The role of parents in the socialization of children: An historical overview.

Abstract

The history of research on childhood socialization in the context of the family is traced through the present century. The 2 major early theories-behaviorism and psychoanalytic theory-are described. These theories declined in mid-century, under the impact of failures to find empirical support. Simple reinforcement theory was seriously weakened by work on developmental psycholinguistics, attachment, modeling, and altruism. The field turned to more domain-specific minitheories. The advent of microanalytic analyses of parent-child interaction focused attention on bidirectional processes. Views about the nature of identification and its role in socialization underwent profound change. The role of "parent as teacher" was reconceptualized (with strong influence from Vygotskian thinking). There has been increasing emphasis on the role of emotions and mutual cognitions in establishing the meaning of parent-child exchanges. The enormous asymmetry in power and competence between adults and children implies that the parent-child relationship must have a unique role in childhood socialization.

Emotional self-regulation in preschoolers: The interplay of child approach reactivity, parenting, and control capacities.

“…It is important to distinguish parental approach and avoidance from other, more familiar parenting constructs in the literature in order to establish them as unique parenting dimensions (e.g., Baumrind, 1967Baumrind, , 1971Maccoby, 1992). Socialization research has gravitated toward two-dimensional classifications of parenting that converge around notions of warmth and control, including responsiveness-unresponsiveness and controlling-noncontrolling (Maccoby & Martin, 1983), as well as more fine-grained descriptions of parental control, such as direct commands and indirect guidance (Baumrind, 1967;Gray & Steinberg, 1999;Houck & LeCuyer-Maus, 2002, 2004.…”

“…Indeed, the notion of goodness-of-fit specifies that the aims and impact of parenting practices vary according to child characteristics such as temperament (Grusec & Goodnow, 1994;Grusec et al, 2000;Grusec & Kuczynski, 1980;Kochanska, 1997;Maccoby, 1992). Parenting that serves to modulate child approach reactivity could have a powerful influence on emotional self-regulation.…”

Growth in temperament and parenting as predictors of adjustment during children's transition to adolescence.

“…Keywords demographic risk; temperament; parenting; adjustment problems; early adolescence Both parenting (Frick, 1994;Loeber & Stouthamer-Loeber, 1986; Maccoby & Martin, 1993) and temperament (Rothbart & Bates, 1998;Sanson, Hemphill, & Smart, 2004) are important predictors of children's adjustment, and their effects are additive, with each contributing unique variance above the other (e.g., Bates, Pettit, Dodge, & Ridge, 1998;Halpern, Garcia Coll, Meyer, & Bendersky, 2001;Rubin, Hastings, Chen, Stewart, & McNichol, 1998;Smith & Prior, 1995). Moreover, transactional models in which parenting and child characteristics are mutually influential have been suggested to explain the development of adjustment problems (e.g., Halpern et al, 2001;Maccoby, 1992;Reiss & Price, 1996;Rothbart & Bates, 1998;Sanson et al, 2004). However, few studies have examined the relations between temperament and parenting during the transition to adolescence using longitudinal, growth analyses.…”

It takes two to tango: How parents’ and adolescents’ personalities link to the quality of their mutual relationship.

“…This truism should also apply to relationships between parents and adolescents, which are a specific type of dyadic relationship (Maccoby, 1992). According to Belsky's (1984) process model of parenting, parental functioning is determined by three sources: factors within the child, factors within the parent, and the social context in which the parent-child relationship occurs.…”