Parenting Science and Practice

Abstract

Each day more than three-quarters of a million adults around the world experience the rewards and challenges as well as the joys and heartaches of becoming parents. Of course, everyone who has lived has had parents; the human race succeeds because of parenting. Parenting is a subject about which people hold strong opinions, but about which too little solid information or considered reflection exists. Parenting: Science and Practice redresses this imbalance.Parenting is, perhaps first and foremost, a functional status in the life cycle: Parents issue as well as protect, care for, and represent their progeny; indeed, parenthood is the "final common pathway" to childhood oversight and caregiving. Parenthood is therefore a job whose primary object of attention and action is the child. But parenting also has consequences for parents themselves. Parenting: Science and Practice encompasses the broad themes of who are parents, whom parents parent, the scope of parenting and its many effects, the determinants of parenting, and the nature, structure, and meaning of parenthood for parents.

Parent–Child Relationships and Influences

“…Bidirectionality has received increasing attention in the conceptualization of parent -child relationships (Bornstein, 2006 ;Kuczynski, 2003aKuczynski, , 2003bLaible & Thompson, 2007 ;Maccoby, 2007 ;Pardini, Fite, & Burke, 2008 ;Patterson & Fisher, 2002 ;Pettit & Arsiwalla, 2008 ). Kuczynski ' s (2003aKuczynski ' s ( , 2003b) emphasis on bidirectionality draws on and extends a common theme in the relationship literature (e.g., the social relations model) that in dyadic interactions or relationships, each affects the other.…”

“…Research has focused especially on the uniqueness of and differences between mother -child versus father -child relationships in both content and outcomes for children (Bornstein, 2006 ;Parke, 2002 ). Differences in parent relationships with boys and girls have been examined (Bornstein, Putnick, et al, 2008 ;Leaper, 2002 ;Maccoby, 1998 ).…”

“…When research efforts move to the effects of parent -child relationships on child outcomes, there is a new set of methodological challenges, with the need to take account of bidirectional infl uence processes as well as contemporaneous and overtime infl uences in both directions in a transactional and circular causal process (Bornstein, 2006 ;Collins et al, 2000 ;Cook, 2003 ;Kuczynski, 2003a ;Laible & Thompson, 2007 ;O ' Connor, 2002 ;Patterson & Fisher, 2002 ;Pettit & Arsiwalla, 2008 ). There are also conceptual and methodological diffi culties associated with the separation of correlation and causality (Cook, 2003 ;Cowan & Cowan, 2002 ;Howe, Reiss, & Yuh, 2002 ) as well as the specifi cation and separation of the contributions of different environmental effects, including separating the contributions of parent -child relationships from other environmental effects (Bradley, 2002 ).…”

“…Overlapping the problem of genetic and environmental infl uences is that of direction of effect and the role of parent and child in presumed infl uence processes that are transactional and bidirectional (Bornstein, 2006 ;Bugental & Grusec, 2006 ;Grusec & Davidov, 2007 ;Kuczynski, 2003aKuczynski, , 2003bMaccoby, 2000Maccoby, , 2007Pettit & Arsiwalla, 2008 ). When child effects are considered, possibilities include genetic variations in children ' s responses and reactivity to the environment as refl ected in their temperament (Sanson et al, 2004 ), variations in children ' s responsiveness to socialization (Bugental & Grusec, 2006 ), and the possibility that children may elicit different responses and behaviors from parents Patterson & Fisher, 2002 ).…”

Sozialisationstheorien

“…Das ist erst ein sehr grobes Raster, und es gibt kaum Daten, anhand deren sich eine derartige Verknüpfung überprüfen lässt (Vaskovics, 1997 (Bornstein, 1995). Als nächstes Teilsystem ist die Familienorientierung als kognitive Repräsentation von Erziehungszielen zu untersuchen.…”