Decades of research have demonstrated that the parent-child dyad and the environment of the familyâ€"which includes all primary caregiversâ€"are at the foundation of children's well- being and healthy development. From birth, children are learning and rely on parents and the other caregivers in their lives to protect and care for them. The impact of parents may never be greater than during the earliest years of life, when a child's brain is rapidly developing and when nearly all of her or his experiences are created and shaped by parents and the family environment. Parents help children build and refine their knowledge and skills, charting a trajectory for their health and well-being during childhood and beyond. The experience of parenting also impacts parents themselves. For instance, parenting can enrich and give focus to parents' lives; generate stress or calm; and create any number of emotions, including feelings of happiness, sadness, fulfillment, and anger. Parenting of young children today takes place in the context of significant ongoing developments. These include: a rapidly growing body of science on early childhood, increases in funding for programs and services for families, changing demographics of the U.S. population, and greater diversity of family structure. Additionally, parenting is increasingly being shaped by technology and increased access to information about parenting. Parenting Matters identifies parenting knowledge, attitudes, and practices associated with positive developmental outcomes in children ages 0-8; universal/preventive and targeted strategies used in a variety of settings that have been effective with parents of young children and that support the identified knowledge, attitudes, and practices; and barriers to and facilitators for parents' use of practices that lead to healthy child outcomes as well as their participation in effective programs and services. This report makes recommendations directed at an array of stakeholders, for promoting the wide-scale adoption of effective programs and services for parents and on areas that warrant further research to inform policy and practice. It is meant to serve as a roadmap for the future of parenting policy, research, and practice in the United States.

Social and emotional functioning (interpersonal interactions, social adjustment, emotional well-being, and mental health) among children and adolescents has drawn growing attention from academics, practitioners, parents, educators, and policymakers. Worldwide, it is agreed that social and emotional development is a result of individual-context interactions. Particularly, socialization perspectives regard parenting as the primary factor that shapes child and adolescent development to a large extent. Meanwhile, the ecological perspective highlights the bi-directional nature of interactions between children and parents by which they affect each other. Parenting can be parents’ active socialization actions that influence their children’s development (i.e., parent effect); it can also be parents’ reactions to their children’s social and emotional functioning (i.e., child effect).

Within parenting, a complex dynamic emerges as empirical research intersects with practical applications. Parental Influence on Educational Success and Wellbeing navigates uncharted territories in parenting research, tackling pivotal issues like culture, minority experiences, lifespan perspectives, disabilities, and the convergence of medical and legal dimensions. Its uniqueness lies in theoretical exploration and in providing tangible solutions—offering parents concrete best practices and strategies. This book is an indispensable resource for parents seeking to navigate the multifaceted challenges of nurturing their children in diverse contexts. By integrating insights from various dimensions of parenting research, the book equips parents with a nuanced understanding of how their actions reverberate through their child's life, influencing academic achievement and emotional well-being.

Gifted and Talented Females Speak Out on Parental Influences and Achievement! examines how to promote female achievement. Using face-to-face interviews with eight women and scholarly research, the book explores topics such as the role of parents, teens and the growing brain, the importance of achieving, and the dilemma of being a gifted and talented female. In addition, each chapter includes recommendations for practice, study questions, and references. These chapter-by-chapter study questions and references enhance the learning experience and provide opportunities for further research.

Part American and part French, part memoir and part guide, this book offers a fresh, unique, and powerful perspective on the challenges of parenting and how to find a rewarding path forward for parents and children alike. How should we raise our children? It should be a simple enough question to answer but in fact it is an intimidating and complex one. We often address it by deciding to do either exactly what our parents did or just the opposite. After that we rely on a cocktail of love and instinct, hoping it will be enough to overcome the difficulties ahead. Far from having perfect free will, however, we are all under the influence. The child still within us confuses, influences, or undermines all our aspirations as parents and prevents us from sticking to the philosophy we initially hoped to follow. These unresolved emotions drive us to reproduce the upbringing we received, including the behaviors that have hurt us the most. In Parents Under the Influence, Cécile David-Weill draws on her own parenting blunders and successes as well as concrete examples, case studies, and works of fiction to guide readers, helping them heal from the past and become effective, nurturing parents.