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.

Interparental Conflict and Child Development provides an in-depth analysis of the rapidly expanding body of research on the impact of interparental conflict on children. Emphasizing developmental and family systems perspectives, it investigates a range of important issues, including the processes by which exposure to conflict may lead to child maladjustment, the role of gender and ethnicity in understanding the effects of conflict, the influence of conflict on parent-child, sibling, and peer relations, family violence, and interparental conflict in divorced and step-families.

Parent-adolescent discord is often handled from a unitary perspective, whether the focus is on enhancing parenting skills, resolving conflicts in family relationships, or working to improve the behavior of the individual child. This important work shows the clinician how to incorporate all of these crucial elements into a single, research-based treatment program. Presented is the authors' influential integration of cognitive-behavioral constructs and family systems theory, grounded in consideration of adolescent developmental concerns. The book describes effective ways to conceptualize and assess the problems of embattled parents and teens; use assessment data in treatment planning; overcome resistance and other therapeutic hurdles; and implement carefully sequenced skills training, cognitive restructuring, and functional/structural interventions. The theoretical and empirical bases of the treatment approach are also discussed in depth.

Parents, Children, and Adolescents presents an integrative perspective of the parent-child relationship within several contexts. You can expand your empirical and theoretical knowledge of the parent-child relationship and child development through the book’s unusually holistic, theoretical perspective that integrates three main frameworks: interactional theories on parents, children, and development; contextual (ecological) models; and behavior genetics. This insightful book’s empirical scope is broader than that of most books in that it considers the parent-child relationship throughout the life course as well as within a great variety of contexts, including interactions with sibling and peers, at school, in their neighborhoods, and with professionals. You’ll gain immeasurable knowledge about: parents’child-rearing styles and how they are affected by environmental variables the interaction between parents and children, and between their personalities behavior genetics as one of the explanatory frameworks for the role of genetics and environment negative child outcomes--emotional problems, conduct disorders, and delinquency poverty and other stressors affecting parents and children problematic-abusive, emotionally disturbed, alcoholic parents siblings and peers as contexts for the parent-child dyad the effect of the school system on the family, with a focus on minority families family structure--divorce, remarriage, and families headed by never-married mothers adolescent mothers and their own mothers the psychogenetic limitations on parental influence and cultural roadblocks to parental moral authority Complete with an Instructor’s Manual, Parents, Children, and Adolescents is ideal for advanced undergraduate and graduate classes in family studies and human development, sociology of the family, interdisciplinary developmental psychology, and social work classes that need a thorough perspective on the parent-child relationship. Professionals and scholars in these fields seeking an interdisciplinary framework as well as research suggestions and incisive critiques of traditional perspectives will also find this innovative book a valuable addition to their reading lists.

Researchers increasingly recognize the importance of early family experiences on children and the impact that inter-parental conflict has on child development. This book reviews recent research in order to show how children who experience high levels of inter-parental conflict are put at both an immediate psychological and physical risk and a longer-developing risk of recapitulating such behaviors. The authors examine topics such as the differences between destructive and constructive inter-parental conflict on child development, why some children are more adversely affected than others, and how conflict affects child physiology. Ultimately they provide suggestions for improving the futures of children who are experiencing challenging family environments today.