such as self-processes, internalized and externalized problems, and school performance, with emerging evidence that these associations occur in a variety of national, cultural, and ethnic samples.In chapter 2, we noted that two of the limitations of the growing literature on parental psychological control are (a) that most of the work has investigated adolescents, and not younger children; and (b) that most of the research has been conducted using self-reports of parental psychological control. These two limitations were targeted in chapters 3 to 8 of this volume. Two of these chapters were devoted to expanding the work on adolescents beyond merely documenting the now common finding of a significant association between parental psychological control and difficulties in adolescents. In chapter 3 , Stone et al. did this by setting psychological control in the broader family context, finding that it was significantly predicted by measures of interparental conflict and that it was one path through 263