Handbook of Parenting: Volume 5: The Practice of Parenting, Third Edition [3 ed.] 113822877X, 9781138228771

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HANDBOOK OF PARENTING

This highly anticipated third edition of the Handbook of Parenting brings together an array of field-leading experts who have worked in different ways toward understanding the many diverse aspects of parenting. Contributors to the Handbook look to the most recent research and thinking to shed light on topics every parent, professional, and policymaker wonders about. Parenting is a perennially “hot” topic. After all, everyone who has ever lived has been parented, and the vast majority of people become parents themselves. No wonder bookstores house shelves of “how-to” parenting books, and magazine racks in pharmacies and airports overflow with periodicals that feature parenting advice. However, almost none of these is evidence-based. The Handbook of Parenting is. Period. Each chapter has been written to be read and absorbed in a single sitting, and includes historical considerations of the topic, a discussion of central issues and theory, a review of classical and modern research, and forecasts of future directions of theory and research. Together, the five volumes in the Handbook cover Children and Parenting, the Biology and Ecology of Parenting, Being and Becoming a Parent, Social Conditions and Applied Parenting, and the Practice of Parenting. Volume 5, The Practice of Parenting, describes the nuts-and-bolts of parenting as well as the promotion of positive parenting practices. Parents meet the biological, physical, and health requirements of children. Parents interact with children socially. Parents stimulate children to engage and understand the environment and to enter the world of learning. Parents provide, organize, and arrange their children’s home and local environments and the media to which children are exposed. Parents also manage child development vis-à-vis childcare, school, and the circles of medicine and law, as well as other social institutions through their active citizenship. The chapters in Part I, on Practical Parenting, review the ethics of parenting, parenting and the development of children’s self-regulation, discipline, prosocial and moral development, and resilience, as well as children’s language, play, cognitive, academic motivation and children’s peer relationships. The chapters in Part II, on Parents and Social Institutions, explore parents and their children’s childcare, activities, media, schools, and health care and examine relations between parenthood and the law, public policy, and religion and spirituality. Marc H. Bornstein holds a BA from Columbia College, MS and PhD degrees from Yale University, and honorary doctorates from the University of Padua and University of Trento. Bornstein is President of the Society for Research in Child Development and has held faculty positions at Princeton University and New York University, as well as academic appointments in Munich, London, Paris, New York, Tokyo, Bamenda, Seoul, Trento, Santiago, Bristol, and Oxford. Bornstein is the author of several children’s books, videos, and puzzles in The Child’s World and Baby Explorer series, Editor Emeritus of Child Development and founding Editor of Parenting: Science and Practice, and consultant for governments, foundations, universities, publishers, scientific journals, the media, and UNICEF. He has published widely in experimental, methodological, comparative, developmental, and cultural science as well as neuroscience, pediatrics, and aesthetics.

HANDBOOK OF PARENTING Volume 5: The Practice of Parenting Third Edition

Edited by Marc H. Bornstein

Third edition published 2019 by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2019 Taylor & Francis The right of Marc H. Bornstein to be identified as the author of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. First edition published by Laurence Erlbaum Associates 1995 Second edition published by Taylor and Francis 2002 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN: 978-1-138-22877-1 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-138-22878-8 (pbk) ISBN: 978-0-429-40169-5 (ebk) Typeset in Bembo by Apex CoVantage, LLC

For Marian and Harold Sackrowitz

CONTENTS

Preface to the Third Edition About the Editor About the Contributors

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PART I

Practical Parenting

1

1 The Ethics of Parenting Ross A. Thompson and Diana Baumrind

3

2 Parenting and Children’s Self-Regulation Wendy S. Grolnick, Alessandra J. Caruso, and Madeline R. Levitt

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3 Parenting and Child Discipline Jennifer E. Lansford

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4 Parenting and Children’s Prosocial Development Tracy L. Spinrad, Nancy Eisenberg, and Carlos Valiente

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5 Parenting and Moral Development Judith G. Smetana, Courtney L. Ball, and Ha Na Yoo

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6 Parenting to Promote Resilience in Children Ann S. Masten and Alyssa R. Palmer

156

7 Language and Play in Parent–Child Interactions Catherine S. Tamis-LeMonda, Yana A. Kuchirko, Kelly Escobar, and Marc H. Bornstein

189

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Contents

8 How Parents Can Maximize Children’s Cognitive Abilities Karin Sternberg, Wendy M. Williams, and Robert J. Sternberg

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9 Parenting of Children’s Academic Motivation Adele Eskeles Gottfried

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10 Parents and Children’s Peer Relationships Gary W. Ladd and Becky Kochenderfer-Ladd

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PART II

Parents and Social Institutions

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11 Choosing Childcare for Young Children Alice Sterling Honig

319

12 Parenting and Children’s Organized Activities Deborah Lowe Vandell, Sandra D. Simpkins, and Christopher M. Wegemer

347

13 Parenting in the Digital Age Rachel Barr

380

14 Parenting the Child in School Robert Crosnoe and Robert W. Ressler

410

15 Parenting and Children’s Health Care Carolyn Brockmeyer Cates,Victoria Chen, Caitlin F. Canfield, and Alan L. Mendelsohn

431

16 Parenting and the Law Caitlin Cavanagh and Elizabeth Cauffman

465

17 Parenting and Public Policy James Garbarino, Amy Governale, and Kathleen Kostelny

491

18 Parenting, Religion, and Spirituality Annette Mahoney and Chris J. Boyatzis

515

Index

553

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PREFACE TO THE THIRD EDITION

Previous editions of the Handbook of Parenting have been called the “who’s who of the what’s what.” The third edition of this Handbook appears at a time that is momentous in the history of parenting. The family generally, and parenting specifically, are today in a greater state of flux, question, and redefinition than perhaps ever before. We are witnessing the emergence of striking permutations on the theme of parenting: blended families, lesbian and gay parents, teen versus fifties first-time moms and dads, genetic versus social parents. One cannot but be awed on the biological front by technology that now renders postmenopausal women capable of childbearing and with the possibility of parents designing their babies. Similarly, on the sociological front, single parenthood is a modern-day fact of life, adult child dependency is on the rise, and even in the face of rising institutional demands to take increasing responsibility for their offspring, parents are ever less certain of their roles and responsibilities. The Handbook of Parenting is concerned with all these facets of parenting . . . and more. Most people become parents, and everyone who ever lived has had parents, yet parenting remains a mystifying subject. Who is ultimately responsible for parenting? Does parenting come naturally, or must parenting be learned? How do parents conceive of parenting? Of childhood? What does it mean to parent a preterm baby, twins, or a child on the autistic spectrum? To be an older parent, or one who is divorced, disabled, or drug abusing? What do theories (psychoanalysis, personality theory, attachment, and behavior genetics, for example) contribute to our understanding of parenting? What are the goals parents have for themselves? For their children? What functions do parents’ cognitions serve? What are the goals of parents’ practices? What accounts for parents believing or behaving in similar ways? Why do so many attitudes and actions of parents differ so? How do children influence their parents? How do personality, knowledge, and worldview affect parenting? How do social class, culture, environment, and history shape parenthood? How can parents effectively relate to childcare, schools, and their children’s pediatricians? These are many of the questions addressed in this third edition of the Handbook of Parenting . . . for this is an evidenced-based volume set on how to parent as much as it is one on what being a parent is all about. Put succinctly, parents create people. They are entrusted with preparing their offspring for the physical, psychosocial, and economic conditions in which their children eventually will fare and hopefully will flourish. Amidst the many influences on each next generation, parents are the “final common pathway” to children’s development, stature, adjustment, and success. Human social inquiry—antedating even Athenian interest in Spartan childrearing practices—has always, as a matter ix

Preface to the Third Edition

of course, included reports of parenting. Freud opined that childrearing is one of three “impossible professions”—the other two being governing nations and psychoanalysis. One encounters as many views as the number of people one asks about the relative merits of being an at-home or a working mother; about what mix of day care, family care, or parent care is best for a child; about whether good parenting reflects intuition or experience. The Handbook of Parenting concerns itself with different types of parents—mothers and fathers, single, adolescent, and adoptive parents; with basic characteristics of parenting—knowledge, beliefs, and expectations about parenting—as well as the practice of parenting; with forces that shape parenting—employment, social class, culture, environment, and history; with problems faced by parents—handicap, marital difficulties, drug addiction; and with practical concerns of parenting— how to promote children’s health, foster social adjustment and cognitive competence, and interact with educational, legal, and religious institutions. Contributors to the Handbook of Parenting have worked in different ways toward understanding all these diverse aspects of parenting, and all look to the most recent research and thinking in the field to shed light on many topics every parent, professional, and policymaker wonders about. Parenthood is a job whose primary object of attention and action is the child. But parenting also has consequences for parents. Parenthood is giving and responsibility, and parenting has its own intrinsic pleasures, privileges, and profits, as well as frustrations, fears, and failures. Parenthood can enhance psychological development, self-confidence, and sense of well-being, and parenthood also affords opportunities to confront new challenges and to test and display diverse competencies. Parents can derive considerable and continuing pleasure in their relationships and activities with their children. But parenting is also fraught with small and large stresses and disappointments. The transition to parenthood is daunting, and the onrush of new stages of parenthood is relentless. In the final analysis, however, parents receive a great deal “in kind” for the hard work of parenting—they can be recipients of unconditional love, they can gain skills, and they can even pretend to immortality. This third edition of the Handbook of Parenting reveals the many positives that accompany parenting and offers resolutions for its many challenges. The Handbook of Parenting 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. The third edition of the Handbook of Parenting is divided into five volumes, each with two parts: CHILDREN AND PARENTING is Volume 1 of the Handbook. Parenthood is, perhaps first and foremost, a functional status in the life cycle: Parents issue as well as protect, nurture, and teach their progeny, even if human development is too subtle and dynamic to admit that parental caregiving alone determines the developmental course and outcome of ontogeny. Volume 1 of the Handbook of Parenting begins with chapters concerned with how children influence parenting. Notable are their more obvious characteristics, like child age or developmental stage; but more subtle ones, like child gender, physical state, temperament, mental ability, and other individual-differences factors, are also instrumental. The chapters in Part I, on Parenting across the Lifespan, discuss the unique rewards and special demands of parenting children of different ages and stages—infants, toddlers, youngsters in middle childhood, and adolescents—as well as the modern notion of parent–child relationships in emerging adulthood and adulthood and old age. The chapters in Part II, on Parenting Children of Varying Status, discuss common issues associated with parenting children of different genders and temperaments, as well as unique situations of parenting adopted and foster children and children with a variety of special needs, such as those with extreme talent; born preterm; who are socially withdrawn or aggressive; or who fall on the autistic spectrum, manifest intellectual disabilities, or suffer a chronic health condition. x

Preface to the Third Edition

BIOLOGY AND ECOLOGY OF PARENTING is Volume 2 of the Handbook. For parenting to be understood as a whole, biological and ecological determinants of parenting need to be brought into the picture. Volume 2 of the Handbook relates parenting to its biological roots and sets parenting in its ecological framework. Some aspects of parenting are influenced by the organic makeup of human beings, and the chapters in Part I, on the Biology of Parenting, examine the evolution of parenting, the psychobiological determinants of parenting in nonhumans, and primate parenting and then the genetic, prenatal, neuroendocrinological, and neurobiological bases of human parenting. A deep understanding of what it means to parent also depends on the ecologies in which parenting takes place. Beyond the nuclear family, parents are embedded in, influence, and are themselves affected by larger social systems. The chapters in Part II, on the Ecology of Parenting, examine the ancient and modern histories of parenting, as well as epidemiology, neighborhoods, educational attainment, socioeconomic status, culture, and environment to provide an overarching relational developmental contextual systems perspective on parenting. BEING AND BECOMING A PARENT is Volume 3 of the Handbook. A large cast of characters is responsible for parenting, each has her or his own customs and agenda, and the psychological characteristics and social interests of those individuals are revealing of what parenting is. Chapters in Part I, on The Parent, show just how rich and multifaceted is the constellation of children’s caregivers. Considered first are family systems and then successively mothers and fathers, coparenting and gatekeeping between parents, adolescent parenting, grandparenting, and single parenthood, divorced and remarried parenting, lesbian and gay parents, and finally sibling caregivers and nonparental caregiving. Parenting also draws on transient and enduring physical, personality, and intellectual characteristics of the individual. The chapters in Part II, on Becoming and Being a Parent, consider the intergenerational transmission of parenting, parenting and contemporary reproductive technologies, the transition to parenthood, and stages of parental development, and then chapters turn to parents’ well-being, emotions, self-efficacy, cognitions, and attributions, as well as socialization, personality in parenting, and psychoanalytic theory. These features of parents serve many functions: They generate and shape parental practices, mediate the effectiveness of parenting, and help to organize parenting. SOCIAL CONDITIONS AND APPLIED PARENTING is Volume 4 of the Handbook. Parenting is not uniform across communities, groups, or cultures; rather, parenting is subject to wide variation. Volume 4 of the Handbook describes socially defined groups of parents and social conditions that promote variation in parenting. The chapters in Part I, on Social and Cultural Conditions of Parenting, start with a relational developmental systems perspective on parenting and move to considerations of ethnic and minority parenting among Latino and Latin Americans, African Americans, Asians and Asian Americans, indigenous parents, and immigrant parents. The section concludes with the roles of employment and of poverty on parenting. Parents are ordinarily the most consistent and caring people in children’s lives. However, parenting does not always go right or well. Information, education, and support programs can remedy potential ills. The chapters in Part II, on Applied Issues in Parenting, begin with how parenting is measured and follow with examinations of maternal deprivation, attachment, and acceptance/rejection in parenting. Serious challenges to parenting—some common, such as stress, depression, and disability, and some less common, such as substance abuse, psychopathology, maltreatment, and incarceration—are addressed, as are parenting interventions intended to redress these trials. THE PRACTICE OF PARENTING is Volume 5 of the Handbook. Parents meet the biological, physical, and health requirements of children. Parents interact with children socially. Parents stimulate children to engage and understand the environment and to enter the world of learning. Parents provision, organize, and arrange their children’s home and local xi

Preface to the Third Edition

environments and the media to which children are exposed. Parents also manage child development vis-à-vis childcare, school, and the circles of medicine and law, as well as other social institutions through their active citizenship. Volume 5 of the Handbook addresses the nuts-and-bolts of parenting, as well as the promotion of positive parenting practices. The chapters in Part I, on Practical Parenting, review the ethics of parenting, parenting and the development of children’s self-regulation, discipline, prosocial and moral development, and resilience, as well as children’s language, play, cognitive, and academic achievement and children’s peer relationships. Many caregiving principles and practices have direct effects on children. Parents indirectly influence children as well, for example, through relations they have with their local or larger community. The chapters in Part II, on Parents and Social Institutions, explore parents and their children’s childcare, activities, media, schools, and health care and examine relations between parenthood and the law, public policy, and religion and spirituality. Each chapter in the third edition of the Handbook of Parenting addresses a different but central topic in parenting; each is rooted in current thinking and theory as well as classical and modern research on a topic; each is written to be read and absorbed in a single sitting. Each chapter in this new Handbook adheres to a standard organization, including an introduction to the chapter as a whole, followed by historical considerations of the topic, a discussion of central issues and theory, a review of classical and modern research, forecasts of future directions of theory and research, and a set of evidencebased conclusions. Of course, each chapter considers contributors’ own convictions and findings, but contributions to this third edition of the Handbook of Parenting attempt to present all major points of view and central lines of inquiry and interpret them broadly. The Handbook of Parenting is intended to be both comprehensive and state-of-the-art. To assert that parenting is complex is to understate the obvious. As the expanded scope of this third edition of the Handbook of Parenting also amply attests, parenting is naturally and intensely interdisciplinary. The Handbook of Parenting is concerned principally with the nature and scope of parenting per se and secondarily with child outcomes of parenting. Beyond an impressive range of information, readers will find passim typologies of parenting (e.g., authoritarian-autocratic, indulgent-permissive, indifferent-uninvolved, authoritative-reciprocal), theories of parenting (e.g., ecological, psychoanalytic, behavior genetic, ethological, behavioral, sociobiological), conditions of parenting (e.g., gender, culture, content), recurrent themes in parenting studies (e.g., attachment, transaction, systems), and even aphorisms (e.g., “A child should have strict discipline in order to develop a fine, strong character,” “The child is father to the man”). Each chapter in the Handbook of Parenting lays out the meanings and implications of a contribution and a perspective on parenting. Once upon a time, parenting was a seemingly simple thing: Mothers mothered. Fathers fathered. Today, parenting has many motives, many meanings, and many manifestations. Contemporary parenting is viewed as immensely time consuming and effortful. The perfect mother or father or family is a figment of false cultural memory. Modern society recognizes “subdivisions” of the call: genetic mother, gestational mother, biological mother, birth mother, social mother. For some, the individual sacrifices that mark parenting arise for the sole and selfish purpose of passing one’s genes on to succeeding generations. For others, a second child may be conceived to save the life of a first child. A multitude of factors influences the unrelenting advance of events and decisions that surround parenting—biopsychosocial, dyadic, contextual, historical. Recognizing this complexity is important to informing people’s thinking about parenting, especially information-hungry parents themselves. This third edition of the Handbook of Parenting explores all these motives, meanings, and manifestations of parenting.

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Preface to the Third Edition

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. The human race succeeds because of parenting. From the start, parenting is a “24/7” job. Parenting formally begins before pregnancy and can continue throughout the life span: Practically speaking for most, once a parent, always a parent. Parenting is a subject about which people hold strong opinions, and about which too little solid information or considered reflection exists. Parenting has never come with a Handbook . . . until now. —Marc H. Bornstein

xiii

ABOUT THE EDITOR

Marc H. Bornstein holds a BA from Columbia College, MS and PhD degrees from Yale University, and honorary doctorates from the University of Padua and University of Trento. Bornstein was a J. S. Guggenheim Foundation Fellow, and he received a Research Career Development Award from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. He also received the C. S. Ford Cross-Cultural Research Award from the Human Relations Area Files, the B. R. McCandless Young Scientist Award, and the G. Stanley Hall Award from the American Psychological Association, a United States PHS Superior Service Award and an Award of Merit from the National Institutes of Health, two Japan Society for the Promotion of Science Fellowships, four Awards for Excellence from the American Mensa Education & Research Foundation, the Arnold Gesell Prize from the Theodor Hellbrügge Foundation, the Distinguished Scientist Award from the International Society for the Study of Behavioral Development, and both the Distinguished International Contributions to Child Development Award and the Distinguished Scientific Contributions to Child Development Award from the Society for Research in Child Development. Bornstein is President of the Society for Research in Child Development (SRCD) and a past member of the SRCD Governing Council and Executive Committee of the International Congress of Infancy Studies. Bornstein has held faculty positions at Princeton University and New York University, as well as academic appointments as Visiting Scientist at the Max-Planck-Institut für Psychiatrie in Munich, Visiting Fellow at University College London; Professeur Invité at the Laboratoire de Psychologie Expérimentale in the Université René Descartes in Paris; Child Clinical Fellow at the Institute for Behavior Therapy in New York; Visiting Professor at the University of Tokyo; Professeur Invité at the Laboratoire de Psychologie du Développement et de l’Éducation de l’Enfant in the Sorbonne in Paris; Visiting Fellow of the British Psychological Society; Visiting Scientist at the Human Development Resource Center in Bamenda, Cameroon; Visiting Scholar at the Institute of Psychology in Seoul National University in Seoul, South Korea; Visiting Professor at the Faculty of Cognitive Science in the University of Trento, Italy; Profesor Visitante at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile in Santiago, Chile; Institute for Advanced Studies Benjamin Meaker Visiting Professor, University of Bristol; Jacobs Foundation Scholar-in-Residence, Marbach, Germany; Honorary Fellow, Department of Psychiatry, Oxford University; Adjunct Academic Member of the Council of the Department of Cognitive Sciences, University of Trento, Italy; and International Research Fellow at the Institute for Fiscal Studies, London.

xiv

About the Editor

Bornstein is coauthor of The Architecture of the Child Mind: g, Fs, and the Hierarchical Model of Intelligence, Gender in Low- and Middle-Income Countries, Development in Infancy (five editions), Development: Infancy through Adolescence, Lifespan Development, Genitorialità: Fattori Biologici E Culturali Dell’essere Genitori, and Perceiving Similarity and Comprehending Metaphor. He is general editor of The Crosscurrents in Contemporary Psychology Series, including Psychological Development from Infancy, Comparative Methods in Psychology, Psychology and Its Allied Disciplines (Vols. I–III), Sensitive Periods in Development, Interaction in Human Development, Cultural Approaches to Parenting, Child Development and Behavioral Pediatrics, and Well-Being: Positive Development Across the Life Course, and general editor of the Monographs in Parenting series, including his own Socioeconomic Status, Parenting, and Child Development and Acculturation and Parent– child Relationships. He edited Maternal Responsiveness: Characteristics and Consequences, the Handbook of Parenting (Vols. I–V, three editions), and the Handbook of Cultural Developmental Science (Parts 1 and 2), and is Editor-in-Chief of the SAGE Encyclopedia of Lifespan Human Development. He also coedited Developmental Science: An Advanced Textbook (seven editions), Stability and Continuity in Mental Development, Contemporary Constructions of the Child, Early Child Development in the French Tradition, The Role of Play in the Development of Thought, Acculturation and Parent–child Relationships, Immigrant Families in Contemporary Society, The Developing Infant Mind: Origins of the Social Brain, and Ecological Settings and Processes in Developmental Systems (Volume 4 of the Handbook of Child Psychology and Developmental Science). He is the author of several children’s books, videos, and puzzles in The Child’s World and Baby Explorer series. Bornstein is Editor Emeritus of Child Development and Founding Editor of Parenting: Science and Practice. He has administered both federal and foundation grants; sits on the editorial boards of several professional journals; is a member of scholarly societies in a variety of disciplines; and consults for governments, foundations, universities, publishers, scientific journals, the media, and UNICEF. He has published widely in experimental, methodological, comparative, developmental, and cultural science as well as neuroscience, pediatrics, and aesthetics. Bornstein was named to the Top 20 Authors for Productivity in Developmental Science by the American Educational Research Association.

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ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS

Courtney L. Ball is a PhD candidate in Developmental Psychology at the University of Rochester. Ball earned her BA in Psychology and Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame and completed her MA in Developmental Psychology at the University of Rochester. Her research focuses on early moral development, with a specific interest in moral emotions, particularly empathy. Rachel Barr is Professor of Psychology at Georgetown University and Director of the Georgetown Early Learning Project. She holds a PhD from the University of Otago, New Zealand. She is primarily interested in how children bridge the gap between what they learn from media and how they apply that information in the real world and how parents facilitate learning from touchscreens, computers, and television. Diana Baumrind is a Research Scientist at the Institute of Human Development at the University of California, Berkeley, where she directed the Family Socialization and Developmental Competence Project. Baumrind received her AB from Hunter College of the City of New York and her MA and PhD from the University of California, Berkeley. Baumrind’s research focuses on parenting effects and how contrasting childrearing patterns influence the development of character and competence in youth. Baumrind is also concerned with social policy applications of research on the family and cultural moderators of parent–child relationships. Chris J. Boyatzis is Professor of Psychology and Director of the Bucknell in Denmark Summer Program at Bucknell University. Boyatzis was educated at Boston University and Brandeis University and was previously affiliated with Wellesley College and California State UniversityFullerton. He is a past president of the Society for the Psychology of Religion and Spirituality of the American Psychological Association and is Associate Editor of Psychology of Religion and Spirituality. Caitlin F. Canfield is a Research Scientist at New York University School of Medicine and Research Director for the Bellevue Project for Language, Literacy, and Education Success. Canfield received her PhD in Developmental Psychology from Boston University and MS in Clinical Investigation from New York University School of Medicine. Her research has emphasized the role of individual differences in child characteristics, family processes, and environments in determining both children’s outcomes and intervention impacts. xvi

About the Contributors

Alessandra J. Caruso is a PhD student in Clinical Psychology at Clark University. Caruso received her BA in Psychology at Georgetown University and was a Research Coordinator at Boston Children’s Hospital. She conducts research on parenting and children’s motivation using a Self-Determination Theory framework. Carolyn Brockmeyer Cates is Assistant Professor of Psychology at Purchase College, State University of New York, and Research Assistant Professor of Pediatrics at New York University School of Medicine. She received her PhD in Developmental Psychology from Lehigh University. Cates leads projects designed to enhance language, literacy, and social-cognitive development through play- and narrative-based intervention programs in preschool and primary care settings serving low-income children. Elizabeth Cauffman is Professor and Chancellor’s Fellow in the Department of Psychology and Social Behavior and holds courtesy appointments in the School of Education and the School of Law at the University of California, Irvine. Cauffman was educated at Temple University and Stanford University and previously was affiliated with the University of Pittsburgh. Cauffman’s research addresses the intersection between adolescent development and juvenile justice. Caitlin Cavanagh is Assistant Professor of Criminal Justice and holds an adjunct appointment in the Department of Psychology at Michigan State University. She received her BA at the University of Rochester and her MA and PhD at the University of California, Irvine. Her research focuses on the intersections of psychology and the law and how social contexts shape adolescent behavior. Victoria Chen is Assistant Professor of Pediatrics in the Donald and Barbara Zucker School of Medicine at Hofstra/Northwell and Steven and Alexandra Cohen Children’s Medical Center at Northwell Health. Chen graduated from the City University of New York Brooklyn College and from the State University of New York Downstate Medical Center. She is a developmental-behavioral pediatrician and currently serves as Co-Chair of the American Academy of Pediatrics Council on Early Childhood Research Network and Co-Chair of the Society for Developmental & Behavioral Pediatrics Screening in Primary Care Working Group. Robert Crosnoe is the C. B. Smith, Sr. Centennial Chair #4 at the University of Texas at Austin, where he is Chair of the Department of Sociology. He received his PhD from Stanford University. He is President of the Society for Research on Adolescence, Co-Director of the Interdisciplinary Collaborative on Development in Context, and a Governing Board Member of the Council on Contemporary Families, as well as a past Governing Council member of the Society for Research in Child Development and Deputy Editor of the Journal of Marriage and Family. Nancy Eisenberg is Regents’ Professor of Psychology at Arizona State University. She received her PhD in Psychology from the University of California, Berkeley. Her research interests span the domain of socioemotional development of self-regulation and its relations to emotion, socially competent behavior, and maladjustment; empathy-related responding; moral reasoning; and personality development. She has been an Associate Editor of Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, MerrillPalmer Quarterly, and Developmental Psychology and editor of Psychological Bulletin and Child Development Perspectives. She was President of the Association for Psychological Development, Division 7 of the American Psychological Association and Western Psychological Association. Her books include The Caring Child, The Roots of Prosocial Behavior in Children, Altruistic Emotion, Cognition, and Behavior, and How Children Develop. She edited Volume 3 in the Handbook of Child Psychology: Social, Emotional, and xvii

About the Contributors

Personality Development and several other books, including Empathy and Its Development and Review of Personality and Social Psychology. Kelly Escobar is a PhD candidate in Developmental Psychology at New York University. She received her MS in Psychology from Villanova University. Escobar’s current research focuses on early dual-language development, with a particular focus on individual variability and the early social contexts that shape children’s bilingual trajectories. James Garbarino is the Maude C. Clarke Chair in Humanistic Psychology and the Senior Faculty Fellow with the Center for the Human Rights of Children at Loyola University Chicago. Previously he held the Elizabeth Lee Vincent Chair in Human Development at Cornell University and was President of the Erikson Institute for Advanced Study in Child Development. He has served as an advisor to the National Committee to Prevent Child Abuse, the National Institute for Mental Health, the American Medical Association, the U.S. Advisory Board on Child Abuse and Neglect, and the FBI. His books include Miller’s Children: Why Giving Teenage Killers a Second Chance Matters for All of Us. Adele Eskeles Gottfried is Professor Emerita of Educational Psychology, California State University, Northridge, and co-directs the Fullerton Longitudinal Study. She received her MA degree from the University of Chicago, and PhD in Educational/Developmental Psychology from the Graduate School and University Center of the City University of New York. Her study of parental employment served as a basis for a California Supreme Court ruling. She is the author of the Children’s Academic Intrinsic Motivation Inventory, and numerous articles and books. Amy Governale is a PhD candidate in Developmental Psychology at Loyola University Chicago. Her research interests include how different dimensions of organized activity involvement, including summer program participation, promote positive youth development among low-income, ethnically diverse adolescents. Wendy S. Grolnick is Professor of Psychology and Director of Clinical Training in the Frances L. Hiatt School of Psychology at Clark University. She received her MA and PhD from the University of Rochester. Grolnick’s research focuses on the effects of home and school environments on children’s motivation as well as factors affecting the environments that parents and teachers create for their children. She is the author of The Psychology of Parental Control: How Well-Meant Parenting Backfires and Pressured Parents, Stressed-Out Kids: Dealing with Competition While Raising a Successful Child. Alice Sterling Honig is Professor Emerita at Syracuse University. She received her BA from Barnard College, MA from Columbia University, and PhD from Syracuse University. She served as Research Review Editor for NAEYC’s Young Children. Among her books are Parent Involvement in Early Childhood Education, Risk Factors in Infancy, Little Kids, Big Worries: Stress Busting Tips for Early Childhood Classrooms, The Best for Babies: Expert Advice for Assessing Infant/Toddler Programs, and Literacy, Storytelling and Bilingualism in Asian Classrooms. Becky Kochenderfer-Ladd is Professor in the T. Denny Sanford School of Social and Family Dynamics at Arizona State University. Ladd earned her PhD at the University of Illinois at UrbanaChampaign in Educational Psychology. She studies children’s social development and peer relationships. She is currently the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology. Kathleen Kostelny is a Senior Researcher at the Columbia Group for Children in Adversity at Columbia University. She received her BA from Bethel College, MA from the University of Chicago, xviii

About the Contributors

and PhD from the Erikson Institution/Loyola University. She was formerly a Research Associate at Erikson Insitute for Advanced Study in Child Development and is co-author of No Place to Be a Child: Growing Up in a War Zone and other publications dealing with children and families at risk. Yana A. Kuchirko is a Postdoctoral Associate at the Bellevue Project for Language, Literacy, and Education Success Initiative at the Institute of Human Development and Social Change at New York University. Kuchirko received her PhD in Developmental Psychology from New York University. Her research focuses on infants’ language experiences across different contexts and cultures. Gary W. Ladd is Cowden Distinguished Professor of Family and Human Development at Arizona State University. Ladd earned his PhD at the University of Rochester and then held professorships at Purdue University and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He was a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford and served as Associate Editor for Child Development and the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships and Editor-in-Chief of Merrill-Palmer Quarterly. Ladd is the author of Children’s Peer Relations and Social Competence: A Century of Progress. Jennifer E. Lansford is Research Professor at the Sanford School of Public Policy and Faculty Fellow of the Center for Child and Family Policy at Duke University. Lansford earned her PhD from the University of Michigan. Her research focuses on the development of aggression and other behavior problems, with an emphasis on how family, peer, and cultural contexts contribute to or protect against these outcomes. She leads the Parenting Across Cultures project. Lansford is Associate Editor of Developmental Psychology and the International Journal of Behavioral Development. Madeline R. Levitt is a PhD student in Clinical Psychology at Clark University. Levitt received her BA in Psychology at Bates College and worked as a psychometrician and research coordinator at Massachusetts General Hospital. She conducts research on parenting and children’s motivation. Annette Mahoney is Professor of Psychology and Director of Clinical Training at Bowling Green State University. Mahoney was educated at Rice University and the University of Houston. She is the President of the Society for the Psychology of Religion and Spirituality of the American Psychological Association. She is an associate editor of Psychology of Religion and Spirituality. Mahoney was an associate editor of the APA Handbook of Psychology, Religion and Spirituality, Vol. II. Ann S. Masten is Regents Professor and the Irving B. Harris Professor of Child Development in the Institute of Child Development, University of Minnesota. Masten completed her undergraduate degree at Smith College, her PhD at the University of Minnesota in psychology, and her clinical internship at the Neuropsychiatric Institute, University of California, Los Angeles. She is past President of the Society for Research in Child Development and Division 7 of the American Psychological Association (APA). She is the author of Ordinary Magic: Resilience in Development. Alan L. Mendelsohn is a General and Developmental-Behavioral Pediatrician and Associate Professor of Pediatrics and Population Health at New York University School of Medicine and Bellevue Hospital Center. Mendelsohn has focused his career on reducing disparities in health and development for young children in low-income families. He is Chair of the NIH/NICHD Biobehavioral and Behavioral Sciences Subcommittee. Alyssa R. Palmer is a PhD candidate in Child Development at the Institute of Child Development within the University of Minnesota. She completed her undergraduate degree at The Pennsylvania State University in Psychology. Her research interests focus broadly on individual differences xix

About the Contributors

contributing to risk and resilience, self-regulation, physiological reactivity and regulation, and the influence of parent functioning and parent–child synchrony. Robert W. Ressler is a PhD student in the Department of Sociology at the University of Texas at Austin. He received his undergraduate degree from the College of William and Mary in Sociology and Hispanic Studies. He conducts research on how community contexts promote the development and education of children with a focus on Latinx, immigrant, and minority populations. Sandra D. Simpkins is Professor of Education and Co-Director of the Certificate in Afterschool and Summer Education at the University of California, Irvine. Simpkins received her PhD in Developmental Psychology from the University of California, Riverside, and previously was a faculty member at Arizona State University. Her work has focused on contextual influences that shape youth development from childhood through adolescence. Simpkins is the lead author on a SRCD Monograph entitled Parent Beliefs to Youth Choices: Mapping the Sequence of Predictors from Childhood to Adolescence. Judith G. Smetana is Professor of Psychology, Director of the Developmental Psychology PhD Program, and past Frederika Warner Chair of Human Development at the University of Rochester. She obtained her undergraduate degree at the University of California, Berkeley, and her MS and PhD in Psychology at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She is past Secretary of the Society for Research in Child Development. Smetana has been associate editor of Child Development and is currently Editor of Child Development Perspectives. Her research focuses on the development of children’s moral and social reasoning, children’s and parents’ beliefs about parenting, and adolescent–parent relationships in ethnic and cultural contexts. Smetana is author of Adolescents, Families and Social Development: How Teens Construct Their Worlds and co-editor of the Handbook of Moral Development. Tracy L. Spinrad is a Professor of Family Studies in the T. Denny Sanford School of Social and Family Dynamics at Arizona State University. She earned her PhD in Human Development and Family Studies from the Pennsylvania State University. Her program of research focuses on the socioemotional development of young children, particularly relations of children’s self-regulation abilities to children’s social adjustment. Karin Sternberg is a Research Associate at Cornell University. She has a PhD in Psychology from the University of Heidelberg, Germany, and an MBA with a specialization in banking from the University of Cooperative Education in Karlsruhe, Germany. Sternberg worked as a Research Associate at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government and School of Public Health. She currently works on projects pertaining to child development, as well as admissions in undergraduate, graduate, and professional schools. She is the author of Child Development in the 21st Century and coauthor of The Psychologist’s Companion, Cognitive Psychology, The Nature of Hate, and the New Psychology of Love. Robert J. Sternberg is Professor of Human Development in the College of Human Ecology at Cornell University and Honorary Professor of Psychology at Heidelberg University, Germany. Previously, Sternberg was IBM Professor of Psychology and Education and Professor of Management at Yale. Sternberg’s BA is from Yale University, his PhD is from Stanford University, and he holds 13 honorary doctorates. Sternberg is a Past President of the American Psychological Association, the Federation of Associations in Behavioral and Brain Sciences, the Eastern Psychological Association, and the International Association for Cognitive Education and Psychology. Sternberg is editor of Perspectives on Psychological Science. Sternberg is a member of the National Academy of Education and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has authored textbooks in introductory psychology, cognitive psychology, and communication in psychology. xx

About the Contributors

Catherine S. Tamis-LeMonda is Professor of Applied Psychology in the Developmental Psychology program at New York University, where she co-directs the Center for Research on Culture, Development, and Education and earned her BA and PhD. Tamis-LeMonda investigates infant learning and development in social and cultural contexts, with a primary focus on infant communication, language, and play. She is Associate Editor of Infancy and Journal of Experimental Psychology: General. Ross A. Thompson is Distinguished Professor of Psychology at the University of California, Davis. Thompson earned his AB from Occidental College and his AM and PhD from the University of Michigan. He studies early parent–child relationships, the development of emotion understanding and emotion regulation, the growth of conscience and prosocial motivation, and related topics concerning the development of constructive social motivation. His books include Preventing Child Maltreatment through Social Support: A Critical Analysis, The Postdivorce Family: Children, Families, and Society, and Infant-Parent Attachment. Carlos Valiente is Professor of Family Studies in the T. Denny Sanford School of Social and Family Dynamics at Arizona State University. He holds a PhD in Family Science from Arizona State University. Valiente’s program of research identifies ways educators and parents can foster children’s social, emotional, and educational success. Deborah Lowe Vandell is Professor of Education and Psychology at the University of California, Irvine, where she was the Founding Dean of the School of Education. She received her BA from Rice University, her EdM from Harvard University, and her PhD in Psychology from Boston University. She was previously on the faculty at the University of Wisconsin, where she was the Sears Bascom Professor of Education. Vandell studies the short-term and long-term effects of afterschool programs, extracurricular activities, and unsupervised time on children and adolescents from diverse families. Christopher M. Wegemer is a PhD student in the School of Education at the University of California, Irvine. Wegemer received degrees from Providence College, Columbia University, and the University of California, Santa Barbara, in the fields of Applied Physics, Electrical Engineering, and Global and International Studies, respectively. He studies identity development of adolescents in youth empowerment activities. Wendy M. Williams is a Professor in the Department of Human Development at Cornell University. She holds MA and PhD degrees in Psychology from Yale University, an MA in Physical Anthropology from Yale, and a BA in English and Biology from Columbia University. Williams founded and directs the Cornell Institute for Women in Science. She studies the development, assessment, training, and societal implications of intelligence. Williams authored and edited The Reluctant Reader, How to Develop Student Creativity, Why Aren’t More Women in Science?, and The Mathematics of Sex. Ha Na Yoo is a PhD student in Clinical and Social Sciences at the University of Rochester. Yoo received her BA in German Literature and Economics from Seoul National University and her MA in Developmental Psychology from Yonsei University. Her research focuses on moral development in childhood, specifically children’s developing conceptions of fairness, and the relation between moral judgments and empathy.

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PART I

Practical Parenting

1 THE ETHICS OF PARENTING Ross A. Thompson and Diana Baumrind1

Introduction Ethical parenting, above all, is responsible caregiving, requiring of parents enduring investment and commitment throughout their children’s long period of dependency. The effort people put forth to be responsible parents, as in other areas of their lives, is a function of their self-attributions concerning the relation between their effort and outcome. As Bugental, Blue, and Cruzcosa (1989) have shown, parents who attribute a child’s dysfunctional behavior primarily to the child’s disposition or to peer influences rather than to their own practices are less likely to attempt to alter their disciplinary style when it is ineffective or developmentally unapt, or to attempt to alter their child’s behavior when it is changeworthy. Greenberger and Goldberg (1989) found that high-investment parents, as part of their identity, believed that they could meet their children’s needs better than other adults, and therefore willingly sacrificed other personal pleasures to be with their children. Such parents (whom the authors identified as authoritative) had higher maturity expectations, were notably responsive, and viewed their children more positively than did less invested parents. The ethics of parenting begins, therefore, with the assumption of responsibility for children. This chapter is concerned with unfolding the nature of that responsibility in the context of the reciprocal obligations of parents and offspring, and the responsibility of the state to support ethical parenting. The moral obligations of parents to their children, and of the state to the family, have been long-standing concerns of philosophy, the law, and psychology dating back to ancient times. This short chapter does not attempt to comprehensively review this interesting history, nor to offer guidelines to contemporary parents about specific ethical dilemmas (e.g., should a parent ever lie to a child?). Instead, we outline a theory of the ethics of parenting, rooted in traditional and modern views in moral and political philosophy, that describes the needs and rights of children and the roles and responsibilities of parents and the state for children’s welfare. We argue, in brief, that children’s rights are complementary and reciprocal (but not equal) to those of parents, that parental responsibilities to offspring arise from a developmental orientation to children’s needs and capabilities, that the state has an important role in supporting parents but not assuming parental responsibilities, and that developmental scientists have an obligation to contribute to public understanding of parenting and its influences. Such a theory can, we hope, offer guidance for the specific dilemmas that parents often face and provide a comprehensive, thoughtful perspective on what parenting is for, and why, in relation to the needs of children. The first part of the chapter concerns the ethical obligations of parents, with special attention to the rights of children, the moral justification of parental authority, and the contrasting views of

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protectionist, liberationist, and developmentalist approaches to understanding children’s best interests. This section closes with a profile of parents’ developmental responsibilities to children, especially in relation to the growth of character and competence. The second part of the chapter focuses on the relations among parents, children, and the state. In this section, we describe the state’s interest in the well-being of children and the conditions justifying the state’s intervention into family life to promote children’s well-being. In doing so, we also seek to profile what the state does well, and poorly, in its efforts to assist its youngest citizens. In the concluding section, we briefly consider the responsibilities of developmental scientists for fostering ethical parenting.

The Ethical Obligations of Parents The Rights of Children Discussions of parenting often begin with the rights of children. But what are children’s rights, and how are they justified? We propose that the moral norms of reciprocity and complementarity offer a new way of regarding children’s rights not as absolute entitlements to self-determination and autonomy, but rather as rights that develop in concert with children’s growing capacities to exercise mature judgment. In 1989 the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (United Nations General Assembly, 1989) codified children’s entitlements in a document that was adopted by the UN General Assembly and subsequently endorsed by more than 100 countries, but not by the United States. The survival, protection, development, and self-determination of dependent children are among the children’s rights identified by the Convention. It was the inclusion of self-determination rights that accounts, in part, for the reluctance of U.S. legislators to endorse the document. According to the Convention, children have the right to express their views (Article 11); to have freedom of thought, conscience, and religion (Article 14); to associate freely (Article 15); to privacy (Article 16); and to be protected from all forms of physical or mental violence (Article 19). The Committee on the Rights of the Child, the organization charged with monitoring and implementing the provisions of the Convention, interpreted Article 19, as well as Article 37 (which protects children against any form of cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment), as prohibiting all physical punishment. In the United States, the debate over the ratification of the Convention sharpened fundamental differences between liberals and conservatives concerning the desirable degree of interference by the state in family life (the less, the better to conservatives) and the freedom with which a child should be legally endowed (the more, the better to liberals). Liberals have urged ratification but criticized the Convention for failing to explicitly proscribe physical punishment. Conservatives have strongly and successfully opposed ratification, arguing that the document contains unwarranted restrictions on the historical right of parents to regulate the physical, moral, intellectual, and cultural development of their children. This liberal versus conservative polarity reflects a broader division in views of the family that contrasts a hierarchical, paternalistic, authoritarian model that places obedience at the cornerstone in the foundation of character (Dobson, 1992) with a children’s rights position that demands for children the same civil rights as are possessed by adults (Cohen, 1980). As the debate over the Convention in the United States illustrates, beginning with the rights of children (or of parents) sharpens the perceived conflict between the rights of each within the family and, inappropriately in our view, impedes thoughtful reflection on ethical parenting by polarizing discussion according to whether children’s rights or parents’ rights should be preeminent. The Convention neither acknowledges nor resolves the conflict created by its approach. We argue that it is much more useful to consider children’s rights and needs within a developmental perspective and within the context of the mutual obligations of parents and children, based on moral norms of reciprocity and complementarity.

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The Moral Norms of Reciprocity and Complementarity Instantiated by different value hierarchies in different cultures, a cornerstone of all ethical systems is the moral norm of reciprocity, represented in Christian religion by the Golden Rule, “do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” and in Buddhist thinking as karma or the sum of the ethical consequences of one’s actions (Baumrind, 1980). Reciprocity refers to the balance in an interactive system such that each party has both rights and duties, and the subordinate norm of complementarity states that one’s rights are the other’s obligations. The norm of complementarity implies that if children have a right to be nurtured (and not merely to seek nurturance), then there must be adult caregivers with a complementary obligation to nurture. Children also incur obligations reciprocal to that right, such as returning love and complying with parental directives, that motivate and enable caregivers to nurture and guide them satisfactorily. Application of the principle of reciprocity requires, therefore, mutuality of obligation and gratification and governs relationships within all stable social systems, including the family. Thus, parents and children have reciprocal, not equal, rights. The view that the rights and obligations of youthful status are reciprocal rather than identical to those of their caregivers acknowledges reciprocity as a generalizable moral norm based on the mutually contingent exchange of resources and gratification whose application is likely to produce the greatest good for the greatest number. Consistent with the principle that children’s rights and responsibilities are complementary, not identical, to those of their parents is the view that parents incur a duty to commit themselves to the welfare of their dependent children, who in turn have a duty to conform to parental standards (Baumrind, 1978b). Because of their dependent status, unemancipated youth may claim from adults the protection and support necessary for their growth and development, but may not claim the full rights to self-determination appropriate to an emancipated, independent person. In practice this means that parents may choose their children’s education, religion, and abode and, at least until adolescence, censor their reading, media exposure, friends, and attire. As children approach adolescence, however, their developing capabilities permit greater self-determination, and they also begin to relinquish the privileges of childhood as they assume the responsibilities and entitlements of adulthood. The remaining restrictions on their freedom provide adolescents with an essential impetus to becoming selfsupporting and thus self-determining. Exploitation or indulgence of the child by the parent interferes with the child’s internalization of the norm of reciprocity and the child’s acknowledgment that her or his actions have consequences for self and others. A marked imbalance between what is given gratuitously and what is required of the child disequilibrates the social system of the family. Whereas unconditional commitment to the child’s welfare and responsiveness to the child’s wishes motivate young children to comply with their parents’ demands for maturity and obedience (Kochanska, 2002; Parpal and Maccoby, 1985), noncontingent acquiescence to children’s demands is likely to encourage dependency rather than to reward responsible self-sufficiency. The reciprocal relations between the rights and obligations of parents and children have enduring philosophical roots and constitute the basis of Rousseau’s (1767/1952, p. 387) social contract: The most ancient of all societies, and the only one that is natural, is the family: and even so the children remain attached to the father only as long as they need him for their preservation. As soon as this need ceases, the natural bond is dissolved. The children, released from the obedience they owed to the father, and the father, released from the care he owed his children, return equally to independence. Radical proponents of liberating rights for children (Cohen, 1980; Holt, 1974; Kohn, 2005) negate the principle of reciprocity by claiming simultaneously that because of their temporary dependence children are entitled to beneficent protection, and yet because of their inherent status as autonomous persons children should exercise equal self-determination as do adults.

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The Moral Case for and Against Equal Rights for Children The case for equal rights for children appeals largely to deontological universalist premises, which maintain that what is morally right and obligatory is based on principles (such as justice) that have prima facie validity, independent of whether they promote the common good. If children (like adults) are persons of unconditional value and persons have the right to equal justice in all situations, then children’s and adults’ rights are equally meriting respect. By contrast, the case for reciprocal rights for children appeals largely to rule-utilitarian consequentialist premises intended to maximize welfare (i.e., the welfare of the community and the family as well as of the child) at a given historical time and place (see Frankena, 1973, for a succinct discussion of these and other contrasting theories of ethics). The justification for children’s equal rights is commonly grounded in the universalist theory of justice of Rawls (1971), who believed that to prove the validity of ethical principles of just treatment, these principles must be selected in the hypothetical “original position” behind “a veil of ignorance” in which individuals are ignorant of their own specific interests, circumstances, and abilities and cannot be biased by them. The “original position” assumes the priority of equal liberty as the fundamental terms of association of all rational persons. Maximizing liberty in equal distribution is a universal, objective end of human nature. This universalist view is the foundation for Rawls’s theory of justice, but giving priority to the ideal of the free, autonomous individual is also a uniquely Western notion that is at variance with the Eastern ideals of collective harmony and individual duty (Markus and Kitayama, 1991; Schweder, 1990; Triandis, 1990). A focus on individual rights is not equipped to address conflict between the rights of persons and the rights of the collective (Baumrind, 2004). The children’s rights movement, which rose to prominence in the 1970s (Holt, 1974; Kohn, 2005; Worsfold, 1974), claimed for children all the rights of adult persons, including the rights associated with self-determination. In this view, children’s rights are entitlements and as such impose ethical obligations on parents and the state. As interpreted by Worsfold (1974), Rawls’s universalist theory claims that “in their fundamental rights children and adults are the same” (p. 33) and indeed that children “have a right to do what they prefer when it conflicts with what their parents and society prefer” (p. 35–36). This view of children’s rights is consistent with, and indeed derives from, the foundational deontological principle of maximizing individual liberty of Rawls’s theory. Worsfold supports his case for equal rights for children with two empirical claims and two moral principles. The two empirical claims are (1) the first motive of everyone is to preserve her or his own personal liberty, and (2) children have the same capacity as adults to know what they want and are capable of weighing alternatives and acting on their decisions. The two moral principles are (3) all inequalities of primary goods such as liberty must be justified by relevant differences between the people concerned, and (4) people are not to enjoy a special advantage as a result of age, natural ability, or social status. If the empirical claims (1) and (2) were both true, it might be appropriate to conclude, with Worsfold, that children have the same self-determination rights as do adults—but a developmental analysis raises significant doubts about their validity. Concerning (1): It is doubtful that most people of any age value absolute liberty above all other fundamental values. For example, there is an abundance of evidence that children of all ages, although they would like to do as they please, accept parental authority as legitimate even when it is punitive as well as firm and deprives them of liberty (Barber, Stolz, and Olsen, 2005; Catron and Masters, 1993; Siegal and Barclay, 1985). Other interests are more important. Concerning (2): Immense differences in knowledge, experience, and power make it impossible to conclude that children have the same capacity as adults to know what they want and to weigh alternatives and act on their choices. Thus, restrictions on children’s liberty rights based on their natural, developmental incapacities to exercise those rights cannot be regarded as inequitable in the moral sense of being unjust. Worsfold states that the two moral principles that justify equal rights for children [(3) and (4)] are based on Rawls’s “original position” and “veil of ignorance,” and so they are. To be logically

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secured, the equal rights for children position requires the “veil of ignorance”: Age cannot be taken into account, and neither adults nor children may claim any special advantages even if their relevant capacities are shown to differ greatly. But with regard to age distinctions, Rawls himself (1971) made the argument for temporary restrictions on children’s liberty from paternalism, as did the major philosophers before him (Locke, Hegel, Mill, Rousseau), emphasizing the priority of liberty as an ultimate goal. In summary, then, the case for equal rights for children as set forth by Worsfold is not convincing. By contrast with deontological theorists, rule-utilitarian theories claim that the right, the obligatory, and the morally good are a function of what is nonmorally good. On the assumption that morality was made for humankind rather than humankind for morality, rule-utilitarians are primarily concerned with the long-range consequences for humankind of acting on the ethical guidelines they espouse. Ruleutilitarians (unlike rule-deontologists) claim that the rules that are right are determined by their longrange consequences. An act is right if, and only if, it would maximize welfare (Brandt, 1998). What is judged to be right in principle is based, not on a short-range cost–benefit analysis of individual acts, but rather on the long-range consequences of applying the rule generally. The institutions of liberty are valued highly, for example, because they assure rational pursuit of the progressive interests of humankind. The right of parents to restrict the liberty of their dependent children is justified because application of this right typically advances the best interests of the child and the common good of the family and the state. Unlike act-utilitarians, rule-utilitarians do not claim that each situation is different and unique, but instead claim that general (but not necessarily universalizable) rules and guidelines must be formulated in making moral claims. However, based on particular welfare considerations, a moral code may vary from subgroup to subgroup within society. The principle of utility enters in determining what the rules will be in like contexts, rather than what concrete action should be performed in a given instance, as in situation ethics or other variations of act-utilitarianism. So in deciding whether one should lie or tell the truth, the long-range consequences of lying in general must be considered, not merely whether telling the truth or a lie in this particular instance is more beneficent in its effect. Unlike the deontological injunction against lying in all circumstances, for instance, rule-utilitarians would claim that to prevent a greater evil or to achieve a greater good in the long run, it would be right to lie. The example often given is that one ought to lie to secure the safe haven of a potential Holocaust victim. Frankena (1973, p. 52) developed a “mixed deontological theory of obligation” that takes as basic both the principle of beneficence (to do good and prevent or avoid harm) and the principle of justice (equal treatment), but appears to give precedence to the principle of justice. By contrast, ruleutilitarians incorporate the principle of social and distributive justice within the principle of utility (or beneficence) by claiming that what satisfies the principle of utility or beneficence in the long run must also satisfy the requirements of justice. For example, an unequal but equitable distribution of resources can maximize total welfare (“to each according to his or her needs”), even within the family. In formulating ethical guidelines for parenting, we adopt a modified rule-utilitarian stance, not dissimilar to that which Frankena (1973) proposed, in that it emphasizes justice (in the sense of equitable, not equal, treatment) as well as beneficence as underlying and unifying principles of morality. In our view, both principles—beneficence and justice—must be taken into account in determining what constitutes ethical parenting, but justice does not take precedence over beneficence. Our “mixed rule-utilitarian theory” emphasizes a welfare-maximizing principle, but in addition requires a separate justification for inequality of distribution of resources and goods. The justification for equitable rather than equal distribution of resources to children within a family must be based on age, gender, and/or sibling order differences in terms of needs, preferences, and capabilities. Justice is not conceived simplistically as guaranteeing equal treatment in the short run, but rather as demanding a justification for unequal treatment based on relevant differences between the people concerned. 7

Ross A. Thompson and Diana Baumrind

Thus, with regard to the relationship between parents and children, unequal treatment as it relates to liberty is justified on the ground that it will produce greater good in the long run because it is based on relevant differences in needs and capabilities, by contrast with equal treatment that disregards these differences. Children’s right to protection, support, and nurturance are greater and their right to selfdetermination correspondingly less than their parents. Liberty is recognized as a good but not as the primary good.

A Mixed Rule-Utilitarian Justification for Parental Authority and Children’s Liberty Until the 20th century, few questioned the justification for restricting children’s liberty in the family. Despite his romantic view of childhood, even Rousseau argued for authoritative rule in the family on the basis that parental rule “looks more to the advantage of him who obeys than to that of him who commands” (Rousseau, 1754/1952, p. 357). The proprietary interests of parents in their children’s welfare presumes an authority more benevolent than that of a disinterested third party. When parents are exploitative, cruel, or incompetent, their authority is thereby rendered illegitimate. In a similar vein more than 50 years later, Hegel (1821/1952, p. 61) wrote: The right of the parents over the wishes of their children is determined by the object in view—discipline and education. The punishment of children does not aim at justice as such; the aim is more subjective and moral in character, that is, to deter them from exercising a freedom still in the toils of nature and to lift the universal into their consciousness and will. Similarly, the rule-utilitarian John Stuart Mill (1859/1973) restricted the ideal of self-determination to individuals capable of assuming adult responsibilities, arguing that, although the adult generation is not perfectly wise and good with regard to the interests of the next generation, it is wiser and better in its judgments of what would benefit them than that generation is itself. From a different philosophical perspective but with comparable relevance to parenting, Aristotelean virtue ethicists justify parental authority because of the tutelage it provides to enable children to develop the practices and the practical wisdom necessary to the growth of virtuous character. Virtue ethics regards ethical conduct not as the proper application of universalizable rules nor as deriving from a consequentialist analysis, but rather as conduct that arises from virtuous character and practical wisdom, and in this regard they are in agreement with most parents that character development is foundational to socialized behavior. In the Aristotelean tradition, virtuous qualities develop through habituation—the practice over time of virtuous conduct that derives, in part, from the enduring efforts of parents to make such conduct habitual in children and thus ingrained in personality—combined with the socialization of practical rationality in the application of virtuous character. Although these influences begin early (Thompson and Lavine, 2016), a sustained period under parental guidance is necessary to the development of virtuous qualities. Parental authority, including the right to speak for their children and to discipline them, is rationally justified by children’s dependent status and relative incompetence, imposing on parents the obligation to protect, nurture, and train children, and the right to reward and punish them contingent on parents’ standards of desirable behavior. As parents do so, children learn to master the environment and to develop a stable sense of self. Self-determination becomes a conscious predominant value during adolescence with its constructive expression predicated on competence, an internal locus of control, and an understanding of moral reciprocity—all capacities developed through the socialization process, which includes parental limit setting. Unequal distribution of liberty is justified in the child’s mind, as in the adult’s mind, by recognition of the relevant age-related differences between them. Prior to the child’s acquisition of the ability to think logically and symbolically, parental authority is legitimated 8

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in the child’s mind by the fact that the child is weak and the parent is strong and by the child’s strong emotional attachment to the parent. The disciplinary encounter, including the use of reward and punishment, is a necessary part of the socialization process through which parents fulfill their obligations to their children. In families with normally assertive toddlers, parental correction and management of child behavior are frequent. Conflictual interactions between young children and their parents occur from 3 to 15 times an hour and even more often when children are defiant (Dix, 1991; Klimes-Dougan, and Kopp, 1999). Because it is rare for a single disciplinary encounter to alter a child’s motivated behavior permanently, periodic reinforcement and explanations are necessary. Properly handled, these recurring disciplinary encounters enable children to better understand the meaning of the request and its justification, internalize the expectation, and even learn the skills of negotiation and thus promote their future autonomy as well as immediate compliance. Because punishment is necessarily aversive, it can be justified only when aimed at maximizing the child’s long-term welfare. By preventing and reforming bad behavior and educating and encouraging good behavior, mild punishment, when indicated, is intended to advance the welfare of the family and the community, as well as of the child. Although parental use of power assertion is sometimes disparaged by developmentalists (Grolnick, 2003; Gershoff, 2002; Holden, 1997), it is important to distinguish confrontive from coercive parental power assertion and its effects on children (Baumrind, 2012). Coercive power assertion is arbitrary, preemptory, relies on threats and psychological control, and is the kind of power assertion that characterizes authoritarian parents. By contrast, confrontive power assertion is reasoned, negotiable, outcome-oriented, concerned with behavioral control, and is typical of authoritative parents. Both are demanding and forceful, but their effects on children are different. Consistent with earlier cross-sectional findings, for example, Baumrind, Larzelere, and Owens (2010) reported that the longitudinal effects of confrontive as opposed to coercive parental power assertion when children were preschoolers were beneficial: ten years later, adolescents showed greater cognitive competence and self-efficacy and fewer problem behaviors. Sorkhabi and Middaugh (2014) reported that parental use of coercive or confrontive power assertion was associated with differences in relational outcomes between adolescents and parents, with heightened affiliation when parents were confrontive but not coercive. The distinction between confrontive and coercive power assertion is important, because although power assertion can be readily contrasted with reasoning and other forms of inductive discipline for descriptive purposes, authoritative parents use both, and the combination promotes children’s constructive obedience and responsible conduct (Baumrind, 2004, 2012, 2013a). When enlisted by authoritative parents, power assertion is neither arbitrary nor harsh but marshaled to promote compliance in the context of a responsive relationship in which children’s dissent is heard and respected. Exercised in this manner, power assertion is consistent with parents’ ethical responsibility to socialize children’s conduct and promote their responsible membership in society.

The Child’s Best Interest Criterion for Determining Ethical Parenting: Protectionist, Liberationalist, and Developmental Perspectives Another way of understanding alternative constructions of children’s needs and rights, and the ethical responsibilities of parents, is to consider how best to define children’s “best interests.” It is incontrovertible that it is in children’s best interests to survive, develop fully, and be protected from harm. But advancing beyond these minima reveals significant differences in views of children’s needs and the responsibilities of adults as caregivers. Protectionists and liberationists view children’s best interests differently, especially with respect to children’s self-determination interests. Children’s rights advocates (Cohen, 1980; Kohn, 2005) adopt a liberationist view and claim that it suffices for children to have a rudimentary understanding of 9

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basic survival facts to entitle them to make their own decisions, whether or not they can do so wisely. This liberationist argument from justice, based on deontological thinking, gives primacy to the right to self-determination for everyone, including children, whereas the protectionist argument from a consequentialist framework encourages children’s personal agency not as a moral right, but rather as a developmental need to be weighed against other developmental needs. Wald (1979) distinguished among four categories of children’s rights, two of which may be viewed as protectionist and two as liberationist. The two protectionist rights are (1) “rights against the world,” which pertain to adequate nutrition, housing, medical care, and schooling, which should be assured by legislatures, not courts; and (2) “protection from inadequate care” by adults, especially parents, or what are typically regarded as abuse and neglect allegations. The two liberationist rights are (3) “adult legal status,” which would relieve children of status offenses or any other form of coercion that would be unconstitutional if attempted with adults, and—the most controversial—(4) “rights against parents,” which would enable unemancipated children to act independently of their parents and against parental wishes. From a justice perspective (which requires that like cases be treated alike), age must be shown to be morally relevant in apportioning either rights or responsibilities. Wald pointed out that granting children liberation rights is a mixed blessing at best. The disadvantage for children of having greater adult-like legal status has been the increasing tendency of the legal system to treat children as adults in the courts, thus holding them (as well as their parents) responsible for their criminal actions. If distinctions based on age in the granting of liberty rights are thought to be unjustifiable, then so are age-based distinctions granting children freedom from responsibility for criminal conduct based on their developmental limitations. Conversely, if children are to be subject to status offenses, then their age may entitle them to freedom from other kinds of criminal responsibility in the courts. There is, however, a third perspective to children’s best interests that is an alternative to protectionist and liberationist views. From a developmentalist perspective, age is a highly relevant justification for constraining children’s liberty. As is universally recognized, with increasing age children develop the cognitive capacities for perspective taking, complex reasoning, and a decentered sense of self that are relevant to the exercise of rights, including those related to autonomy. These and other cognitive skills also enable children to increasingly perceive themselves in the context of social units and society, to comprehend and willingly accept the responsibilities that come with citizenship, and to perceive their actions in terms of near- and long-term futures. With increasing age children and adolescents also acquire the capabilities necessary to function competently outside the family. Consequently, children’s best interests compel changes with age in parental responsibilities related to nurturance and protection (greater when the child is younger) and restrictions on children’s exercise of autonomy or selfdetermination rights (decreasing with children’s increasing age and competence). A developmentalist perspective is not only ethically justified and empirically sound, it is also consistent with how children themselves perceive their rights (Helwig, Ruck, and Peterson-Badali, 2014). When children ranging in age from 8 to 16 responded to a series of hypothetical stories in which parents (or other authorities) threatened to contravene a child’s nurturance or self-determination rights, at all ages children endorsed the story character’s nurturance rights (e.g., continued access to food and clothing), which were deemed parental responsibilities. By contrast, there were significant increases with age in children’s endorsement of self-determination rights for the story character (e.g., keeping a diary private), with children increasingly referring to that person’s rights as justification (Ruck, Abramovitch, and Keating, 1998). When mothers were interviewed about nurturance and selfdetermination vignettes, the results were similar, although mothers were also attentive to the maturity or capabilities of the story character to exercise self-determination rights (Ruck, Peterson-Badali, and Day, 2002). Children also endorse a developmentalist perspective in their everyday behavior. The imposition of authority, even against the child’s will, is perceived by most children (as well as by their parents) as 10

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age-appropriate during the first six years. This is especially so if disciplinary practices are consistent with what children perceive to be normative for their culture and social group (Lansford, Chang, Dodge, Malone, et al., 2005). During the preschool years, adult constraint—expressed as consistent contingent reinforcement and regularity—helps to promote the child’s sense of security and her or his belief that the world can be a safe, predictable place. Toddler compliance is most effective when the adult briefly explains the rule and provides a consequence if the child persists in disobeying, reserving longer explanations for when punishment is over (Blum, Williams, Friman, and Christophersen, 1995). Preschool children in middle-class American families broadly accept punishment as suitable across behavioral domains (moral, conventional, prudential), whereas by middle childhood children are more discriminating, viewing punishment for violations of moral and safety concerns as acceptable but for conventional transgressions as unacceptable (Catron and Masters, 1993). The importance of using reason to justify caregivers’ directives increases with age. By early adolescence, children are more likely to endorse parents who use reason rather than force or psychological control to justify their decisions and demands, even in cultures with normative use of psychological control (Helwig, To, Wang, Liu, and Yang, 2014). With increasing maturity, children distinguish between personal issues (such as what clothes to wear) and moral (such as bullying weaker children) or conventional issues (such as table manners), and by adolescence tend to regard parental directives pertaining to moral issues as legitimate, conventional or prudential issues (such as dietary injunctions) as somewhat less legitimate, and personal issues (such as dress) as not legitimate domains in which parents may assert their authority (Nucci, 1981; Smetana, 1988, 2019). As children approach adolescence their growing need for independence, as well as their capacities to think through their own best interests and to empathize with the needs of others, entitle them to a vote as well as a voice in matters that intimately affect them in the personal domain, such as custody disputes. In summary, a developmentalist perspective argues that what constitutes children’s best interests varies with the child’s age. The protectionist perspective emphasizes children’s need for nurturance and protection from danger, including parental and societal neglect and abuse, at all ages. The liberationist perspective emphasizes the child’s inherent right to self-determination, with liberty regarded as the primary “good” to which children and adults are equally entitled. From the developmental perspective that we endorse, however, the child’s age is a highly relevant justification both for restraining children’s liberty and for determining their rights to protection and nurturance. Justice, according to natural law, must take into account real differences in ability and need in determining the apportionment of privileges, responsibilities, and rewards. At each childhood stage the duties and rights of parents and children differ, finally approximating the balance that characterizes a mature adult–adult relationship. During the adolescent period the child gradually relinquishes the privileges and limitations of childhood and assumes the responsibilities of adulthood, and is rewarded with self-determination.

Parents’ Developmental Responsibilities: Shaping Children’s Character and Competence We have sought in this discussion to clarify the nature of children’s rights and parental responsibilities and, in particular, to provide an ethical justification for parental authority that is consistent with a mixed rule-utilitarian perspective and developmental science. But what are the purposes for which parental authority is exercised? What, in other words, are parents’ developmental responsibilities to offspring? The power to shape children’s character and competence is an awesome responsibility requiring conscious sustained and systematic commitment by dedicated caregivers. Parents are responsible for contributing substantially to the development of ethical character and competence in their children 11

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through their socialization efforts (Baumrind, 1998). Socialization is an adult-initiated process by which young persons through education, training, and imitation acquire their culture, as well as the habits and values congruent with adaptation to that culture. Children’s perspectives shape their understanding of parents’ socialization efforts, but their perspectives are strongly influenced by their parents’ perspectives, which are grounded in particular cultural contexts and instantiated in adult behavior. In this section, we focus particularly on the development of the dual essentials of socialization—character and competence—and then consider briefly the importance of culture in defining these essentials.

Character The abilities to know right from wrong and to regulate one’s own actions led Waddington (1960) to refer to human beings as “the ethical animal.” When its moral component is made explicit, character may be thought of as personality evaluated. Character constitutes the ethical estimate of an individual and refers to that aspect of personality that engenders accountability. These qualities of character have traditionally been deemed virtues. Character is responsible for persistence in the face of obstacles and inhibits immediate impulses in the service of some more remote or other-oriented goal. Character provides the structure of internal law that governs inner thoughts and volitions subject to the agent’s control under the jurisdiction of conscience. Within limits imposed by their competencies (cognitive, affective, and physical), circumstances, and cultures, ethical agents are able to plan their actions and implement their plans; to examine and choose among options; to eschew certain actions in favor of others; and to structure their lives by adopting congenial habits, attitudes, and rules of conduct. How may parents contribute to the development of a virtuous character in their children? Wilson (1993) contended that children are born with the moral sentiments of fairness, duty, sympathy, and self-control (see also Haidt, 2012). However, they also require cultivation of their moral sentiments by socializing agents. The child’s moral sentiments are cultivated most effectively by caregivers who have a clear sense of purpose; enforce their directives; and convey their messages simply, firmly, and consistently. Through the disciplinary encounter and other means, caregivers attempt to induce children to behave in accord with parental standards of proper conduct and to become aware that they have an obligation to comply with legitimate authority and to respect the rights of others. The short-range objective of the exercise of parental authority is to maintain order in the family, but this short-range objective is subordinated to parents’ ultimate objective, which is to further children’s development from a dependent infant into a self-determining, socially responsible, and moral adult. Becoming a moral agent is not simply conforming unreflectively to internalized expectations of authority but also constructing personal moral standards to guide conduct even when one is free from external inducements or surveillance, and which form the basis for self-conscious moral reflection. For parents who want their children to become autonomous moral adults, dispositional compliance—uncritical internalization of society’s norms—is thus not the preeminent long-range childrearing objective (Baumrind, 2013b). Rather, the objective is behavioral compliance combined with a capacity for responsible dissent: to question authority, negotiate, resist injustice, and make thoughtful, autonomous moral choices (Baumrind, 2004; Sorkhabi and Baumrind, 2009). Responsible dissent, a constructive form of noncompliance, can be contrasted with persistent oppositional defiance, which is unconstructive and unfocused general resistance and has negative consequences for children and the family (Eyberg, Nelson, and Boggs, 2008; Morrissey and Gondoli, 2012). Parents encourage the development of ethical agency in children by distinguishing between unconstructive and constructive noncompliance strategies, and by encouraging the latter by negotiating with a child who mounts a rational objection to a negotiable parental directive (Goodnow, 1994; Kuczynski and Kochanska, 1990). Provided that firm parental control has been exercised in childhood, far fewer rules will be required in adolescence, and family power can be distributed more symmetrically (Baumrind, 1983, 1987; Baumrind and Moselle, 1985; Kandel and Lesser, 1969; Perry and Perry, 1983). 12

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Disciplinary encounters are not the only—or even the primary—means by which parents influence the character development of their children. Of paramount importance is the manner in which caregivers live their own lives by acting in accord with their beliefs, modeling compassion and courage, engaging in physically and mentally healthy behaviors, and creating the family as a just institution (Okin, 1989). As Okin, following in the footsteps of John Stuart Mill (1869/1988) argued, the family is the first and most influential source of moral development. Justice in the family is modeled by attending carefully to everyone’s point of view, distributing resources and tasks equitably by taking into account preference, need, and ability, and establishing gender equity. If home responsibilities are inequitably distributed or distributed on the basis of gender without consideration of personal preferences and abilities, children learn injustice and gender-based inequality in power and access to resources. The mark of virtuous character differs somewhat in Eastern and Western thought. Personal integrity marks exemplary character in Western thought. Integrity implies both wholeness and honesty. Wholeness means that a person’s precepts and practices are consistent, that the same standards are applied to means and ends, and that the dichotomy between self and other is transcended in understanding true self-interest. Honesty preserves trust in human relationships. Rule-utilitarians place a high premium on truth telling and trust, although unlike Kantian deontologists, they do not claim that truth-telling is an unconditional duty that holds in all circumstances, even if a life is forfeited (Kant, 1797/1964). From a consequentialist perspective promise keeping and truth telling are, however, of sufficient utility in promoting the greatest good for the greatest number to justify an initial presumption against lying. Truth telling is such a difficult discipline to acquire, however, and the principle of veracity has such utility in social life, that parents need to act as models, especially when it is awkward or uncomfortable to tell their child the truth. (For a differentiated treatment of the subject of lying, see Bok, 1979; for a discussion of rule-utilitarian objections to deception research, see Baumrind, 1971b, 1972b, 1979, 1985, 1992, 2013c). The Eastern perspective on integrity differs from Western thought because the self is construed as context dependent so that its identity is allowed to change with circumstances and relationships. Jen, a cardinal Chinese virtue, is the ability to interact in a polite, decent, and sympathetic fashion and to flexibly change one’s behavior in accord with the requirements of a relationship (Hsu, 1985). Therefore, authenticity that requires people to focus their attention on their own inner feelings and convictions rather than on the reactions of others is not considered as important as not hurting others psychologically or disrupting harmonious interactions with them. In Eastern thought trust is based on goodwill rather than on telling the whole truth because it is understood that how one acts is a negotiated and shared social enterprise. Ethical personality evolves by successive forms of reciprocity in which the capacity develops for treating the other as someone like oneself rather than alien from oneself. From a young child’s dawning awareness of psychological states in others (i.e., theory of mind) emerges the earliest moral sensibility in a preschooler’s sensitivity to the feelings, beliefs, and goals of others (Thompson, 2012, 2015). By middle childhood, the child recognizes that stable social relationships, including those within the family, are based on the reciprocal maintenance of expectations by social partners as well as on appropriate feelings of gratitude or grievance. Consequently, children actively solicit approval from adults as well as peers and can understand the reasons for parental directives. Perceiving their peers as like themselves in status and nature, they can better extend toward them genuine concern and comprehend their antithetical position in an altercation (Allen and Loeb, 2015). By early adolescence, youth acknowledge reciprocity in their relationships with adults and adopt a considered view of existential obligations that embraces an understanding of one’s obligations to others (Matsuba, Murzyn, and Hart, 2014). By acts of compassionate regard and respect for the rights of others, one invites reciprocal acts of goodwill in time of need. As children develop intellectually, socially, and emotionally, their character becomes shaped by parental practices that include (1) the “scaffolding” of shared activity with the child that leads offspring 13

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to new patterns of behavior and thought (Damon and Colby, 1987; Pratt, Kerig, Cowan, and Cowan, 1988); (2) inclusion in family habits of hospitality, compassion, and generosity that are extended to the larger community (McIntosh, Hart, and Youniss, 2007); (3) direct training in role taking, sometimes through parent–child conversation about helping (Thompson and Winer, 2014); (4) parental use of induction and reasoning in preference to power; and (5) the child’s opportunities to observe loved adults acting consistently with their expressed moral beliefs (Colby and Damon, 1992; Oliner and Oliner, 1988). As a consequence, children become ethically sound by internalizing adult values of kindness, fairness, and respect; experiencing empathy and sympathy for others; developing habits of fair and considerate treatment of others; and forming personal standards of right and wrong that result in a sense of obligation to others. Perhaps most important, parental practices focused on the principle of compassionate regard for children will foster in children the ability to make inferences about how others feel and respect for those feelings (Thompson, 2014).

Competence Competence is effective human functioning in the attainment of desired and valued goals. The goals that are valued in a culture are those that enable individuals to pursue their personal objectives within the constraints imposed by the common good and by their social networks. The presence of virtuous character, intelligence, creativity, and determination enable many people to make substantial contributions to society. It takes virtuous character to will the good, and competence to do good well. Optimum competence as well as good character in Western society require both highly developed communal and agentic (self-assertive) attributes and skills, the two orthogonal dimensions of instrumental competence (see Baumrind, 1970, 1973; Baumrind and Black, 1967). In Western psychological literature (Bakan, 1966; Ryan and Deci, 2017), agency refers to the drive for independence, individuality, and self-aggrandizement, whereas communion refers to receptivity, empathy, interdependency, and the need to be of service and engaged with others. The social dimensions of status (dominance, power) and love (solidarity, affiliation), which emerge as the two orthogonal axes from many factor analyses of Western personality characteristics (Baumrind and Black, 1967; Lonner, 1980; Wiggins, 1979), are manifestations of agency and communion. Optimum competence requires a balance of highly developed agentic and communal qualities, and thus this is also a prized goal of childrearing. In practice, the integration of the two modalities is represented by actions that resolve social conflicts in a manner that is both just and compassionate and that promotes the interests of both one’s self and one’s community (Baumrind, 1982). The young child’s development of competence is the product of increasingly complex interactions of the developing child with socializing adults—primarily parents—who during the child’s early years have the power to control these interactions. How parents socialize their children through disciplinary encounters, conversational discourse, the examples provided by their own conduct, and other means predicts crucial aspects of children’s positive and negative interpersonal behavior and socioemotional and cognitive development. In the past, most socialization researchers implicitly assumed that internalization of society’s rules, represented by parental values, was the primary objective of childrearing. However, today fewer parents and educators make that assumption. Internalization by one generation of the rules of the preceding generation represents the conservative force in society, whereas the impetus to social change comes about by the challenges each generation presents to the accepted values, rules, and habits of the previous generation. Behavioral compliance and internalization of parental standards are necessary but not sufficient childrearing objectives. In addition, the development of moral autonomy and its constituents—including the ability to make reasoned, independent moral choices, to understand the justification for moral expectations, to identify oneself as a moral being, and to engage in responsible dissent—is also important. 14

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We do not attempt here to review the literature on socialization effects as these contribute to the development of competence of children (see the bibliographic references to Baumrind, 1966, 1968, 1996b, 1997a, 2013b; Maccoby and Martin, 1983). Instead, we describe the authoritative model, which has to date proven to be the most effective childrearing style in generating high levels of both agency and communion in European-American children. Authoritative parenting balances warm involvement and psychological autonomy with firm, consistent behavioral control and developmentally high expectations for social maturity and cognitive achievement. In contrast to authoritarian parents who are highly demanding (enlisting coercive power assertion) but not responsive, permissive parents who are responsive but not demanding, and unengaged parents who are neither demanding nor responsive, authoritative parents are both highly demanding and highly responsive. On the one hand, they provide firm control and high maturity demands, and on the other hand, they offer warmth, responsiveness, and encouragement of autonomy (Baumrind, 1966, 1975, 1978a, 1980). Authoritative parents emphasize the importance of well-timed parental interventions. They minimize intrusions on a toddler’s autonomy by proactive caregiving, such as childproofing, quality time-in, an abundance of positive attention and active listening; clear instructions; and progressive expectations for self-help. Authoritative parents are receptive to the child’s views but take responsibility for firmly guiding the child’s actions by emphasizing reasoning, communication, and rational discussion in interactions that are friendly as well as tutorial and disciplinary. The balanced perspective of authoritative parents is neither exclusively child-centered nor exclusively parent-centered, but instead seeks to integrate the needs of the child with those of other family members, treating the rights and responsibilities of children and those of parents as reciprocal and complementary rather than as identical. Authoritative parents endorse the judicious use of aversive consequences when needed in the context of a warm, engaged, and rational parent–child relationship. Because children have their own agendas that include testing the limits of their parents’ authority, disciplinary encounters are frequent, even in authoritative homes. At such times direct, confrontive power assertion that is just sufficient to control the child’s behavior and is preceded by an explanation most effectively reinforces parental authority concerning the standards that the child must meet. Studies that focus on the mechanisms that characterize the authoritative parent show how authoritative parents encourage moral internalization, self-assertion, prosocial behavior, and high cognitive performance. Their strategies include (1) scaffolding of children’s competence, including children’s social competence, through shared activity and conversations (Pratt et al., 1988; Tomasello, 2016); (2) reliance on person-centered persuasion rather than on coercion (Applegate, Burke, Burleson, Delia, and Kline, 1985; Thompson, Laible, and Ontai, 2003); (3) monitoring of offspring and the use of contingent reinforcement; (4) consistency with the “minimum sufficiency principle” (Lepper, 1983) of using just enough pressure to enlist child compliance; (5) instantiation of the ethical principle of reciprocity (Kochanska, 2002; Parpal and Maccoby, 1985); and (6) involved and engaged participation in the child’s life (Pomerantz, Ng, Cheung, and Qu, 2014; Rogoff, Moore, Correa-Chávez, and Dexter, 2015).

Cultural Considerations Converging findings support relations between the authoritative style of childrearing and instrumental competence in European-American middle-class children (Baumrind, 1971a, 1972a, 1983, 1989, 1991a, 1991b, 1991c, 1993, 1994, 1996a, 1996b, 1998, 2013b). Although alternative candidates for optimal parenting may exist in diverse cultural contexts, no study has shown authoritative parenting to be more harmful or less effective than any of the alternative parenting styles in promoting children’s competence and character. The literature suggests that optimal parenting in any culture is likely to have certain features that characterize authoritative parents—deep and abiding commitment to the parenting role, intimate knowledge of their child and her or his developmental needs, respect 15

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for the child’s individuality and desires, provision of structure and regimen appropriate to the child’s developmental level, readiness to establish and enforce behavioral guidelines, cognitive stimulation, and effective communication and use of reasoning to ensure children’s understanding of parents’ goals and disciplinary strategies. Just what combination of behavioral control, warmth, and psychological autonomy is optimal in advancing children’s competence and character, and how each of these outcomes should be operationally defined, is likely to be moderated by social context (Lansford et al., 2005). Cultures differ in their emphasis on the rights of individuals or their responsibilities to the polity (Whiting and Whiting, 1975). The ideals of equality and liberty inherent in the Anglo-American Western tradition and of social harmony, purity, and collectivity in hierarchical collectivist cultures such as India or Japan affect the parental attitudes and practices that are deemed desirable and the childrearing goals that parents set forth for themselves and their children. The emphasis on children’s rights to self-determination is predominantly a Western ideal. The Eastern sensibility of nonintrusive and harmonious social relationships contrasts markedly with rights-oriented competitive societies such as the United States. In the context, therefore, of cultural diversity in conceptions of human needs, rights and responsibilities, the roles of parents, and the goals of childrearing, a developmental orientation to parental responsibilities—especially with respect to the development of character and competence—leads to the conclusion that significant hallmarks of authoritative parenting are contributors to child competence. As a consequence, “the ethics of parenting” embraces both broadly generalizable (consistent with a rule-utilitarian framework) and culturally specific considerations. It could not be otherwise, respecting as we must the constructions of children’s needs and parenting responsibilities that characterize cultures and cultural groups. Moreover, the importance of culture increases as we broaden our discussion from parents and children to considerations of parents, children, and the state.

Parents, Children, and the State Although the emphasis of moral philosophy is on the reciprocal responsibilities of parents and children, the community also assumes a significant role in childrearing. Communities provide resources that can assist adults in ethically responsible parenting. Material resources include income support, affordable and high-quality childcare, and workplace practices that enable workers to be responsible parents. Human resources include access to networks of social support, whether in formal contexts (such as social services, parent support groups, or religious institutions) or the informal social support systems characterizing many extended families and neighborhoods (Thompson, 1995). Communities also advance ethical parenting by informally supervising and regulating parental practices to conform them to cultural norms and to ensure child well-being. That “it takes a village to raise a child” reflects the view that parenting is interpreted, supported, and monitored by others beyond the family, which raises significant questions about the relations between ethically responsible parenting and an ethically responsible society in which parenting occurs. These questions are the concern of this section. What is the role of society in promoting ethical parenting? Can the state ensure that parents fulfill their positive obligations toward offspring, or can it only sanction them when they do wrong? What can the state do to ensure that parents act in an ethically responsible manner? What are the justifications for the community’s intervention into family life? In what other ways can the state support ethical parenting? By addressing these questions, we may help to explain the complex and often troubled relationships between parents, children, and the state. Although parents bear ultimate responsibility for the care and treatment of their children, how the community treats families can make the responsibilities of ethical parenting either easier or more difficult for adults to fulfill.

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The State and the Family The state—defined as national, state, and local governing bodies and associated institutions—has considerable interest in the well-being of children. After all, children are citizens, as are their parents. But children are citizens with different qualities. Children’s developmentally limited capacities for thinking, judgment, and reasoning described earlier mean that children have different needs, capabilities, and circumstances compared with other citizens. This means, consistent with the foregoing arguments, that they require special protections and constraints on their liberty that are not offered other citizens, such as laws governing their economic support; restrictions on child labor, drinking, and driving; protections from sexual exploitation, abandonment, and corrupting influences; and alternative judicial procedures for the treatment of juvenile offenders. Developmental limitations in decision-making and reasoning also mean that, by comparison with adults as “persons” before the law, children have limited autonomy and self-determination, and many decisions (such as consenting to medical treatment and experimentation, and financial decisions) are made on their behalf (Cavanaugh and Cauffman, 2019). Many of these limits on autonomy are developmentally graded, as earlier noted, such that adolescents are legally entitled to exercise greater self-determination (e.g., privileges such as driving; independent judgments in certain circumstances related to medical care; opportunities to work) than are young children. The state adopts an attitude of beneficent paternalism toward its youngest citizens. Such an attitude neither demeans, disadvantages, nor exploits children (as is sometimes claimed by those adopting a liberationist view of children) but instead, by treating children as a “special” citizen group, affords special protections and restrictions suited to children’s unique characteristics and needs. The state’s approach is consistent with the mixed rule-utilitarian perspective we described earlier with respect to the ethical responsibilities of parents because each is based on a developmental orientation to the exercise of external authority in relation to children’s capabilities and needs. The state’s attitude of beneficent paternalism is deeply rooted in Western philosophical and legal traditions, including the distinction by Hegel (1821/1952) between the obligations of family membership and state citizenship. From these traditions has arisen the doctrine of the state as parens patriae—literally, “the state as parent.” Originally intended to protect the state’s interests in the property interests of dependent children, the doctrine indicates that the state may act in loco parentis (“in place of the parent”) to protect citizens who are unable to defend their own interests. The parens patriae doctrine has become well established in Western law, and is invoked particularly in situations when parents are unwilling, or unable, to protect the interests of offspring (Areen, 1975). In these circumstances and others, the parens patriae doctrine can justify removing children from the family and warrant other interventions into family life. The state has other reasons to be interested in the well-being of its youngest citizens besides their dependency needs. In particular, the maintenance of the community depends on children’s internalization of values that are consistent with public goals and values. These values may derive from the ideals of individualism, equality, competition, and liberty characteristic of the European-American Western tradition, or the ideals of social harmony, collectivism, deference to authority, and cooperation more characteristic of certain Eastern traditions. Children are expected to accept the values, customs, and responsibilities of community life and to acquire the skills necessary to contribute meaningfully to the community. These adaptive skills vary significantly according to historical time and location, but whether they concern mastery of agricultural skills, literary and numeracy skills, or technological competence, they constitute some of the essential capabilities valued for citizenship. Because of the state’s interest in these facets of early socialization, educational institutions outside of the family have become an almost universal feature of childhood (Crosnoe and Ressler, 2019). The state thus has significant interests in the well-being of its children-citizens and promotes these interests in a variety of ways that intrude on parents’ autonomy to rear children as they wish. In light

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of these important state interests, indeed, are families necessary? This is not a casual or unimportant question (Aiken and LaFollette, 1980; Houlgate, 1988). The ideal civic life envisioned in Plato’s (1979) Republic divorced procreation from childrearing to ensure that children reared communally would internalize the collective values and ideals necessary for social welfare and promote solidarity of interests among those responsible for collective well-being. Advocacy of collective childrearing has been found in various places, from the institutional childcare centers of the old Soviet Union to traditional Israeli kibbutzim, and from the Marxist critique of the bourgeois family (Engels, 1884/1962) to B. F. Skinner’s (1948) utopian vision of the community of Walden Two. If we claim that families are necessary for children’s well-being, however, then describing why they are necessary can help to define the unique features of family life that the state should, above all, be hesitant to violate or usurp. In moral philosophy as well as developmental science, three justifications for the family are typically offered (McCarthy, 1988; Wald, 1975). First, children thrive psychologically in the context of the intimate, unique, and enduring relationships they create with specific caregivers, and these relationships can best be found in family life. This view is a cornerstone of classical psychological theories of early personality development and is supported by a substantial empirical literature (Cummings and Warmuth, 2019; Thompson, 2006). Although families are often rent by separation and divorce, and family intimacy is threatened by stresses of various kinds, it is rare that collective care is capable of providing children with the kinds of warm, specific, reliable relationships with adults who know the child well that are typical in most families (Sagi, van IJzendoorn, Aviezer, Donnell, and Mayseless, 1994). In institutional contexts, turnover of caregivers and high staff caseloads typically militate against children developing enduring, secure attachments to those who care for them. Second, most parents are highly motivated by the love they naturally feel for offspring to advance children’s well-being. Children are precious to them because parents regard offspring as extensions of themselves biologically, socially, and personally, and thus parental nurturance is deeply rooted in species evolution (Trivers, 1985). Although caregivers outside of the family can be motivated by strong affectional ties to the children they care for, their motivational bases for childcare are nevertheless different from those of parents and may not be as compelling. Third, although they are all cultural members, parents rear their offspring with different values and preferences, which ensures considerable social diversity in childrearing goals and outcomes. One parent seeks to rear her or his child to be conscientious and responsible; another values creativity and imagination; a third seeks to foster individuality and leadership. Within the broad boundaries of acceptable parental conduct, these diverse parental practices ensure plurality in the attributes and characteristics of children that is essential to a democratic society that values and benefits from the diversity of its members. This is what John Stuart Mill (1859/1973, p. 202) called a “plurality of paths”: What has made the European family of nations an improving, instead of a stationary portion of mankind? Not any superior excellence in them, which, when it exists, exists as the effect not as the cause; but their remarkable diversity of character and culture. Individuals, classes, nations, have been extremely unlike one another: they have struck out a great variety of paths, each leading to something valuable. By contrast with the consistency in practices and goals that would necessarily characterize collective forms of childrearing, families afford societal pluralism in child outcomes that is a desirable feature of a creative, dynamic culture. These arguments from moral philosophy, supported by the findings of developmental science, confirm the unique contributions that parent–child relationships offer to children and, furthermore, justify special provisions to protect these relationships from outside interference. They underscore that respect for family privacy and parental autonomy in childrearing decisions should be protected 18

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by the same state that has considerable interest in children’s well-being and their appropriate socialization. This is because the unique qualities of family life—intimate relationships, individuality, and self-disclosure, a plurality of developmental paths—are violated by undue outside intrusions on the family. As Blustein (1982, p. 214) expressed it, “privacy is a precondition of intimacy.” Stated differently, the state’s interest in children’s well-being is advanced partly by its protection of family life against unnecessary intrusions from the outside, including intrusions from state authorities who may be motivated by the needs of children. There is thus a delicate balancing between the state’s interest in child welfare and the state’s interest in family privacy. This view is the basis for the long-standing legal deference to the preferences of parents in childrearing decisions. In U.S. Supreme Court decisions beginning nearly a century ago (see Meyer v. Nebraska, 1923; Pierce v. Society of Sisters, 1925), the Court has been clear that: [i]t is cardinal with us that the custody, care and nurture of the child reside first in the parents, whose primary function and freedom include preparation for obligations the state can neither supply nor hinder. . . . And it is in recognition of this that these decisions have respected the private realm of family life which the state cannot enter. ( Prince v. Massachusetts, 1944, p. 166) Absent a compelling state interest, therefore, family life and parental decision-making concerning the care of offspring are protected from the state’s intervention. Although this legal tradition and its philosophical foundations are commonly interpreted within a deontological universalist framework of parental rights (often contrasted with children’s rights and the “rights” of the state), a more constructive reading focuses on the long-range consequences for human welfare of consequentialist ethical rules protecting family integrity compared to rules permitting substantial intervention by outside authorities. From this mixed rule-utilitarian perspective, children are far more likely to thrive psychologically in families in which parents are permitted significant latitude in their childrearing practices and goals compared to alternative forms of collective care, and society in general (at least a society embracing democratic values) is also likely to be stronger when family privacy is safeguarded. Such an analysis does not ensure that all outcomes arising from this ethical perspective will necessarily be easy or satisfactory. The U.S. Supreme Court has, for example, struggled with the implications of its decisions concerning parental autonomy, affirming in one case (Wisconsin v. Yoder, 1972) the rights of Amish families to deny secondary school education to their children based on the adults’ religious beliefs and community norms, despite a stirring dissent emphasizing the needs of the children for secondary education. Nevertheless, we argue that an ethical rule protecting family integrity and parental autonomy provides the greatest benefits, in the long run, to children, parents, and the society in which they live.

Public and Private Ordering of “the Best Interests of the Child” Earlier in this chapter, we compared philosophically protectionist, liberationist, and developmentalist perspectives to determining children’s best interests in the exercise of parental authority. The state must also make judgments concerning “the best interests of the child,” but for many reasons it is less capable than parents of making the kinds of complex, individualized, multidimensional predictive judgments entailed in assessing children’s interests. This is why deference to parental decisions in these situations is also warranted. The state’s judgment concerning a child’s best interests is required in many legal decisions. Most commonly, these concern child custody when parents divorce, but grandparent visitation decisions (Thompson, Scalora, Castrianno, and Limber, 1992; Thompson, Tinsley, Scalora, and Parke, 1989) and other situations affecting children also require judgments of the child’s best interests. These judgments 19

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differ significantly from the kinds of judgments that judges and other authorities are well trained to provide. Most legal disputes, for example, focus on the documentation of facts. By contrast, judgments concerning children’s best interests entail less explicit and more subjective determinations of the relative quality and significance of relationships, the nature of parental care, the impact of different living circumstances, and related concerns. Statutory law, administrative policy, and judicial precedent usually provide significant guidance for legal and policy problems, but none of these is helpful for the individualized decisions required in determining a child’s best interests. The latter are person oriented rather than act oriented, are based on knowledge of the individual child’s characteristics and the circumstances of particular families, and require complex predictive rather than retrospective judgments involving future well-being rather than past actions. Finally, but perhaps most important, state decision-making in a democratic society typically involves the representation of all relevant parties and opportunities for each to express their views. By contrast, judgments concerning a child’s best interests entail the inferred but seldom directly expressed interests of the most important party to the case: the child. In short, the judgments required in determining a child’s best interests are different from those which administrative, judicial, or regulatory authorities of the state are well prepared to provide. Thus, it is unsurprising that most judges report that child custody disputes—in which judgments of children’s best interests most commonly occur—are among the most difficult cases to resolve (Whobrey, Sales, and Lou, 1987). As a consequence, when parents cannot agree on the postdivorce custody of their offspring and turn to the court for a resolution, judges often rely on their own value preferences and intuitive judgments of the determinants of a child’s future well-being (Mnookin, 1975, 2014). For example, some judges simply adhere to the traditional maternal presumption that had previously guided custody decisions—especially with younger children—despite the intended gender neutrality of the bestinterests standard (Lowery, 1981; Thompson and Wyatt, 1999). Others may use different criteria, such as judgments of each parent’s disciplinary style, warmth, or personality characteristics, as well as their relative earning power, residence, and future plans as the basis for their judgment, which means that the same family circumstances evaluated by two different judges may result in different outcomes (Chambers, 1984; Mnookin, 1975, 2014). This is contrary to justice principles, and in a society that accords parents considerable latitude in their styles of care and discipline, these criteria may inappropriately penalize parents when child custody decisions are made. Moreover, Mnookin (1974, 1975) and other scholars (Emery, Otto, and O’Donohue, 2005) have claimed that the expert testimony of forensic psychologists or developmental scientists rarely adds clarity to child custody decisions, given how difficult it is to make precise predictions of individual development. Perhaps this is why expert witnesses can typically be found on both sides of a custody dispute. Even when statutory language more explicitly defines the basis for determining a child’s best interests, significant problems remain in the application of these standards. For example, a legal presumption long advocated by legal scholars and social scientists is to award custody to a fit parent who is the child’s “primary caretaker” (Chambers, 1984; Maccoby, 1995, 1999). By ensuring the child’s continuing contact with the parent who has assumed the predominant role in parenting, it is argued, courts can reliably advance a child’s best interests. Although this approach has the appeal of providing a straightforward, valid, and readily evaluated means of distinguishing parenting roles, it is nevertheless often difficult to define the varied responsibilities of parenting and their evolving relevance to children’s changing developmental needs to determine who is the “primary caretaker” (Thompson, 1986, 1994). Physical care, play, instruction, gender socialization, academic encouragement, role modeling, and other responsibilities of parenting vary in their significance as children mature. Furthermore, determining who is the child’s “primary caretaker” is a retrospective approach to a prospective determination: The parent who assumed a predominant role in childrearing in the intact, predivorce family when children were younger may or may not be the best caregiver as a single parent as children mature (Thompson and Wyatt, 1999). 20

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Indeed, because postdivorce family life changes over time, it is unclear how well a custody judgment made by a court when parents divorce can ensure the future well-being of offspring. After parents divorce, children often change residence as parental circumstances change (including changing jobs and remarriage) and as children’s needs evolve, and these often provoke other changes in visitation and child support arrangements (Maccoby and Mnookin, 1992). Increasingly families find that courtroom decisions made at the time of a divorce settlement do not accommodate the rapidly changing life circumstances of all family members in postdivorce life. Parents are, of course, accustomed to making judgments of their children’s best interests. They know their children well and are experienced with the kinds of complex considerations involved in planning for the child’s future. Perhaps, therefore, the best role for the state in child custody disputes is to provide opportunities, incentives, and structure to foster parents’ own decisions about postdivorce parenting responsibilities and their continued responsibility for children’s well-being (Emery and Emery, 2014). Even if parents appeal to the state to decide a custody dispute that they have been unable to resolve, the judicial system may nevertheless insist on the private ordering of a decision that parents, not the state, are best capable of making. This judicial insistence can occur through mandatory mediation with a skilled counselor who can lead parents through the decision-making needed to thoughtfully plan postdivorce life for themselves and their children (Emery, 2011). It can also consist of the requirement that adults negotiate a parenting plan that identifies the responsibilities of each parent for maintaining a meaningful relationship with children, providing financial support, and renegotiating other aspects of postdivorce life with the former spouse as family circumstances change (Warshak, 2014). At the same time, the state can also create new ways to guide divorcing parents’ thinking about custody issues to help parents more thoughtfully “bargain in the shadow of the law” as they jointly plan postdivorce family life (Mnookin and Kornhauser, 1979). “Bargaining in the shadow of the law” recognizes that legal regulations are important in defining the options and opportunities within which family members negotiate, even if they never bring their dispute to a courtroom. Legal guidelines provide parameters for parental negotiations because each parent can estimate his or her chances of success if the dispute goes to court. The increase in joint legal custody and joint physical custody awards by the courts in the United States, for example, has given parents more to consider besides the “winner take all” orientation of past custody decisions in which one becomes the custodial parent and the other enters into a visiting relationship with the child. Joint legal and/or physical custody provide a better structure for both parents to anticipate meaningful roles in the child’s life (Thompson and Wyatt, 1999), and provisions for joint custody are nearly universal in the United States. As a second illustration, the American Law Institute (2002) proposed custody guidelines by which parents would each have postdivorce custody of the child in rough approximation to the portion of time each parent spent in caregiving activities with the child before separation (based on an earlier proposal by Scott, 1992), and this recommendation has also influenced custody decisions in many states (Bartlett, 2014). This approach enables each parent to assume a custodial role, and advocates in psychology and law have argued that it is clearer and more precise than the best-interests standard (Bartlett, 2014; Emery et al., 2005), whereas others believe that it is likely to provide misleading guidance to judges and parents (Riggs, 2005; Warshak, 2007). Finally, a third example of how changing legal standards alter parents’ “bargaining in the shadow of the law” is the increase in child support enforcement, beginning in the 1990s, that significantly improved many fathers’ postdivorce financial support of their children (Meyer, 1999). These provisions collectively remind parents that although divorce may end a marriage, it doesn’t end their responsibilities to children. This discussion of the public and private ordering of “the best interests of the child” illustrates the formal and informal ways that the state, through legal rules and regulations, can strive to enhance ethical parenting, even when parents are stressed by the end of their marriage. Legislatures and courts have introduced new provisions that explicitly encourage both parents to remain committed to their 21

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children’s well-being after divorce through meaningful care, financial support, and other ordering of postdivorce life with procedures that require them to negotiate and plan for the future. These changes in family law also illustrate the need for periodic revision in legal rules and continued flexibility in their application to accommodate changes in family life, particularly related to the changes that have occurred in recent years in parental roles and parent–child relationships (Lansford, 2009). Finally, this discussion also illustrates the influence of developmental science on the knowledge that legal authorities use when creating new standards and their application. In view of how typical modes of legal analysis are unhelpful to the individualized, complex, predictive judgments involved in a custody decision, developmental science can help frame these judgments in ways that are empirical rather than intuitive and take into account evidence of family processes and children’s development and the consequences of alternative custody arrangements. We shall later return to this theme.

State Intervention into Family Life Our discussion thus far has focused on ethical rules governing the relations between the state and parents that best foster children’s well-being. Our conclusion underscores an irony in public policy. The state has strong interests in ensuring the character development, competence, and well-being of its youngest citizens, but in doing so it must respect the boundaries of family privacy and parental autonomy that constitute the cornerstones of the child’s psychological development. Consequently, the state’s coercive power over the family must be secondary to the support, incentives, and structure it provides to enable parents to make wise choices on behalf of children while accepting the risk that, so long as parental decisions do not exceed clear thresholds of child harm, those choices may not always be optimal for the child’s interests. Nevertheless, in recognizing that family privacy and integrity ultimately create the greatest benefits for children, parents, and society, the state’s efforts to promote ethical parenting in family life are primarily a matter of enablement, not coercion. Family privacy and parental autonomy are not, of course, ends in themselves. They are means to the ultimate objective of advancing children’s well-being. As John Locke (1690/1965, Treatise 2, sec. 58) argued, the Power . . . that Parents have over their Children, arises from that Duty which is incumbent on them, to take care of their Offspring, during the imperfect state of Childhood. Because parental rights arise from the performance of parental duties to children, parental rights erode when parents fail to fulfill their legitimate obligations toward offspring (see Blustein, 1982). No parents who are manifestly abusive or neglectful, for example, can expect that the boundaries of family privacy will remain respected by a community that is concerned about children’s well-being. The same Supreme Court that has long deferred to parental preferences in childrearing decisions has also declared that parents are not “free . . . to make martyrs of their children” (Prince v. Massachusetts, 1944, p. 170). Although our discussion has focused on defining the boundaries beyond which the state cannot normally intrude into family life, there are circumstances in which the state must intervene. This section of our discussion is devoted to considering the nature of those conditions and their relevance to ethical parenting. There are several circumstances in which the state can legitimately intervene into family life (Wald, 1985). One is when the family itself is disrupted, such as by separation, divorce, or other circumstances that make it impossible for preexisting family relationships to be maintained. In these situations, the state must ensure that the renegotiation of family resources and relationships ensures fairness to all family members, especially to children. Even when state authorities strongly encourage the private ordering of these arrangements, parental decisions are regulated in light of laws in whose shadow parents conduct their negotiations, and in light of the judicial judgments required to ratify parents’ decisions. 22

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Another circumstance warranting the state’s intervention into family life is when there are threats to the health, safety, or well-being of children, which is the state’s most important commitment to ensuring ethical parenting. This is both a negative obligation—ensuring that children are not harmed—and a positive obligation—ensuring that children receive adequate care and training to become productive members of society. The state may intervene in these circumstances to protect children and remediate their harm, correct parental misconduct, and/or express the consensual value preferences of the community through punitive action. Thus, the ethical obligations of the state’s intervention into family life are both specific (e.g., ending a child’s physical abuse and preventing its recurrence) and broad (e.g., prosecuting child sexual exploitation as inappropriate adult conduct, regardless of its specific harms to children). How should the state define the conditions warranting its coercive intervention into family life? The tasks of defining in specific terms the ensurance that children are “not harmed” and that they “receive adequate care and training” are challenging because of the varieties of harms that children can experience, the varieties of care that they require, and the need to balance the risks and benefits that children derive when state authorities intervene into family life to protect them. The latter is a particularly important consideration from a utilitarian analysis. When authorities intervene into the family because of a report of suspected child maltreatment, for example, there is an upheaval in the child’s life that can have long-term consequences (Thompson, 1993). At the most extreme, children who are rescued from physically or sexually abusive homes are placed in a temporary foster home for an indefinite period, with periodic transitions to other temporary arrangements if a permanent placement is unavailable or cannot be negotiated, or if family reunification cannot be achieved (Mnookin, 1974). Even if the child remains in the home as social services are provided to address family problems, the child has become the locus of family disruption that alters family relationships significantly. Thus, the costs as well as the potential benefits to children of state intervention into family life are important to consider. An additional consideration is research raising considerable doubt that foster care, social services, or the other interventions typically provided by child protection agencies can effectively alter the family problems that led to maltreatment or can ensure the child’s future wellbeing, especially given the limited resources of social service agencies in the face of growing numbers of reports of child abuse or neglect (Huntington, 2014; U.S. Advisory Board on Child Abuse and Neglect, 1990). Indeed, for children who are left for years in temporary foster care placements or who remain in severely troubled families that receive inadequate services, the important question is whether they are helped or hindered by the intervention of state authorities. The troubling ethical problem governing state intervention into family life for purposes of child protection, therefore, is defining the forms of child harm that are sufficiently severe that, on balance, the actions of state authorities are likely to yield greater benefit than harm to children. Moreover, principles of justice require further that the standards for state intervention in family life are sufficiently clear and explicit such that there is no doubt about the parental conduct warranting intrusion into family life. This ensures that parents have fair warning of legally prohibited behavior and guards against subjective, potentially arbitrary legal judgments about what conduct is abusive or not. Consequently, a rule-utilitarian analysis favors narrowly conceived, explicit standards governing state intervention into family life, with an emphasis on evidence of child harm resulting from parental practices. Doing so ensures that a high threshold for intervention is maintained and, consistent with the costs and benefits that must be considered in permitting state intervention into family life, focuses on the consequences to the child. One such standard was proposed by Wald (1982, p. 11): [C]oercive intervention should be permissible only when a child has suffered or is likely to suffer serious physical injury as a result of abuse or inadequate care; when a child is suffering from severe emotional damage and his or her parents are unwilling to deal with the problems without coercive intervention; when a child has been sexually abused; when a child is 23

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suffering from a serious medical condition and his or her parents are unwilling to provide him with suitable medical treatment; or when a child is committing delinquent acts at the urging or with the help of his or her parents. Although Wald’s standard may be unduly narrow in some respects (for example, it excludes neglect due to inadequate nutrition, clothing, shelter, or supervision), it reflects the emphasis on narrowly defined, clear, and child-centered standards that we believe are supported by the mixed rule-utilitarian analysis of this discussion. Are there other forms of parental misconduct warranting concern by state authorities? Parents may be psychologically abusive to offspring, for example, by their threats, denigration, isolation, or exploitation of their children. Some have argued that state authorities should intervene into such families to protect children’s emotional well-being (Hart, Germain, and Brassard, 1987; McGee and Wolfe, 1991). Consideration of the risks and benefits of doing so, however, reveals several difficulties (Melton and Thompson, 1987; Thompson and Jacobs, 1991). The first concerns the lack of clarity of the standard for intervention with terms like “exploiting” and “isolating” children. Can a parent who requires children to help with farm chores expect to be accused of “exploiting” the child? Is homeschooling an example of “isolating” a child? In these and other situations, there is insufficient clarity concerning what constitutes psychological maltreatment to ensure that judges will be guided by well-defined legal guidelines. Second, by contrast with other standards of child maltreatment that focus on child harms, most standards of psychological maltreatment focus on parental behavior rather than child outcomes. But doing so is the wrong focus because the complex effects of parental conduct on children are moderated by the child’s temperament, the behavior of the other parent, and other family processes. Finally, because the intervention of state authorities into family life is itself psychologically threatening to children, it is important to weigh these potential costs to children against the expected benefits achieved by actions intended to combat psychological maltreatment. For many children, the costs of intervention are unlikely to outweigh its benefits. The troubling ethical dilemma for state intervention for child protection is defining the forms of child harm that are sufficiently severe that the actions of state authorities are likely to yield greater benefits than harm to children. Narrow definitions of child harm curb the risk of excessive or arbitrary intrusions into family life, but they also reflect limitations in the state’s capacity to provide benefits for children in difficulty so that interventions are focused on the children in greatest peril. As we note in the following section, there are many ways that the state is capable of providing noncoercive family assistance, even to the most troubled families (Baumrind, 1995), and intervention science continues to generate a larger variety of evidence-based programs for parents who need help (National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, 2016). But the resources of child protection agencies are typically so meager that effective interventions to provide family support cannot readily be mobilized on behalf of children (Huntington, 2014). Viewed in this light, the capacity of the state to support ethical parenting is contingent on the state devoting the resources and generating the will to act ethically on behalf of the dependent children who are also its citizens by providing the resources necessary to its parens patriae responsibilities. Adequate resources devoted to the maintenance of an effective, child-focused foster care system, and the implementation of evidence-based programs to improve the parenting skills of troubled adults, would seem to be at the core of the state’s ethical responsibility. At present, those conditions do not exist in most jurisdictions of the United States.

Family Assistance One conclusion arising from the preceding analysis is that although the state has a significant responsibility to support ethical parenting, the authority of the state is a very blunt instrument for doing so. There are, however, other ways the state influences family life apart from its coercive or punitive 24

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power. The state orders relationships within the family (and assists when these relationships must be reordered, such as in divorce), regulates the institutions affecting family members, provides enablements that support parents in their caregiving functions, creates institutions (such as schools and public health programs) that directly support children, and constructs out-of-home and in-home forms of assistance when families are troubled. The state also has an expressive function by which, through formal and informal avenues, it conveys beliefs and expectations about children and families that both reflect and instantiate changing social values. In many respects, the most important ways the state promotes ethical parenting is through these supportive, provisioning, enabling functions, even though they are often the least recognized forms of state intervention. Legal and regulatory authorities help to order family life, for example, by defining the roles and responsibilities of family members, such as in statutes governing marriage, parenting, procreation, adoption, child custody, and defining the obligations (including financial responsibilities) of spouses and parents. These statutes help to ensure that the reciprocal obligations of adults are clearly understood as they enter into family relationships and that their responsibilities to children are fulfilled. As in the case of parental divorce, moreover, the state is mandated to intervene to help family members reorder their relationships and responsibilities when the family is disrupted, especially to ensure that children’s needs are safeguarded. In addition, state regulation of institutions affecting children, such as pediatric practices and childcare programs, help to ensure the safety and health of those who attend. Perhaps the most important indication of how the state benefits children and families is public education. Indeed, mandatory education requirements are perhaps the most coercive state regulation on family life because parents are compelled to attend to the education of their children—most often to comply with compulsory school attendance—for a sustained period throughout childhood and adolescence. Yet the inherent coerciveness of this regulation is not apparent to most families because public education has become institutionalized in national culture and worldwide, and because of the clear benefits of school attendance for most children. There are other noncoercive avenues by which the state assists families. The state provides enablements that make it easier for parents to fulfill their responsibilities to children. Many enablements in the United States, for example, are direct financial subsidies, such as the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), the Child Tax Credit, and Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF). Some are nutritional supports, such as the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC), the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program (SNAP, formerly known as food stamps), and the national school lunch program. The Affordable Care Act significantly expanded the range of health care supports available to children and families, and was preceded by the Child Health Insurance Program (CHIP). Housing programs also provide vouchers and other kinds of assistance. Finally, a range of educational enablements, beginning with the family-based Early Head Start and Head Start programs, are either targeted to the most needy children and families or (as in public education programs) are universally available. This list only focuses on programs of the U.S. federal government, and many states and localities in the United States supplement these with other forms of family support. In addition, through the financial incentives it offers businesses, the state can encourage the development of workplace practices (such as family leave) that make it easier for adults to be better parents, and it can provide economic assistance to childcare programs that are willing to invest significantly in improved facilities, teacher training, and developmentally appropriate programs. In these and many other ways, the state strengthens the support and resources that parents can enlist as they provide nurturing environments for children. This portrayal of a broad range of supportive forms of family assistance starkly contrasts with the limited coercive latitude of the state for regulating family life. It suggests that although the state can do little to compel parents to do good for their children, and the grounds for state intervention are narrowly tailored to address only the most serious forms of child harm, there are many avenues by which the state can enable and provision parents to do better for their children. These forms of state 25

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“intervention” into family life are often overlooked because they are incorporated into the fabric of family life and are noncoercive, so they are readily accepted. But these may be the most significant avenues by which the state supports ethical parenting. In the end, moreover, the hortatory power of the state should not be overlooked. The values that are explicitly recognized in the formal and informal regulations influencing family life, and which the state implements in its provisions for the family, speak volumes. This is because legal, administrative, and regulatory reforms not only reflect the changes that occur in family life and help to express and institutionalize those changes. The expressive function of laws affecting families (Bartlett, 1988) is reflected, for example, in divorce and custody statutory reform that implicitly encourages parents to recognize that although they may end a marriage, they can never end their responsibilities as parents. The law’s expressive function is reflected in changes in child protection laws that are increasingly and explicitly child-focused in their assessments of the harms of parental conduct and the remedies the state can implement. The expressive function of the law is most broadly revealed in the extent to which the state either regards children as a liability and a burden or as a social resource of shared responsibility.

Conclusions The ethics of parenting begin, we have argued, with the assumption of responsibility for children by parents. Although parents do not alone have responsibility for the welfare of children—the state, as we have seen, also has important obligations to children—parental responsibilities are first and foremost. Within our mixed rule-utilitarian, developmentalist framework, children and adults have complementary, not equal, rights that arise from their very different capabilities and the mutual obligations they share within the family. A child’s right to self-determination is limited, for example, by the exercise of parental authority that functions legitimately to promote the healthy development of offspring. We have described the parental responsibilities that legitimize the exercise of parental authority, particularly the adult practices that shape the development of character and competence in children. As children mature and acquire more mature capacities for reasoning, judgment, and self-control, their autonomy increases and parenting responsibilities subside, consistent with a developmental orientation to understanding children’s best interests. We argue that a developmental orientation is preferable to either liberationist or protectionist approaches because it recognizes the changing mutual obligations shared by parents and children with the growth of children’s competencies and judgment. Our theory of ethical parenting underscores that responsible parenting is not solely a family obligation but a responsibility shared by the community. The community’s values, resources, and social supports make it easier (or more difficult) for parents to fulfill their responsibilities to offspring, and we have focused on the role of the state, and of public policy, in fostering ethical parenting. Our analysis has highlighted that the state has significant interests in the well-being of its youngest citizens, but that in most cases it promotes children’s welfare best by respecting family privacy and parental autonomy in childrearing decisions. From a consequentialist perspective, respect for parental autonomy protects the features of family life that contribute to children’s well-being and minimizes unnecessary intrusions into family life that can undermine children, even when motivated to advance their best interests. Consequently, we have advocated limited, clear standards warranting the state’s coercive intervention into the family to protect children’s physical and emotional well-being and emphasized the value of the support, resources, and structure the state can provide parents to make their own wise decisions on behalf of offspring. This is because coercive public policy is a very blunt instrument for altering family life, and thus the state can most effectively assist children through incentives rather than coercion. Our analysis of the ethics of parenting has drawn on classic and modern ideas within moral and political philosophy, ethical theory, and developmental science. We close with additional comments about the latter, because we are each developmental scientists. The integration of developmental research into arguments drawn from ethics and moral philosophy shows that scientists, whether 26

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applied or not, have an important contribution to offer in supporting ethical parenting. Fallible and necessarily limited as our knowledge is, we believe that developmental scientists should and do contribute to the resolution of ethically saturated disputes about what constitutes a child’s best interests by providing relevant information about the probable psychological and social consequences of contrasting social policies. In doing so, however, the information provided must be unbiased and based on firm empirical evidence. Scientists have a responsibility not only to contribute to public discourse in their professional roles but also to base their recommendations on scientifically derived knowledge. Scientific knowledge is distinguished from ordinary knowledge by the systematic use of procedures that protect against bias due to personal values, conformity to received wisdom, or misleading surplus meaning in the measurement of theoretical constructs. The scientific method is intended to provide information that is systematic, public, and replicable. Critical thinking instilled by scientific training consists of asking the right questions and asking them in the right way. Consensual rules of objectivity, exemplified by the double-blind experiment, were formulated to protect against subliminal as well as intentional confirmatory biases. Hypotheses make explicit investigators’ partiality or research biases so that they may then attempt to probe, not prove, their hypotheses. When policymakers consult with social scientists in an effort to better inform their legislative or judicial efforts to address social problems, they assume that the social scientists whom they consult are objective, impartial reporters of their own and others’ findings rather than intentionally biased advocates, motivated by self-interest or a political cause. Robert Merton (1973) articulated four norms of science that are widely accepted by scientists (Koehler, 1993) and laypersons. Merton’s norms require scientific information to be (1) publicly shared; (2) judged by objective rather than personal criteria; (3) unbiased by personal values or interests; and (4) available to the scientific community to scrutinize through established procedures of peer review, replication, and challenges by rival hypotheses. Unlike lawyers or politicians, research scientists may not ethically suppress disconfirming data and must acknowledge the existence of alternative hypotheses and explanations of their findings, as well as the degree of certainty that should be attached to their findings. However well intentioned, biased interpretation of research results by social scientists undermines public trust in our perceived objectivity and impartiality, and thus our capacity to contribute to ethical parenting (MacCoun, 1998; Thompson and Nelson, 2001). Public debates about the nature and consequences of parenting, and policymaking affecting families, require the thoughtful and informed contributions of scientific experts. Because of their unique expertise, developmental scientists are well qualified to transform scientific knowledge into “usable knowledge” that is thoughtfully and responsibly relevant to the public questions under discussion, including those discussed here related to ethical parenting (Lindblom and Cohen, 1979; Thompson, 1993). Ethical parenting is the responsibility of parents and the state, and of developmental scientists who seek to understand family life. By appreciating the unique roles and responsibilities of each partner for advancing children’s well-being, adults offer children the best opportunities to develop the character and competence that lead to successful adult life.

Note 1

Diana Baumrind’s passing as this chapter was being completed brought to an end a rich collaboration that I valued, and in which many elements of Diana’s lifetime contributions were brought together: a generative program of research on parenting, a deep commitment to the highest ethical values, especially in research and its applications, and a view of families in cultural, community, and policy contexts. She will be missed.

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In J. Annas, D. Narvarz, and N. E. Snow (Eds.), Developing virtue: Integrating perspectives (pp. 95–115). New York: Oxford University Press. Thompson, R. A., and Nelson, C. A. (2001). Developmental science and the media: Early brain development. American Psychologist, 56, 5–15. Thompson, R. A., Scalora, M. J., Castrianno, L., and Limber, S. (1992). Grandparent visitation rights: Emergent psychological and psycholegal issues. In D. K. Kagehiro and W. S. Laufer (Eds.), Handbook of psychology and law (pp. 292–317). New York: Springer-Verlag. Thompson, R. A., Tinsley, B., Scalora, M., and Parke, R. (1989). Grandparents’ visitation rights: Legalizing the ties that bind. American Psychologist, 44, 1217–1222. Thompson, R. A., and Winer, A. (2014). Moral development, conversation, and the development of internal working models. In C. Wainryb and H. Recchia (Eds.), Talking about right and wrong: Parent–child conversations as contexts for moral development (pp. 299–333). New York: Cambridge University Press. Thompson, R. A., and Wyatt, J. (1999). Values, policy, and research on divorce: Seeking fairness for children. In R. A. Thompson and P. R. Amato (Eds.), The postdivorce family: Children, parenting, and society (pp. 191–232). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.

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The Ethics of Parenting Tomasello, M. (2016). Cultural learning redux. Child Development, 87, 643–653. Triandis, H. C. (1990). Cross-cultural studies of individualism and collectivism. In J. J. Berman (Ed.), Cross cultural perspectives: Nebraska symposium on motivation 1989 (Vol. 37, pp. 41–133). Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press. Trivers, R. L. (1985). Social evolution. Menlo Park, CA: Benjamin and Cummings. United Nations General Assembly. (1989). Adoption of a convention on the rights of the child (U.N. Doc. A/Res/44/25). New York: Author. U.S. Advisory Board on Child Abuse and Neglect. (1990). Child abuse and neglect: Critical first steps in response to a national emergency. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office. Waddington, C. H. (1960). The ethical animal. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Wald, M. S. (1975). State intervention on behalf of “neglected” children: A search for realistic standards. Stanford Law Review, 27, 985–1040. Wald, M. S. (1979). Children’s rights: A framework for analysis. University of California Davis Law Review, 12, 255–282. Wald, M. S. (1982). State intervention on behalf of endangered children: A proposed legal response. Child Abuse and Neglect, 6, 3–45. Wald, M. S. (1985). Introduction to the symposium on the family, the state, and the law. University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform, 18, 799–804. Warshak, R. A. (2007). The approximation rule, child development research, and children’s best interests after divorce. Child Development Perspectives, 1, 119–125. Warshak, R. A. (2014). Social science and parenting plans for young children: A consensus report. Psychology, Public Policy, and Law, 20, 46–67. Whiting, J. W. M., and Whiting, B. B. (1975). Children of six cultures: A psychocultural analysis. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Whobrey, L., Sales, B., and Lou, M. (1987). Determining the best interests of the child in custody disputes. In L. Weithorn (Ed.), Psychology and child custody determinations: Roles, knowledge, and expertise. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press. Wiggins, J. S. (1979). A psychological taxonomy of trait-descriptive terms: The interpersonal domain. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 37, 395–412. Wilson, J. Q. (1993). The moral sense. New York: Free Press. Wisconsin v. Yoder, 406 U.S. 205. (1972). Worsfold, V. L. (1974). A philosophical justification for children’s rights. Harvard Educational Review, 44, 142–157.

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2 PARENTING AND CHILDREN’S SELF-REGULATION Wendy S. Grolnick, Alessandra J. Caruso, and Madeline R. Levitt

Introduction There is a burgeoning area of research on the development of children’s self-regulation. Such research focuses on a number of constructs, including children’s behavior regulation, effortful control, emotion regulation, and executive functioning, to name just a few. One of the reasons for this intensifying focus is acknowledgment of the crucial role of self-regulation in children’s motivation, learning, and adjustment. The sequelae of children’s self-regulation are evident across multiple domains, including their functioning at school, at home, and with peers. Given this understanding, it is crucial to identify the determinants of children’s self-regulation. As children’s most important socializers, parents are key contributors to the development of children’s self-regulation. Thus, this chapter explores what we know about the contributions of parenting to children’s developing self-regulation. In exploring this issue, we consider multiple forms of self-regulation. However, in doing so, we recognize that the “self ” in the term self-regulation can be interpreted differently. In the most general sense, self-regulation can refer to any behavior or emotion that the person emits in response to an environmental demand. However, within a motivational framework, the self is more than just a location from which behavior is initiated. In particular, such a theory of motivation considers the experience of the initiator, asking, for example, does the person engage in the behavior because of external contingencies (e.g., rewards, deadlines) or pressure, or does she or he engage in the behavior willingly, out of a sense of its importance or value? Thus, a motivational framework considers compliance and obeying directives as different from internalized responses that are more volitional or endorsed. Importantly, the quality and persistence of these different types of self-regulated behavior are likely to be quite different. In this chapter, we consider parenting in relation to self-regulation in the broader sense of exerting self-control and using strategies that help individuals to meet environmental demands (Posner and Rothbart, 2000), but also in the more limited motivational sense of autonomously or volitionally regulating one’s behavior (Deci and Ryan, 1985). In doing so, we use Self-Determination Theory (Deci and Ryan, 1985, 2000) as a framework for understanding how behaviors move from being motivated by external contingencies (i.e., compliance) to being more autonomously regulated. We also use this theory to organize our discussion of parenting into three dimensions that theoretically should conduce toward children’s self-regulation: involvement/warmth, autonomy support, and structure. We begin the chapter by defining self-regulation and the key constructs that we will cover in the chapter. We then turn to a discussion of the three dimensions of parenting as delineated by

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Self-Determination Theory: involvement, autonomy support, and structure. From there, we review studies on parenting that have been found to facilitate and undermine children’s self-regulation in the areas of behavior regulation, internalized self-regulation in younger and older children, and emotion regulation. Finally, we conclude the chapter with ideas for some areas that need attention to further our understanding of how parenting facilitates self-regulation, including specifying directionality in our studies; delineating the contributions of mothers and fathers; and considering how culture, ethnicity, and socioeconomic circumstances might shape the role of parents as facilitators of self-regulation. First we begin with a definition of self-regulation and constructs that fall under this, including behavior regulation, internalized self-regulation, and emotion regulation.

Self-Regulation Defined Self-regulation, defined many ways, is a broad rubric covering multiple constructs. Perhaps most comprehensive is Posner and Rothbart’s (2000) definition of self-regulation as the process of individuals modulating behavior and affect given contextual demands. With such a broad definition, selfregulation can include behavior, emotion, and cognition. Within the area of self-regulation, several constructs have been employed. Some theorists use the term behavior regulation. Behavior regulation includes behaviors that comply with environmental demands such as following rules, paying attention, resisting temptation, and inhibiting impulsive behaviors (Calkins, Smith, Gill, and Johnson, 1998). A related construct is effortful control, which has been defined as attentional processes that enable individuals to shift and focus their attention to suppress inappropriate behavior and perform behaviors that are required or appropriate in response to behavioral demands (Evans and Rothbart, 2007). The concepts of behavior regulation and effortful control clearly overlap, but effortful control has often been conceived as a temperamental dimension, although affected by the environment (Evans and Rothbart, 2007). The related concept of executive functioning is often conceived as the cognitive aspect of self-regulation, or higher-order attentional and cognitive processes that support a range of competencies (Ursache, Blair, and Raver, 2012). The measurement of executive functions typically includes three aspects: the ability to hold information in working memory; attentional control, or the ability to resist distractions or temptations; and cognitive flexibility, or the ability to flexibly shift attention. Finally, emotion regulation concerns the ability to manage one’s states of arousal and has been defined as processes that initiate, inhibit, avoid, and maintain or modulate emotions to achieve individual goals (Eisenberg and Spinrad, 2004). Emotion regulation is considered a goal-directed process that includes cognitive, emotional, and behavioral components (Cole, Martin, and Dennis, 2004). Self-regulation has been conceptualized as a developmental process. Kopp (1982), for example, discussed stages of the regulation of behavior. In the neurophysiological stage (2 to 3 months), behavior is regulated largely by arousal states aided by the caregiver. In the sensorimotor stage (3 to 9 months), the child is able to adjust behavior in accord with immediate environmental events and stimuli. The child between 9 and 18 months exhibits control by showing awareness of social and task demands and acting accordingly. However, it is not until the middle of the second year that the child can act in accord with social expectations in the absence of external monitoring or, in other words, can display self-control. Kopp postulated a final stage of self-regulation (36 months plus) in which a more flexible and adaptive control of behavior is possible, largely because of increasing capacities for representation and symbolic functioning. Several studies have supported the increasing capacity of children between 18 and 48 months to delay (Golden, Montare, and Bridger, 1977; Vaughn, Kopp, and Krakow, 1984) and use adaptive strategies while waiting (Van Lieshout, 1975), supporting a developmental model of behavioral self-regulation. Although the development of self-regulatory skills begins within the first year, such skills and abilities grow dramatically during the preschool years, becoming increasingly important beyond the second year (Eisenberg et al., 2005) and becoming moderately stable into the preschool years (Carlson,

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Mandell, and Williams, 2004). Thus, it is not surprising that many developmental studies of parenting in relation to behavior and emotion regulation focus on the toddler and preschool years. Each of the self-regulation constructs described here has been found to be important to children’s adaptive functioning. Behavioral and emotion regulation are critical to school functioning, as children must follow rules, function in groups, and cooperate with others, requiring them to inhibit disruptive and inappropriate behavior and modulate strong emotions (Graziano, Reavis, Keane, and Calkins, 2007). They also need to use attentional control (e.g., ignoring distractions, sustaining focus on challenging tasks) and cognitive mechanisms (e.g., keeping directions in working memory) to follow directions, engage in learning activities, and complete tasks (Blair, 2002; McClelland et al., 2007). Thus, it is not surprising that each of these self-regulatory processes has been associated with a range of adaptive outcomes. Behavior regulation has been associated with school achievement across diverse age groups (McClelland et al., 2007; Weis, Heikamp, and Trommsdorf, 2013). Similarly, executive function skills predict math and literacy achievement in preschoolers and kindergarteners (Blair and Razza, 2007; Bull and Scerif, 2001; McClelland et al., 2007). Emotion regulation has been associated with higher levels of achievement in early elementary school (Howse, Calkins, Anastopoulos, Keane, and Shelton, 2003) even after controlling for IQ (Graziano et al., 2007), as well as positive interactions with peers and teachers (Hamre and Pianta, 2001). Clearly, these aspects of self-regulation are intertwined. For example, children who are better able to modulate their strong emotions will more likely be able to focus attention on tasks. Conversely, children who are able to withdraw their attention from upsetting events will likely be able to selfsoothe more easily (Raver, 1996). Thus, the concomitants of one set of processes likely apply to the others. However, self-regulation from a motivational perspective involves more than merely complying with rules and controlling one’s behavior or emotions. A motivational perspective considers the initiation of the behavior. For example, a different level of self-regulation is in evidence when a child adheres to a stated rule or guideline when it is demanded of her or him than one who does so spontaneously (e.g., the child who cleans her or his room or helps another child after being yelled at to do so compared with the child who cleans her or his room without being asked or helps another child unprompted). A level of self-regulation beyond compliance is also in evidence in situations when the caregiver or other authority is not present. For example, does a child alone in the kitchen refrain from eating a cookie when she or he knows it is almost dinnertime? Third, in considering selfregulation from a motivational perspective, it is important to consider not just the behavior itself but also the person’s experience of the initiation of her or his behavior. Does the child experience herself or himself as engaging in the behavior volitionally or autonomously, without a sense of pressure or coercion, or is she or he having to push herself or himself, experiencing an inner conflict with the behavior? The construct of locus of causality (deCharms, 1968) can be used to distinguish between these different experiences. In particular, behaviors with an internal locus of causality are experienced as volitional, whereas those with an external locus of causality are experienced as coerced, either from without or within. Of course, determining how autonomous the child feels in engaging in a behavior or emotion is difficult to ascertain from the behavior itself because, from an outward perspective, the behavior may look similar. Creative ways to assess the type of regulation in younger (Kochanska and Aksan, 1995) and older (Ryan and Connell, 1989) children have been developed and will be discussed in the next sections. Relatedly, emotion regulation is not just suppression of emotion. From a functionalist perspective, emotion is adaptive and communicates important messages to others and the self about the state of the organism (Campos, Campos, and Barrett, 1989). Thus, the ability to curtail strong emotions in the service of one’s goals or of situational demands is critical for social development and learning, and it is also important to be able to experience and express emotions. Emotion regulation can thus be differentiated from emotion suppression and control, and the flexible management of both the experience 36

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and expression of emotion is in line with a perspective valuing the experience of autonomy and inner cohesion. Clearly, the identification of parenting factors that facilitate compliance and display of desired behavior and acceptable emotion in children is an important task. However, in considering the socialization of children, many of the goals parents have for them go beyond mere compliance. A major goal of socialization is for children to take on themselves the regulation of their own behavior and emotion—meaning to act without explicit directives or demands, to engage in socially prescribed behaviors in the absence of adult supervision, and to do all of this in a flexible, nonconflictual manner (Grolnick, Deci, and Ryan, 1997). Thus, explicating the socialization of more internalized or autonomous self-regulation is a key goal of parenting and will be discussed as a major section of this chapter. In summary, the rubric of self-regulation includes a number of constructs, including executive functions, effortful control, and emotion regulation. The concept of self-regulation goes beyond children exhibiting self-control but also their internalizing the regulation of their own behavior and emotion such that they engage in desired behaviors spontaneously and flexibly. The chapter addresses the relations of parenting to both behavior regulation and more internalized self-regulation across a range of child ages.

A Self-Determination Theory Perspective on Self-Regulation From a Self-Determination Theory (SDT) perspective, individuals have three innate needs: those for autonomy, or to feel volitional or the owner of one’s actions; competence, or to feel effective; and relatedness, or to feel loved and valued (Deci and Ryan, 2000). These needs underlie development more generally, as well as the persistence in exercising one’s capacities and building competence more specifically. Thus, when these needs are satisfied, individuals will most likely persist in challenging behaviors for the pure pleasure of exercising their competencies, which is termed intrinsic motivation. The needs also underlie development toward more autonomous self-regulation for those activities that are not inherently interesting. These extrinsically motivated behaviors (i.e., behaviors engaged in for some goal or purpose other than pleasure and enjoyment) can be seen as lying along a continuum of autonomy ranging from those that are more externally motivated to those that are more autonomously regulated. Self-Determination Theory posits multiple types of self-regulation lying along this continuum. At the least autonomous end is external regulation, whereby individuals regulate behavior around contingencies (i.e., rewards or punishments in the environment). For example, children might do their homework because they would get in trouble if they did not. Further along the continuum is introjected regulation. This type of regulation involves regulating behavior around a contingency, yet the contingency is administered by the self rather than some outside agent. Thus, children might behave because they would feel bad or guilty if they did not. With introjected regulation, the behavior stems from within but the person does not experience a sense of choice or volition, and there is conflict between the individual’s natural tendencies and the regulation. Still further along the continuum is identified regulation, which involves a sense of autonomy. At this point, the child identifies with or takes on the value of the behavior or regulation and behaves in accord with it. No longer is there a perceived conflict between the regulation and the self. Children who clean their rooms because they like them neat so they can find their belongings are regulating through identification. At the final point on the continuum, identifications have been integrated or assimilated with other aspects of the self into a coherent system of values, goals, and motives, resulting in integrated regulation. Because this form of self-regulation is developmentally advanced and therefore not characteristic of children and adolescents, we do not focus on integrated regulation in this chapter. How do children move along the continuum toward a greater sense of autonomy or self-regulation for behaviors that are originally externally regulated? According to SDT, individuals move along the autonomy continuum through the process of internalization. Internalization is the process through 37

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which originally externally regulated action becomes increasingly taken in by the person and made a part of the self (Deci and Ryan, 1985). The process of internalization is proposed to be a natural one in which children actively engage. Thus, provided the environment does not interfere too much, children naturally and spontaneously take on regulations, values, and behaviors around them as part of their intrinsically motivated growth and development. A corollary of the theory is that, as an intrinsically motivated process, internalization itself is energized by the same three needs as intrinsic motivation: to feel autonomous, competent, and related to others. Furthermore, factors that facilitate intrinsic motivation should also facilitate the active process of internalization. Within the SDT tradition, the degree of autonomy in children’s self-regulation has often been measured by asking children about the reasons they engage in various behaviors—for example, children might be asked why they do their homework, clean their rooms, or keep a promise. These reasons provide a window into the degree of autonomy in their behaviors. This type of measure has also been used to assess the degree of autonomy in children’s use of emotion regulation strategies (e.g., suppressing emotions). There is evidence that at what point along the autonomy continuum children’s regulation of behavior falls makes a difference in terms of their adjustment and achievement. For example, more identified regulation of school-related activities is associated with more positive affect and proactive coping with school setbacks, whereas less autonomous styles (i.e., external, introjected) are associated with negative affect and maladaptive coping (Ryan and Connell, 1989). Using a scale that examined the regulation of prosocial behaviors, Ryan and Connell (1989) found that identified regulation was associated with higher empathy and more mature moral reasoning. Researchers have extended the investigation of regulatory styles in children across a number of areas, including sports and overall well-being. To assess type of self-regulation in young children, Kochanska, Aksan, and Koenig (1995) focused on the quality of children’s behavior—differentiating between situational compliance and committed compliance, with committed compliance being a precursor to internalization. In situational compliance, the child is cooperative and complies but lacks a sincere commitment to the compliance behavior. To sustain the compliance, the child requires reminders and parental control techniques. By contrast, committed compliance is more self-regulated. Here, the child appears to embrace, endorse, and accept the parent’s agendum as her or his own. The child does not require prompts or reminders to maintain the behavior and does so enthusiastically. Committed compliance thus can be likened to the more autonomous self-regulation discussed earlier. Supporting the developmental nature of committed compliance, Kochanska and Aksan (1995) found that committed compliance increases with age. Supporting the hypothesis that it is a precursor to internalization, these authors found that committed compliance in the toddler years was associated with indices of internalization in the preschool years, such as doing a requested activity in the absence of the mother, and an unwillingness to succumb to enticements to cheat. Situational compliance was not so related to internalization. SDT thus outlines the processes through which individuals move from more external regulation of their behavior toward more autonomous self-regulation. The internalization process is hypothesized to be a natural one through which individuals progress as they meet innate needs for autonomy, competence, and relatedness. We now turn to environments that facilitate or thwart the internalization process.

Facilitating Environments—Parenting From an SDT Perspective From an SDT perspective, environments that support the needs for autonomy, competence, and relatedness, respectively, autonomy support, structure, and involvement, should facilitate greater intrinsic motivation and movement along the internalization continuum toward more autonomous 38

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self-regulation. We delineate these dimensions as well as their links to constructs in the parenting literature. Autonomy support is a broad construct that includes taking people’s perspectives, supporting their initiations, and providing choice and input into decision-making and problem-solving. By contrast, controlling environments, which pressure people toward specific outcomes, solve problems for them, and prohibit input and dissension, should undermine individuals’ experience of autonomy. Within the parenting literature, autonomy support versus control is linked to dimensions such as psychological control (Barber, 1996), harsh parenting (Melby and Conger, 2001), and intrusive parenting (Egeland, Pianta, and O’Brien, 1993), though in many cases researchers only focus on the controlling end of the continuum rather than the autonomy supportive end. A second dimension, structure, supports the need for competence. When environments are structured, they contain the information individuals need to effectively guide their behavior (Grolnick and Pomerantz, 2009). Within parenting, structure includes providing clear rules, expectations, and guidelines; consistent consequences for meeting or not meeting expectations; and feedback on how the person is doing in following the guidelines (Farkas and Grolnick, 2010; Grolnick et al., 2014). The dimension of structure is related to that of behavioral control, which has been defined as managing children’s behavior (Barber, 1996). Finally, meeting the need for relatedness is the dimension of involvement. Involved environments provide resources that individuals need, such as time and attention. It also includes love and affection that make individuals feel valued and loved. The rubric of involvement can include acceptance (Schaefer, 1965), warmth (Rohner, 1986), and overall support (Eisenberg et al., 2005). The SDT conceptualization is closely related to Baumrind’s (1967, 1971) parenting typology, which differentiates three types of parents. The authoritative parent encourages verbal give and take, provides rationales for actions, and solicits input into decisions. This parent also firmly enforces rules and demands mature behavior from children. The authoritarian parent, similar to the authoritative, has rules and guidelines for action. However, in contrast, this parent discourages individuality and independence. Finally, the permissive parent imposes few demands and accepts the child’s impulses. Similar to the authoritative parent, the permissive parent encourages independence. Seen from a motivational framework, the authoritative parent would be high on autonomy support and structure, the authoritarian parent high on control and structure, and the permissive parent low on structure and high on autonomy support. Similar to theoretical arguments underlying Self-Determination Theory, Baumrind (1973) suggested that both the authoritarian and the permissive styles would undermine children’s internalization because both of these styles shield children from opportunities to struggle with and assume responsibility for their own behavior. The authoritarian parent does so by preventing the child from taking initiative. Thus, the child does not have the opportunity to be responsible for her or his own behavior. Permissive parents shield children by not demanding that they confront the consequences of their own actions. Children of each of these types of parents should, then, be lower in self-regulation than those of authoritative parents. The SDT conceptualization looks at each parenting dimension separately so that the contribution of different behaviors and strategies can be understood. In addition to the theoretical value of explaining why certain aspects of parenting are beneficial for children, we believe that using the three parenting dimensions of autonomy support, structure, and involvement is a useful way to organize the literature to be reviewed on parenting in relation to selfregulation. However, a number of parenting constructs receiving attention in this literature cross these dimensions. For example, sensitive parenting, originally defined by Ainsworth as the parent’s ability to notice the child’s signals, interpret them correctly, and respond to them promptly and appropriately (Ainsworth, Bell, and Stayton, 1974), includes aspects of autonomy support, structure, and involvement. Sensitivity will be discussed in the involvement section. Scaffolding, a construct emerging from the sociocultural theoretical perspective (Vygotsky, 1978), involves parents gearing or tailoring 39

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task-oriented interventions toward the child’s ability. As such, it includes aspects of both structure and autonomy support. It will be discussed under the structure section. In our review of the literature on parenting and the development of children’s self-regulation we focus on three broad rubrics of self-regulation as discussed earlier: behavior regulation, internalized self-regulation, and emotion regulation. We begin each section with research on young children and move to that on older children. Within each section, we utilize the SDT parenting framework to organize relevant research. In some cases research on one of these dimensions is not available. Where studies focus on all three of the dimensions, we save their discussion until the end of the section.

Behavior Regulation Involvement/Support A number of studies with roots in an attachment perspective have examined maternal sensitivity in relation to children’s behavior regulation. The reasoning for examining such a relation is that when a caregiver is sensitive, children are most likely to develop a secure attachment (Cummings and Warmuth, 2019). A secure attachment, then, would allow the child to explore her or his environment, developing competencies such as are evident in behavior regulation skills. A secure attachment would also allow the child to focus her or his attention on tasks and skill development rather than the whereabouts of caregivers. Furthermore, caregivers’ ability to support children’s behavior and serve as regulators of their children’s behavior when needed allows them to gradually build regulatory capacities (Calkins, 2007). Consistent with these ideas, several studies have utilized the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development Study of Early Childcare and Youth Development (SECCYD) to examine aspects of early caregiving associated with behavior regulation. This study included codings of maternal sensitivity from play as well as ratings of the caregiving environment using the Home Observation for Measurement of the Environment (HOME; Caldwell and Bradley, 1984), which measures the quality of stimulation and support in the home environment, when children were 15 and 36 months old. To assess children’s behavior regulation, they were administered a delay task to measure inhibition, a continuous performance task to measure sustained attention, and a Stroop task to measure impulsivity when they were 54 months old. Using the SECCYD data set, Birmingham, Bub, and Vaughn (2017) found that both maternal sensitivity and home quality were related to children’s behavior regulation. Furthermore, consistent with attachment theory and other studies of links between attachment and behavior regulation (Fearon and Belsky, 2004; Gilliom, Shaw, Beck, Schonberg, and Lukon, 2002), quality of attachment mediated the relations between both parenting measures and behavior regulation, such that higher sensitivity was associated with more secure attachment, which then predicted better self-regulation. Similarly, Russell, Lee, Spieker, and Oxford (2016) showed that both higher maternal sensitivity and ratings on the HOME predicted lower levels of children’s inattention. Using similar measures of behavior regulation but a different sample, Zeytinoglu, Calkins, Swingler, and Leerkes (2017) showed that higher maternal support during problem-solving interactions at 4 years predicted both children’s behavior regulation and executive functions at 5 years. In a longitudinal study of children’s inhibitory control from ages 2 to 4, Moilanen, Shaw, Dishion, Gardner, and Wilson (2009) showed that higher levels of supportive parenting were associated with faster growth in inhibitory control. Thus, there is ample evidence that a supportive, sensitive environment is associated with children’s better behavior regulation. Findings on maternal sensitivity and general support are important, but it is difficult to know which aspects of these broad qualities are facilitative and just how they result in greater self-regulation skills. Research on autonomy support and structure hone in further on some parenting behaviors that may be active agents in facilitating behavior regulation. 40

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Autonomy Supportive Versus Controlling Parenting When parents are autonomy supportive, they provide children with the opportunity to solve problems on their own or with assistance rather than having the problems solved for them. There is evidence that when parents are more autonomy supportive, children’s motivation for engaging in tasks is enhanced. Therefore, children would be more motivated to sustain engagement on challenging tasks. These experiences of persistence would give children practice in building their emerging self-regulatory skills. Thus, several researchers, working with both younger and older children, have studied relations between autonomy support and children’s developing behavior regulation. Bernier, Carlson, and Whipple (2010) coded maternal autonomy support, which was defined as intervening according to the infant’s needs, adapting tasks to create challenge, encouraging the child in pursuit of the task, taking the child’s perspective, following the child’s pace, and ensuring the child takes a role in the task, during mother–child interaction. Autonomy support at 12 to 13 months predicted children’s executive functioning using laboratory tasks at 26 months. This effect was in evidence controlling for maternal sensitivity. Using SECCYD data, Bindman, Pomerantz, and Roisman (2015) showed that ratings of mothers’ autonomy support coded during parent–child play at four time points (6 to 36 months) predicted behavior regulation (EF) at 54 months. Furthermore, high levels of executive functioning predicted higher achievement in elementary and high school. Weis, Trommsdorff, and Munoz (2016), focusing on fourth-graders in Germany and Chile, used mothers’ and teachers’ ratings of children’s hyperactivity to index behavior regulation. They used parent report questionnaires to assess parents’ restrictive parenting, which was measured as punishment and demands for compliance without the use of reasoning. Both samples showed negative relations between restrictive parenting and behavior regulation. Results across a broad age range support the importance of parental autonomy support for the development of children’s behavioral self-regulation. When parents give children the opportunity to be proactive and to exercise their emerging abilities in a supportive context, regulatory skills are enhanced. The next section on structure focuses on the specific types of support parents can provide to help build children’s regulatory skills.

Structure Relative to the other dimensions of parenting, there has been less focus on structure as conceptualized within the SDT framework and no studies that we know of specifically related to behavior regulation. Related to structure, however, is the concept of scaffolding, a term first coined by Wood, Bruner, and Ross (1976) to describe how more experienced individuals gear their interventions to the learner’s competence in the “zone of proximal development,” which is just above the learner’s ability to complete the task on her or his own. The concept involves the leader adjusting the level of intervention— increasing their support when the child has trouble and decreasing the level of help when the child succeeds. This tailoring to the learner denotes that scaffolding includes elements of autonomy support as well as the organization and management entailed in the construct of structure. Studies have examined parental scaffolding in relation to young children’s behavior regulation. Landry, Miller-Loncar, Smith, and Swank (2002) coded verbal scaffolding as parents’ informational content that provided hints or prompts to control their children’s attention, as well as verbalizations that “provided conceptual links between objects, person, activities, and functions” (p. 21). Verbal scaffolding at 3 years was associated with children’s executive functioning skills at 4 years. Hammond, Müller, Carpendale, Bibok, and Liebermann-Finestone (2012) coded scaffolding on a 5-point scale, taking into account a number of characteristics, including providing helpful structure, such as suggestions when the child is frustrated and not interfering when the child is successful. They 41

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showed that scaffolding at age 2 was associated with executive functioning at age 4 by facilitating verbal ability at age 3. In summary, there is evidence that structuring behaviors that support children’s emerging competencies are associated with the development of behavioral self-regulation. Clearly more research is needed on this construct, especially that which disentangles autonomy support and structure.

Internalized Self-Regulation Internalized Behavioral Self-Regulation in Younger Children The development of self-regulation in toddlerhood and the early precursors of more internalized behavior in older children have been addressed by Kochanska, Coy, and Murray (2001), as well as other researchers. These authors have conceptualized self-regulation as developmental in nature, with behavior moving from more externally to internally regulated as children’s attention, control, and recognition of parental expectations mature (Karreman, van Tuijl, van Aken, and Deković, 2006). Defining and measuring internalization in toddlers and young children pose unique methodological challenges for empirical study. Because researchers are unable to directly ask young children why they engage in or inhibit certain behaviors, researchers must extrapolate from children’s actions. For instance, when a toddler complies with a parent’s request to clean up toys or refrain from touching an attractive object, is she or he fulfilling this task willingly or due to feeling coerced? In their developmental conceptualization, Kochanska and her colleagues (Kochanska et al., 1995; Kochanska, Tjebkes, and Fortnan, 1998; Kochanska et al., 2001) posit that compliance with caregivers’ requests serves as an early indicator of toddlers’ self-regulation, as compliance necessitates the child’s initiation, suppression, or modification of behaviors in accordance with parental demands. Kochanska et al. (1998) argued that compliance is heterogeneous, differentiating between situational compliance and committed compliance. In situational compliance, a child will cooperate with parental demands, but will do so “half-heartedly” and without genuine interest in the parent’s agendum; this child requires reminders and parental intervention to maintain behavior. By contrast, in committed compliance, the child enthusiastically embraces, endorses, and accepts the parent’s agendum as her or his own, proactively engaging in tasks without need for prompts or control from the parent. To measure a child’s committed versus situational compliance, Kochanska et al. (2001) videotaped interactions between mothers and their children during various “do” and “don’t” tasks in the laboratory. In the “do” context, mothers were instructed to ask their children to withstand unpleasant or boring behaviors, such as cleaning up toys and returning the items into a designated basket after a free play session. In a “don’t” context, mothers asked their children to suppress a desired behavior, such as refraining from playing with attractive toys. Committed compliance was denoted in the “do” context if the child enthusiastically picked up toys and placed them in their appropriate baskets, moved from one pile of toys to the next without maternal directives, and/or clapped her or his hands after putting away the toys; in the “don’t” context, committed compliance was coded if the child looked at but did not touch the attractive toys, muttering statements to the effect of “no-no toys” or “no touch” (Kochanska et al., 2001, p. 1095). Situational compliance was coded in the “do” context if the child cooperated reluctantly or due to maternal prompting, without which the child would become distracted or disengaged from the task. In the “don’t” context, a child observed to be hovering closely around the attractive toys or relying heavily on maternal control to refrain from touching the toys would be coded as displaying situational compliance. Kochanska and her colleagues also gauged young children’s internalization by observing toddlers’ initiation or suppression of behaviors without external surveillance by their caregiver, or the extent to which toddlers complied with their caregivers’ requests when their parents left them unattended, for 42

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example, to finish putting away toys on their own (do) or refrain from playing with attractive toys (don’t) (Kochanska et al., 2001). Finally, to further examine how young children internalize rules, values, and standards of behaviors, Kochanska (2002) explored morality and conscience development, defining conscience as “a reliable internal guidance system that regulates conduct without the need for external control” (p. 192). To study this process, Kochanska and Aksan (2006) examined moral emotions (e.g., guilt, discomfort following wrongdoing) and moral conduct (e.g., adhering to rules and standards without surveillance), for example, by examining children’s affect after being told they had damaged an important item belonging to the experimenter (Kochanska, Gross, Lin, and Nichols, 2002), by whether children touched toys deemed prohibited by their mothers, and by whether they cheated during a game to win a prize. What parental qualities may facilitate the development of committed compliance and conscience in children? Kochanska and colleagues developed the construct of mutually responsive orientation (MRO; Kochanska, 1997, 2002), defined as a “positive, mutually binding, and mutually cooperative relationship that evolves in some parent–child dyads” (Kochanska, Aksan, Prisco, and Adams, 2008, p. 30). Based in attachment theory, MRO portrays a warmth and eagerness between parent and child to cooperate and respond to one another’s cues. Aksan, Kochanska, and Ortmann (2006) developed the Mutually Responsive Orientation Scale to identify four components of MRO in parent–child dyads: (1) coordinated routines, in which the parent and child have mutually agreed-on expectations for the organization of daily activities; (2) harmonious communication, in which the parent and child display effective, warm, and back-and-forth flow of conversation; (3) mutual cooperation, in which the parent and child display a vested interest in and cooperation with each other; and (4) emotional ambience, in which the parent-child relationship is mutually characterized by positive affect, joy, and humor. MRO is bidirectional and transactional, and includes parental involvement, with parents providing their children with time, affection, support, and love, as well as parental autonomy support, with parents taking children’s perspectives and being responsive to their initiations and wishes. Kochanska and Aksan (1995) also examined parenting on dimensions of negative control and guidance or gentle control. In negative control, a parent uses forceful discipline, such as threats, harsh physical discipline, or negative commands to achieve compliance goals, whereas gentle guidance entails a parent directing her or his child through reasoning, polite requests, positive feedback, and suggestions—a construct very similar to that of autonomy support. Kochanska et al. (2008) further divided negative control into categories of assertive control¸ in which the parent controls her or his child in a firm manner with direct commands and prohibitions (e.g., “Do not play now” and “These are only to look at”), and forceful control, in which a parent uses threats and anger to enact control (e.g., “We won’t go to the pool until it’s all done” or “What did I tell you?”). Kochanska and her colleagues investigated relations among MRO, parental power assertion, and children’s self-regulatory capacities through measures of committed compliance. Kochanska and Aksan (1995) proposed that the MRO established between a mother and her child may foster an interactive environment in which a child’s eager enactment of her or his mother’s requests promotes internalization. Observing mothers and their 26- to 41-month-old children, Kochanska and Aksan (1995) found that the higher the MRO in the dyad, the more children demonstrated committed compliance and self-regulation when alone with prohibited toys. In turn, the more likely mothers were to use gentle guidance and the less they were to resort to negative control, the more children displayed committed compliance. Conversely, mothers of children exhibiting situational compliance were more likely to use any form of control to manage their children’s behavior, including negative control. Kochanska and Aksan (1995) argued that the need for a mother to assert power diminishes or becomes unnecessary when her child enthusiastically endorses her or his mother’s agendum. The directionality of the relation between parental power assertion and children’s committed compliance, however, cannot be established, as inherent in the concept of MRO is the parent–child dyad sharing reciprocal qualities and evolving dynamics. 43

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Findings of Kochanska et al. (2008) further support the importance of MRO for the development of self-regulation. Mother–child and father–child MRO were measured at 7, 15, and 25 months, and parental power assertion was observed in discipline contexts both in the home and laboratory at 38 months. Children’s self-regulation was observed at 52 months in tasks requiring the child to delay gratification, slow motor activity, and lower her or his voice, among other contextual demands. Children who had experienced a highly mutually responsive relationship with their mothers and fathers during their first two years of life demonstrated greater self-regulation at 52 months. Mothers and fathers who relied more heavily on power assertion at 38 months had children with less developed self-regulation at 52 months. Furthermore, reduced maternal power assertion mediated the effects of the mother–child dyad’s MRO on children’s internalized behavior, presumably as mothers need not forcefully discipline their children who are already in tune with and responsive to their cues. However, these associations were not significant in father–child dyads. Kochanska et al. (2008) present various explanations for why the relations were in evidence in mothers but not fathers, suggesting differences in mothers’ responsiveness, affective expression, and greater time spent with their children in comparison to fathers as potential explanations. Researchers have since expanded on the work of Kochanska and her colleagues to explore how relations between parenting and children’s committed compliance may relate longitudinally to adaptive outcomes for the child. Spinrad and colleagues (2012) examined maternal sensitivity, warmth, and MRO through free play and teaching tasks in a sample of 30-, 42-, and 54-month-old toddlers. These authors hypothesized that children whose parents were high on warmth and sensitivity would be eager to adopt their parents’ goals and rules (i.e., committed compliance) in the “do” and “don’t” paradigms previously developed by Kochanska and colleagues (1995, 2001). Effortful control (EC), defined as the ability to quell a dominant response to activate a subdominant behavior, was also assessed through the Early Childhood Behavioral Questionnaire (Putnam, Gartstein, and Rothbart, 2006) measuring children’s ability to focus and shift attention and control behaviors. Effortful control has been found to mediate associations between parenting and child outcomes in previous research (Spinrad et al., 2007), as parental warmth is thought to facilitate EC through providing a comfortable environment in which the child learns how to navigate behaviors effectively with her or his parent providing feedback (Feldman and Klein, 2003). Through path modeling, Spinrad and colleagues (2012) provided evidence that maternal warmth and sensitivity predict higher effortful control and that 30- and 42-month effortful control predict higher committed compliance over one year, even when controlling for earlier outcomes. It appears as though warm and sensitive parenting may facilitate children’s effortful control over time, as children’s ability to control attention and behavior may in turn produce greater cooperation and willingness to engage in their parents’ requests. The researchers also found that early sensitive parenting predicted low impulsivity in children a year later. These results strengthened Spinrad and colleagues’ (2007) previous findings in which effortful control was found to mediate the relation between maternal observed sensitivity and warmth and children’s low levels of externalizing problems, separation distress, and social competence both at 18 and 30 months of age. However, it may be that these early parent–child interactions and outcomes persist beyond childhood and continue throughout even the early adolescent years. Eisenberg and colleagues (2005) have shown that children’s effortful control, measured throughout a three-wave longitudinal study with children ages 9, 11, and 13 years, may serve as the mediator between parental warmth and children’s lower externalizing problems in adolescence. Examining parental facilitation of the conscience and moral development of young children is also vital to understanding how children come to internalize rules as standards of moral conduct. As previously described, guilt following a transgression is an important function of behavior regulation, as children learn from the emotional repercussions of their behaviors to navigate future situations. Kochanska, Forman, and Coy (1999, 2002) found that children of power-assertive mothers who use negative control to force compliance are less likely to show guilt following transgressions in mishap 44

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paradigms. Furthermore, observations of maternal responsiveness and high MRO among parent–child dyads in the first two years of life predict greater guilt at preschool age. High MRO between parents and children has also been associated with children’s internalized conduct (i.e., refraining from playing with prohibited toys when unsupervised and following the rules of a game without cheating) concurrently and longitudinally from the toddler through preschool years and measured through laboratory observations and parental report (Kochanska and Aksan, 2006). According to Kochanska and colleagues, a history of high MRO instills in children a sense of excitement for their future interactions with their parents, which in turn facilitates children’s cooperation and internalization of their parents’ rules. This internalization of rules and standards of conduct, in turn, is associated with positive child outcomes, as Kochanska, Koenig, Barry, Kim, and Yoon (2010) found that toddlers’ and preschoolers’ out-of-sight compliance with parental requests was related to the children’s competent, adaptive functioning and few antisocial problems at early school age. These findings highlight the importance of positive parenting styles and features of the parent–child dyad in promoting early moral development in young children. In summary, studies of young children support the importance of involvement and autonomy support in facilitating children’s self-regulation. The findings using the concept and measure of MRO highlight the bidirectional and transactional nature of parenting and children’s developing self-regulation. These studies go beyond children developing compliance and self-control to understanding how children begin to internalize the regulation of their own behavior, a process crucial to both children’s competence and well-being.

Behavioral Self-Regulation in Older Children Studies of behavior regulation in older children reviewed examine whether or not children engage in various desired behaviors. However, they did not look further to determine why children did what they did, which according to SDT is the core of self-regulation. From an SDT perspective, self-regulation concerns more than compliance; it is in evidence when children engage in behavior according to their own values or goals and without the prompting or coercion of adults. As children grow older, there are increased opportunities to measure self-regulation because they can be asked directly why they do what they do and can be observed in situations without their parents. One key method to assess self-regulation is children’s reports of their reasons for engaging in various behaviors, which, because they are not inherently fun or enjoyable, would need to be internalized (Ryan and Connell, 1989). The reasons children endorse for engaging in behaviors, such as homework or chores, are used to determine where their behavior falls on the internalization continuum (i.e., how autonomous they feel while performing them). Another way to measure selfregulation is to observe whether children engage in certain desired behaviors or show evidence that they have internalized parental communications when their parents or other caregiving adults are not present. Therefore, studies reviewed in this section focus on outcomes that address children’s more versus less autonomous regulation of their behavior. As described previously, some children comply or adhere to their parents’ directives immediately or after a short delay—behaviors known as compliance (Whiting and Edwards, 1988). However, as children develop, and particularly as they enter adolescence, the hope is that they move towards more autonomous self-regulation, or that they behave appropriately not because they are explicitly asked to but because they want to. Accordingly, an important question is: Do the same parenting factors facilitate child compliance and self-regulation? There is evidence in the literature that certain parenting styles are more or less conducive towards children’s compliance. For example, both Baumrind (1967) and Steinberg and his colleagues (Steinberg, Elmen, and Mounts, 1989) have found that, whereas children of authoritarian (controlling) parents may be competent on certain outcomes (e.g., academic achievement) and conforming (i.e., low 45

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levels of deviant behavior), they also lack self-reliance and initiative, factors that are more related to autonomous self-regulation. Addressing the issue of compliance, Chen, Soenens, Vansteenkiste, Van Petegem, and Beyers (2016) had adolescents read vignettes depicting mothers requiring them to study for a test using a generally controlling (demanding), psychologically controlling (guilt-inducing), or autonomy supportive style. When asked how they would respond to the requests, adolescents reported that in response to the two types of control they would display high levels of compulsive compliance (i.e., complying due to pressure though the request is not meaningful) and defiance or rebellion. Compulsive compliance has been shown to be negatively related to children’s well-being, leading to feelings of guilt and resentment towards parents (Roth, Assor, Niemiec, Ryan, and Deci, 2009). By contrast, when the mother’s request was autonomy supportive, adolescents reported that they would try to negotiate with their mothers. Thus, when parents are controlling, children may comply, but only because they feel pressured to do so, or they may defy their parents’ requests altogether. Because children’s autonomous self-regulation goes beyond engaging in appropriate behaviors or refraining from deviant behaviors purely because they must, most studies reviewed in this section examine the relations between parenting and outcomes that go a step further than child compliance— examining why children are engaging in various behaviors. According to SDT, children’s movement along the internalization continuum towards autonomous self-regulation should be facilitated by their parents’ tendencies to be involved, autonomy supportive, and provide structure. The next section reviews studies of these parenting dimensions.

Autonomy Support Versus Control and Self-Regulation Research from an SDT framework has examined relations between autonomy supportive parenting and children’s self-regulation. In one study, Grolnick and Ryan (1989) examined relations between autonomy supportive parenting and children’s autonomous regulation of school behaviors. Children completed the Self-Regulation Questionnaire (Ryan and Connell, 1989), on which they endorse reasons why they engage in homework, classwork, and other activities. Reasons represent the four types of self-regulation: external (e.g., Because I don’t want the teacher to yell at me), introjected (e.g., Because I’d feel guilty if I didn’t do my homework), identified (e.g., Because I want to learn the material), and intrinsic (e.g., Because it’s fun). Subscale scores are weighted and combined to form a Relative Autonomy Index, which represents the degree of autonomy in children’s self-regulation. The authors interviewed mothers and fathers of third- through sixth-grade children (8- to 11-year-olds) regarding the ways in which they motivate their children to engage in school-related activities like homework. Interviews were rated for the degree of parental autonomy support to control. Greater use of parental autonomy support was associated with children’s reports of more autonomous regulation of their school-related activities, as well as with teacher ratings of students’ competence and adjustment and children’s school grades. Furthermore, parents who were more autonomy supportive had children who were less likely, by teacher report, to both act out in school and to exhibit learning difficulties. Soenens and Vansteenkiste (2005) examined the relations between parental autonomy support and adolescents’ self-regulation in the school, friendship, and job search domains. The more adolescents (ages 15 to 22) perceived their mothers to be autonomy supportive in the school and friendship domains, the higher were their reports of autonomous motivation for doing schoolwork and engaging with friends. Furthermore, in both domains, more autonomous motivation for these behaviors in turn predicted increased school competence, grades, and social competence. In the job search domain, adolescents’ perceptions of their fathers’ autonomy support were related to their more autonomous motivation in searching for a job. Similarly, adolescents’ autonomous regulation mediated the relation between father autonomy support and adaptive functioning in the job search. These results revealed unique associations for mother autonomy support in the friendship and school domains and father 46

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autonomy support in the job search domain, perhaps indicating the areas in which each parent is more likely to be involved. These findings suggest that when parents are autonomy supportive, the adolescent is able to approach these areas with more self-determined motives and take on the importance of these behaviors on their own, which makes them more likely to thrive in the given area. Whereas the previous two studies used children’s own reasons why they do things to measure selfregulation, other studies observe how children behave when their parents are not present or examine whether they internalize newly learned information. Grolnick, Gurland, DeCourcey, and Jacob (2002) asked mothers and their third-grade children to work on school-like tasks together. Mothers were observed interacting with their child after being placed in either a high-pressure (“ensure your child performs well enough”) or low-pressure (“there is no particular level at which [your child] needs to perform”) condition. Videos were coded for how controlling versus autonomy supportive mothers were towards their children during the task. Children were then asked to do similar tasks on their own after their mothers left the room. Children performed more poorly on the task alone when their mothers had been more controlling, and better when mothers had been more autonomy supportive. According to SDT, when children are given the opportunity to master a task without interference, they are more likely to internalize the information than when they feel pressured or controlled to do it. This result is in line with the findings of an experimental study (Grolnick and Ryan, 1987) demonstrating that in a more pressuring condition (learning for a grade), children showed less conceptual understanding of information than in a less pressuring condition (learning for interest). Thus, autonomy support can enhance children’s internalization of information and consequentially their ability to apply their new knowledge when their parents are not present. Employing a related method, Davidov and Grusec (2006) observed children’s behavior when left alone to clean up toys. The authors assessed mothers’ willingness to cooperate with their child, a construct similar to autonomy support that included mothers’ openness to being influenced by their children and their willingness to cooperate with their children’s reasonable requests (e.g., “I allow my child to give input into family rules”). Mothers were told to ask their 6- to 9-year-old child to clean up a playroom and then left her or him alone to do so. The child’s response to the request to clean up (whether or not she or he protested) and the mother’s reactions to the protest were coded for the level of conflict and responsiveness. Results showed that mothers’ general willingness to cooperate with their child predicted children’s compliance with their mother’s request to clean up, but only in the absence of conflict. When the mother’s request resulted in more conflict (i.e., child protested, mother was unresponsive to the complaint), the mother’s willing cooperation was not linked to child compliance, likely because this conflict undermined the child’s motivation to comply. These findings indicate that more autonomy supportive parenting practices in which mothers are open to their child’s input can result in child compliance even when the mother is absent, a practice that indicates the child has internalized the regulation of their behavior.

Involvement and Self-Regulation The following studies examine relations between parental involvement and children’s self-regulation. However, as SDT asserts, parental involvement should have the most positive effect on children’s selfregulation when it is implemented in an autonomy supportive way (e.g., children are given a choice in how they spend time with their parents, and parents communicate openly with their child and acknowledge her or his feelings). Thus, we review studies that examine the unique relation between parental involvement and children’s self-regulation and those that look at the relation between how autonomy supportive parents are when they are involved and children’s self-regulation. Xu, Kushner Benson, Murdey-Camino, and Steiner (2010) examined whether various parental involvement practices around school, including their knowledge of children’s school-related activities and active participation in homework and school-related events, were associated with fifth-graders’ 47

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self-regulated learning (SRL), in which students take a purposeful and eager role in the learning process. The more parents helped with their children’s homework, the lower was children’s use of SRL strategies. However, higher parental educational expectations (how far parents think their child will go in school) and school involvement (attending school-related events) were associated with greater use of SRL. SRL also mediated the relation between parental involvement and student reading achievement, indicating that the positive relation between parental school involvement and academic outcomes is a function of children’s increased SRL. Grolnick and Slowiaczek (1994) also found an association between parental school involvement and 11- to 14-year-old children’s academic selfregulation. Mothers’ and fathers’ personal involvement (knowledge about child’s school life) and behavioral involvement (attending school-related events) predicted children’s more autonomous selfregulation of school behaviors such as doing homework and classwork. These studies show that parental involvement can take many forms. Through showing they are there for their child, having confidence that they will succeed, and being present for important school events, parents can encourage children to take on the importance of working hard in school. Two studies examined the effects of parent involvement and autonomy support on self-regulation during school transitions. Stressful events such as school transitions, which can involve changes in school, peers, and academic expectations, can undermine children’s academic motivation and competence. Thus, the availability and support of parents in these situations take on special importance for children’s autonomous regulation. Ratelle, Guay, Larose, and Senécal (2004) examined how parental autonomy support and involvement influenced adolescents’ motivation to pursue higher education during the transition from high school to college. Adolescents completed questionnaires about their parents’ autonomy support and affective involvement in the process of choosing a college program and their own motivation for pursuing higher education, ranging from intrinsic motivation (e.g., “for the pleasure and satisfaction of learning new things in the program”) to external motivation (e.g., “because the program will allow me to get a lucrative job later”). The measure of affective involvement included parents having open discussions with their children and acknowledging their feelings, an autonomy supportive way to show involvement. Higher parental affective involvement and autonomy support were related to adolescents’ more autonomous motivation around choosing a college program. Niemiec et al. (2006) also examined relations between parents’ behaviors that support children’s needs for autonomy, competence, and relatedness and adolescents’ self-regulation in planning to attend college. Parents’ need supportive behaviors were measured by combining reports of parents’ provision of autonomy support and relational support. Adolescents’ perceptions of their parents as providing more autonomy support and relational support (involvement) were associated with more autonomous self-regulation for continuing their education in college. Autonomous regulation was, in turn, related to adolescents’ greater well-being. Taking this relation between autonomy support and involvement a step further, Katz, Kaplan, and Buzukashvily (2011) examined parents’ own motivation to be involved in their children’s homework process. In a sample of fourth-grade Israeli children and their parents, parents’ more autonomous motivation for being involved in their child’s homework was associated with more need supportive behavior, which was measured by combining parents’ and children’s reports of parents’ autonomy supportive behavior and involvement in homework. Parents’ level of need supportive behavior was then related to children’s more autonomous motivation for doing homework. Thus, when parents are involved in their children’s homework process because they find it to be enjoyable and valuable, they are likely to approach it with a more positive attitude and less stress. This positive approach likely increases parents’ ability to behave in ways that support their child’s needs for relatedness, competence, and autonomy, such as by showing empathy, giving choices, and taking their children’s perspectives, all of which result in greater self-regulation. In summary, stressful events, such as school transitions, can undermine adolescents’ academic motivation and competence, and thus the availability and support of parents in these situations take on 48

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increased importance for keeping students on course towards autonomous regulation of school behaviors, and ultimately better competence, psychological health, and life satisfaction. When parental involvement is implemented in an autonomy supportive way and parents show a genuine interest in wanting to help their children in this stressful process, adolescents’ motivational outcomes are more autonomous.

Parental Conditional Regard and Self-Regulation A form of psychological control often discussed in the literature is parental conditional regard, in which parents alter their attention or affection towards their child according to the child’s good or bad behavior. Positive conditional regard is when parents give more attention/affection when their child exhibits desired behaviors, and negative conditional regard is when parents withdraw attention/ affection when their child does not (Roth et al., 2009). Rogers (1951) theorized that parents’ conditional regard undermines children’s self-esteem and self-regulation, and object relations theorists such as Miller and Ward (1981) suggested that when children learn they are not loved unconditionally, they behave in ways they believe will bring about their parents’ love. Thus, children may perform the desired behaviors of their parents, but the children are not behind or satisfied with the behaviors. The following studies examine relations between parental conditional regard and self-regulation. Roth et al. (2009) compared how parental conditional positive regard (PCPR), parental conditional negative regard (PCNR), and autonomy support related to ninth-grade Israeli adolescents’ introjected versus identified regulation of academic and emotion control behaviors. Greater use of PCPR was associated with adolescents’ more introjected regulation, or feelings of internal compulsion or pressure to perform behaviors, which in turn predicted their more constricted behaviors—pressured, gradefocused studying and suppressed regulation of negative emotions. PCNR was associated with higher resentment towards parents, which undermined adolescents’ capacity to regulate their emotions and their school engagement. Adolescents’ introjected regulation mediated the relation between PCPR and emotion dysregulation; thus, parents’ use of PCPR to encourage adolescents to suppress negative emotions led to adolescents’ inability to regulate these emotions. In contrast, parental autonomy support predicted feelings of choice or autonomous motivation in adolescents, which in turn predicted less constricted behaviors—integrated regulation of negative emotions and interest-focused academic engagement. Thus, parental conditional regard is not an effective means of encouraging adolescents towards willingly behaving and making choices in these domains. Similarly, Assor, Roth, and Deci (2004) examined associations between college students’ perceptions of their parents’ use of conditional regard and the internalization of their behavior in the academic, sports, prosocial, and emotion control domains. In all four domains, students’ perception of their parents’ conditional regard was associated with their introjected self-regulation, as indicated by their feelings of internal compulsion to perform the target behavior. Feeling compelled led students to behave only due to internal pressure, which was related to their negative well-being and poor parent–child relationships. Even though parental conditional regard can encourage students to behave in certain ways, there are sequelae in terms of negative emotional experience following the behavior. Roth (2008) examined how college students’ perceptions of their parents’ use of conditional regard and autonomy support related to the students’ self-oriented versus other-oriented prosocial behavior and self-regulation. Autonomy supportive parenting was positively related to more other-oriented forms of helping and identified and integrated regulation of helping behavior, whereas parental conditional regard was related to more self-oriented helping (helping others to serve oneself ) and introjected regulation of helping behavior. These studies reveal that, as with psychological control, parental conditional regard undermines children’s autonomous self-regulation and encourages children to engage in behaviors because they feel pressured or worry about losing their parents’ approval, rather than engaging in them more volitionally or willingly. 49

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Structure and Self-Regulation The relation between the final dimension of SDT, structure, and self-regulation is less explored. A study by Griffith and Grolnick (2014) examining sixth-grade students in Barbados found that parental structure was related to students’ identified and intrinsic motivation in school. In another study, Grolnick, Raftery-Helmer, Flamm, Marbell, and Cardemil (2015) focused on parental provision of academic structure and children’s school motivation during the transition to middle school, a challenging transition that can often undermine students’ intrinsic motivation. The more parents provided structure in an autonomy supportive manner (involving children in the process of setting up the rules and regulations, allowing for input, opinion exchange, and choice), the more children showed autonomous motivation for school behaviors. However, when structure was provided in a more controlling manner (e.g., using pressure or coercion to implement rules; not allowing children to express opinions regarding the rules), children reported more introjected motivation, indicating they were pressuring themselves to succeed. Parental provision of structure positively predicted students’ intrinsic motivation over this school transition, suggesting that provision of structure can buffer against decreases in students’ intrinsic motivation that is common during this time. Thus, parents’ provision of structure is similarly important to encouraging children’s autonomous regulation of their behaviors. More research is needed to examine relations between structure and self-regulation in other domains.

Emotion Regulation Self-regulation of emotion concerns the child’s active modulation of emotional processes. Just as was argued for behavior regulation, emotion regulation requires the support of caregivers as children develop nascent strategies that become increasingly autonomous. Children need to be exposed to effective strategies through adult guidance and modeling for these strategies to be internalized, and children must be able to practice these strategies, first with the support of their caregivers and later on their own under conditions in which emotions are mildly or moderately strong. The modulation of very strong affect without assistance is an excessively difficult task for young children. Children must thus have the opportunity to autonomously modulate affect, and this can only take place when the regulatory task is within the capacity of the child. In other words, an autonomy supportive, structured, and involved environment should facilitate the internalization of the regulation of emotion.

Involvement/Sensitivity/Support Consistent with the earlier argument, responsive, affectionate, and sensitive parenting should help children to develop the capacity to modulate emotions by supporting them and “coregulating” emotion until children can do so on their own (Tronick, 1989). The external soothing that parents provide while children are developing would help them to cope with distress within a range that they can handle. One way of conceptualizing this responsiveness is that parents are available to help their children when distress becomes unmanageable, resulting in maladaptive functioning. Keeping affect within tolerable limits allows the child to take steps toward self-regulation. One way parents facilitate their children’s emotion regulation is by acting as resources for their children. This is the assumption of work on social referencing (Sorce and Emde, 1981). In this work, it is posited that regulation involves an appraisal process in which primary emotional reactions are modulated by the meaning ascribed to the situation. Caregivers’ facial and vocal expressions are important sources of meaning in ambiguous situations. Several studies have found that when mothers are available for referencing in fear-inducing situations, children show less distress and more engagement with the stimulus than when she is unavailable (Diener, Mangelsdorf, Fosnot, and Kienstra, 1997; Sorce and Emde, 1981). Kogan and Carter (1995) found that emotional availability, empathy, and contingent responsiveness to 50

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a child’s emotion are associated with less avoidance and resistance upon maternal reengagement after a still-face task, indicating good ability to regulate emotion. Raver (1996; Raver and Leadbetter, 1995) conceptualized parental responsiveness as periods of social contingency or collaborative joint attention. More time in such bouts during free play is associated with more successful emotion regulation strategies (less time seeking comfort from mothers and more time distracting themselves with other objects) during a delay task (Raver, 1996). Halligan et al. (2013) studied a sample of mothers beginning in pregnancy. These authors measured children’s emotion regulation at 10 days and 4 weeks and then at 12 and 18 months and 5 years. The 12- and 18-month measures were observer ratings during the Bayley assessment and a laboratory task where an attractive toy was taken away and children’s affect and emotion regulation strategies (e.g., self-soothing) were assessed. At 5 years, emotion regulation was assessed as children’s affect and behavior during a challenging task. Maternal sensitivity (warm, responsive, and accepting behavior) was coded during parent–child interaction, and behavior problems were measured at 12 and 18 months and 5 years. Higher maternal sensitivity was associated with higher concurrent and subsequent emotion regulation from 12 weeks to 5 years. Emotion regulation mediated the relation between sensitivity and behavior problems. The authors found stronger support for parent-to-child than child-to parent relations. The studies reviewed here show the importance of overall responsive and sensitive parenting to children’s emotion regulation development. Next we delve into studies that address the parenting processes that more specifically facilitate emotion regulation.

Autonomy Supportive Versus Controlling Parenting Several studies have related parenting on dimensions similar to that of autonomy support to control during interaction to the development of emotion regulation capacities in children. In two studies, Calkins (1997; Calkins and Johnson, 1998) examined parents’ styles of interacting with their children in play situations. From these interactions, parents’ behaviors were coded for the extent to which they used positive guidance, which included praise, affection, and encouragement, and negative control, which included scolding, restricting, and directing the child. Children’s use of three strategies in situations requiring emotion regulation (e.g., delay), were coded: orienting to the task, distraction, and aggression. In a study of 24-month-olds, mothers who engaged in more negative control had children who spent more time orienting to the focal object, used less distraction, and had lower levels of vagal suppression, a physiological index of emotion regulation. Maternal styles were not correlated with children’s level of reactivity (i.e., distress) to the situations—only the strategies children used to modulate emotion. Because reactivity likely has a strong temperamental component (Calkins and Johnson, 1998), it is less likely to be subject to socialization styles. Rather, the modulation of emotion, as indexed by emotion regulation strategies, is the component of emotion regulation that is more amenable to and vulnerable to parental styles. In a study of 18-month-olds, positive guidance was associated with greater use of distraction and constructive coping in emotion-inducing situations. Furthermore, an additional maternal variable, preemptive interference, defined as mothers’ actions that precluded the child from doing an activity herself or himself, was associated with more use of anger as a regulatory strategy. Mathis and Bierman (2015) coded mothers interacting with their prekindergarten children for warmth/sensitivity and directive/critical behavior. Emotion regulation was rated by the teacher and attentional control by both the teacher and through a number of laboratory tasks. Mothers’ more directive and critical interacting was associated with children’s lower attention control and emotion regulation. By contrast, there were no effects of mothers’ warmth/sensitivity. This study highlights the specific role of autonomy support in helping to build children’s use of successful emotion regulation strategies. 51

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Cui, Morris, Criss, Houltberg, and Silk (2014) had adolescents report on their parents’ psychological control (i.e., their use of parenting that is emotionally manipulative and coercive through the use of such tactics as love withdrawal and guilt induction). Adolescents also reported on their abilities to regulate anger (e.g., “I can stop myself from losing my temper”) and sadness (e.g., “I stay calm and don’t let sad things get to me”). Higher levels of psychological control were associated with lower anger regulation, although there were no relations for regulation of sadness. In addition, anger regulation mediated relations between psychological control and adolescents’ depressive symptoms. Several studies have specifically examined parents’ autonomy supportive versus controlling behavior in regard to the regulation of emotion per se. Grolnick, Kurowski, McMenamy, Rivkin, and Bridges (1998) examined the ways mothers helped their children regulate mild distress. Twelve-, 18-, 24-, and 32-month-olds waited to obtain a present or eat some goldfish crackers. In one of these situations (parent-active), the mother was allowed to be active in helping her child. In the other (parent-passive), she was asked to refrain from initiating interaction with her child (although she could respond). Of interest were relations between the ways mothers interacted with their children in the parent-active situation and the children’s abilities to modulate distress on their own in the parent-passive situation. Six strategies used by the mother were coded: active engagement, redirecting attention, reassurance, following the child, physical comfort, and focus on the desired object. In addition, the authors coded whether the strategy was mother-initiated, child-initiated, or ongoing from a previous episode. Mothers who used more ongoing active engagement in the parent-active situation had children who were more distressed in the parent-passive situation (controlling for distress in the parent-active situation). This finding did not occur for mother-initiated active engagement, indicating that it is not mothers’ responses per se (which tend to be reactions to child distress), but the maintenance of activity despite decreases in distress that appears to undermine children’s active self-regulation. Thus, mothers who take responsibility for regulating children’s distress above and beyond what is called for by their distress levels appear to undermine children’s abilities to regulate emotions on their own. A similar result was found with fear as the emotion to be regulated. Nachmias, Gunnar, Mangelsdorf, Parritz, and Buss (1996) examined the strategies that mothers used to help their wary children deal with a mildly fear-inducing stimulus. Mothers who forced their children to focus on a novel event had children with higher postsession cortisol levels, indicating less effective regulation and possible interference with the children’s own attempts to regulate proximity and contact with the arousing stimulus. With older children, Gottman, Katz, and Hooven (1996) showed that parents who dismiss negative emotions have children who have difficulty managing emotions on their own. Children of parents who are aware of their children’s emotions and support their expression themselves show more well-regulated physiological reactions. These authors also described parents’ beliefs and thoughts about their own and their children’s emotions as their “meta-emotion philosophy” (Gottman, Katz, and Hooven, 1997). Two philosophies have been identified. Parents who have an emotion-coaching philosophy are aware of their own and their children’s emotions. They see emotional expressions as opportunities for teaching and attempt to assist their children with emotions of anger and sadness, much like an emotion coach. By contrast, parents who subscribe to an emotion-dismissing philosophy deny and ignore emotions in themselves and their children. They try to get rid of emotions and convey to their children that emotions are not important and will not last. They view their job as trying to change and minimize emotions. Gottman et al. (1997) demonstrated that children from homes with an emotion-coaching philosophy were better regulated physiologically and had a greater ability to focus attention and better social skills than those from homes with an emotion-dismissing philosophy. Similarly, Eisenberg et al. (1999) examined parents’ reactions to children’s negative emotion. Parents who were more punitive and minimizing of emotion had children who, in the short term, decreased in emotion expression but in the long term showed more externalizing negative emotion (parent 52

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ratings of children overreacting when angry, being hostile, and irritable). In this study, Eisenberg was also able to identify bidirectional patterns in which externalizing negative emotion predicted parental reports of more punitive negative reactions. Roberts (1999) examined parents’ childrearing practices, children’s competence in preschool, and parents’ emotional socialization practices. Parents’ comforting and nonpunitive reactions to emotional distress were related to boys’ resourceful active engagement in preschool and friendly, nonaggressive relationships with peers. There was evidence, however, that emotion control, including pressure for control of emotion expression, was also positively associated with friendly behavior with peers in the preschool. These findings held even controlling for general parenting style (e.g., authoritarian versus authoritative). Tolerant and nonpunitive responses to emotion at 4 years also predicted increases in friendliness and resourcefulness at age 7 (Roberts, 1999). Parent practices that emphasized control of emotions were uncorrelated or correlated negatively with resourcefulness at 7. These results suggest that, in the short run, there may be some positive effects of pressuring children to suppress emotion. However, in the long term, tolerant responses that help children work through their emotions facilitate adaptive self-regulated behavior. In both Eisenberg’s and Roberts’s work, one strategy parents used was to ignore or dismiss emotion. How can this strategy be categorized in terms of an autonomy support to control dimension? Some might say that this strategy allows emotion to run its course and so is not controlling. Roberts and Strayer (1987) provided another perspective. These authors suggested that parents who ignore emotion make clear their demand for control because access to the caregiver is denied at a time when approach tendencies are high. The indirect message to the child is that expression of emotions is not acceptable. As such, this strategy would be categorized as controlling of emotion. These studies show that both general parenting styles and parents’ specific responses to emotions play a role in children’s developing self-regulation. When parents allow for and assist in supporting children’s attempts to regulate their emotions without dismissing them or controlling their responses, children are more likely to develop and use strategies for regulating their emotions.

Structure As with behavior regulation, fewer studies address the role of parental structure in emotion regulation. However, work on scaffolding has addressed this issue. Hoffman, Crnic, and Baker (2006) coded 3-year-olds’ emotion dysregulation during waiting and problem-solving tasks. In addition, they coded three types of maternal scaffolding during laboratory tasks: technical scaffolding (the ability to structure tasks to children’s capabilities so they can complete them with support), motivational scaffolding (the ability to help children initially become engaged and maintain their engagement), and emotional scaffolding (the ability to make the task a positive experience). Higher levels of all three types of scaffolding when children were 3 years predicted lower levels of emotion dysregulation in children at 4 years. In addition, less effective maternal scaffolding at 3 years predicted higher levels of child behavior problems at 4 years. In summary, emotional self-regulation is facilitated by involved, responsive, and structuring parenting and by styles that tolerate and support emotional expression and allow the child opportunities to autonomously regulate emotions.

Facilitating Internalized Emotion Regulation From an SDT perspective, successful emotion regulation involves more than suppressing emotions or even being able to express them in a socially appropriate manner. Roth and his colleagues (2009) used this theory to delineate the quality and depth of processing and the regulation of emotions. These authors differentiated three emotion regulation styles: emotional integration, suppressive regulation, and dysregulation. Emotional integration involves an openness whereby the individual takes interest 53

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in her or his emotional experience and allows this experience to guide behavior. In emotional integration, the individual uses a variety of regulatory strategies with a sense of choice about whether to express or withhold emotion. Suppressive regulation involves the avoidance or minimization of emotional experience. Individuals typically feel pressure to downplay or dismiss their emotions. Finally, with dysregulated emotion regulation, the individual is overwhelmed by emotions such that they either express emotions unintentionally or experience intense emotions. Both suppressive and dysregulation of emotions are associated with maladaptive outcomes and ill-being (Gross, 2013). SDT researchers have examined parenting in relation to these styles of emotion regulation. Roth and Assor (2012) studied the relation between parents’ use of positive conditional regard (PCR) and emotion regulation styles. These authors asked college students how much their parents used PCR as well as autonomy support (i.e., acknowledging the child’s perspectives and feelings) in relation to their expression and suppression of emotions when they were growing up. They also reported on their integrated, suppressive, and dysregulated styles of emotion regulation. Higher autonomy support was associated with more integrated regulation. By contrast, PCR for expression of emotions was associated with more dysregulation, whereas PCR for suppression was associated with more suppressive regulation. In a related study with 9- to 14-year-olds, Brenning, Soenens, Van Petegem, and Vansteenkiste (2015) measured parents’ autonomy support around emotion, which they measured as parents taking an interest in the child’s emotions, accepting them, and encouraging children to explore their emotions. Autonomy support around emotion regulation was related to higher levels of integration and lower levels of suppression. Cross-lagged analyses showed that autonomy support was associated with increases in integration and decreases in suppression over a one-year period. Countering the hypothesis that these relations represent parents reacting to emotion regulation styles, cross-lagged analyses showed no evidence that emotion regulation styles predicted parenting over time. In summary, autonomy support appears to facilitate more internalized regulation of emotion, as well as the integrated experience of emotion such that it can be used to facilitate adaptive responses.

Challenges in the Study of Parenting and Children’s Self-Regulation The research cited earlier provides a rather consistent picture of the parenting characteristics associated with self-regulation in children, but the study of parenting and self-regulation holds a number of challenges. We discuss three of these next.

Specifying Directionality A key challenge for work on parenting and self-regulation is that the directionality of parenting effects cannot be definitively established. It is certainly the case that children who initiate their own behavior and who take responsibility for themselves might elicit less control from their parents and make it less likely that the parents feel the need to resort to power-assertive techniques. Furthermore, such children increase the likelihood that interactions with parents will be pleasant and satisfying, potentially increasing parents’ involvement. There is strong evidence for the child-to-parent hypothesis. Clearly, temperament plays a role in how controlling versus autonomy supportive parents are. Lee and Bates (1985), for example, found that toddlers with difficult temperaments were more resistant to maternal attempts to exert authority and their negative behavior was more likely to be met with coercive responses by their mothers. Rutter and Quinton (1984), in their four-year longitudinal study of children of mentally ill parents, showed that children who have difficult temperamental characteristics, including negative mood and low malleability, were more likely to elicit parental criticism and hostility, and Scaramella and Leve (2004) showed that children with difficult temperaments (poor self-control, high emotional reactivity) 54

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elicited more harsh parenting than those with easier temperaments. Grolnick, Weiss, McKenzie, and Wrightmen (1996) showed that mothers who saw their adolescents as more difficult were rated by observers as more controlling with them than mothers who saw their adolescents as easier. This result did not hold for fathers; fathers who perceived their adolescents as difficult tended to withdraw from interactions with them rather than becoming controlling. It is likely that this differential response is due to the greater latitude fathers have in becoming involved with their adolescents. Behavioral genetics (Ge, Conger, and Stewart, 1996; Plomin, Reiss, Hetherington, and Howe, 1994) has suggested that the level of control provided by parents is at least partially due to genetic factors. Researchers have attempted to address the issue of directionality in a number of ways. First, the concept of bidirectionality and transactional processes can be inherent in the concepts being explored. For example, Kochanska’s concept of mutually responsive orientation is a relational concept that involves the attitudes and behaviors of both parents and children. Another strategy involves the use of longitudinal data. For example, several of the studies cited in this chapter have shown longitudinal effects of parenting from infancy to toddlerhood (Bernier et al., 2010), from toddlerhood to preschool (Halligan et al., 2013), and even from preschool to high school (Bindman et al., 2015). Particularly compelling are studies that suggest that the short- and long-term consequences of parental behaviors can be at odds. For example, Roberts and Strayer’s (1987) data, reviewed in the section on emotion regulation, showed that pressure to control emotions can have a short-term consequence of greater social success but a long-term consequence of lower resourcefulness. Additional methods of demonstrating that the development of children’s self-regulation is influenced by parenting practices involves the use of statistical techniques to attempt to account for children’s behavior in understanding parents’ actions and their repercussions. For example, Grolnick, Kurowski, McMenamy, Rivkin, and Bridges (1998) controlled for children’s levels of distress in asking about parent strategies that facilitate the development of children’s self-regulation. Several researchers have used cross-lagged analyses with varying conclusions. Bridgett et al. (2009) showed that parents whose infants increased rapidly in self-regulation from 4 to 12 months showed lower levels of negative parenting at 18 months. In an older sample, Moilanen, Rasmussen, and Padilla-Walker (2014) examined 11- to 16-year-olds’ reports of parenting styles in relation to parents’ reports of children’s emotion regulation over a one-year period. Neither authoritative nor permissive styles predicted changes in self-regulation over time, but authoritarian parenting predicted decreases in emotion regulation. Furthermore, low levels of emotion regulation predicted increases in both permissive and authoritarian parenting over the year. The authors concluded that child-to-parent effects are stronger at this point in development wherein parenting styles may have had effects much earlier. Finally, Brenning et al. (2015) found that in a sample of young adolescents, maternal autonomy support predicted increases in adaptive emotion regulation. In addition, increases in emotion dysregulation predicted decreases in autonomy support. These studies suggest the complexity of possible bidirectional relations between parenting and selfregulation, which may vary as a function of child age and the parenting and self-regulation constructs examined. No doubt, the study of parenting and children’s self-regulation will require creative and tenacious approaches to address the issue of directionality.

Specifying the Roles of Mothers and Fathers Although most research in child development has focused on mothers, there is increased emphasis on the differential roles of mothers and fathers in facilitating children’s development. The researchers whose work was reviewed earlier have taken different approaches to their studies of parenting effects on children. Most studies of self-regulation included only mothers, some (e.g., Liew, Kwok, Chang, Chang, and Yeh, 2014) average results for mothers and fathers, and some use reports of “parents.” 55

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Because of the dearth of studies, conclusions on the differential roles of mothers and fathers in facilitating self-regulation cannot be made at this time. Research in the area of children’s behavior problems more generally has included fathers and gives reason to believe that it is crucial to include fathers in studies of children’s self-regulation. Research supports focusing on both quantitative and qualitative measures of fathering. On the quantitative side, children of more involved fathers have been found to display more positive affect and task orientation during problem-solving (Goldberg and Easterbrooks, 1984) and less acting-out behavior (McCabe, Clark, and Barnett, 1999). On the qualitative end, more sensitive father–child interactions have been associated with positive task behavior and better socialization skills (Goldberg and Easterbrooks, 1984; Kelley, Smith, Green, Berndt, and Rogers, 1998). More restrictive, harsh, and punitive styles in fathers have been associated with low cognitive and social development and low academic performance (Feldman and Wentzel, 1993; Kelley et al., 1998; Pettit, Bates, and Dodge, 1993). The studies of self-regulation reviewed that included mothers and fathers support the earlier findings. There are mean level differences in fathers’ levels of involvement as compared with mothers (Grolnick and Ryan, 1989), but fathers’ styles appear to be associated with outcomes in similar ways to those of mothers (Grolnick and Ryan, 1989; Pratt, Kerig, Cowan, and Cowan, 1988; Roth and Assor, 2012). Others show differences. For example, Moilanen et al. (2009) showed that there were relations between mothers’ but not fathers’ authoritarian parenting and poor emotion regulation. Furthermore, for both mothers and fathers, lower self-regulation was associated with more permissive parenting. In contrast, poor emotion regulation was associated with increased authoritarianism only in mothers. The authors concluded that because mothers tend to take on more responsibility for their children, they have more opportunities to respond to their children’s dysregulated behavior. In addition, they may be the primary disciplinarians of their children. As we work toward inclusion of fathers in all studies, the questions we ask in our research will need to become more complex. For example, do fathers make independent contributions to the development of children’s self-regulation? Do mothers and fathers play different roles in the onset versus stability of self-regulation difficulties? Does the role of fathers differ for sons and daughters? These and other questions await answers in the field of self-regulation.

Conceptualizing the Role of Parents in Cultural/Ethnic and Socioeconomic Contexts Are the patterns we described supporting the importance of autonomy support, structure, and involvement for the growth of self-regulation applicable to all cultural and socioeconomic groups? Work using SDT and other theories has begun to address this issue. Perhaps the most controversial and well-studied issue concerns the effects of the parenting dimension of autonomy support versus control. Some have argued that in cultures that value interdependence rather than individualism and/or possess hierarchical relations among individuals rather than egalitarian ones, autonomy support would be at odds with those values and not associated with positive outcomes. In contrast to this view, when autonomy is defined as being volitional rather than as independent, controlling parenting has been associated with maladjustment in the United States as well as collectivistic-oriented cultures, including China (Vansteenkiste, Zhou, Lens, and Soenens, 2005), Korea (Soenens, Park, Vansteenkiste, and Mouratidis, 2012), India, and Palestine (Barber, Stolz, and Olsen, 2005). With regard to self-regulation per se, parental autonomy support is associated with more autonomous self-regulation in Russia (Chirkov and Ryan, 2001), Belgium (Soenens and Vansteenkiste, 2005), Barbados (Griffith and Grolnick, 2014), and Ghana (Marbell and Grolnick, 2013). Although these cross-culture similarities are evident, there is also evidence for differences in the strengths of relations between autonomy support and self-regulation in various groups and cultures, as well as in the behaviors children experience as supporting autonomy. Lamborn, Dornbusch, and Steinberg (1996) found stronger relations between nondemocratic decision-making and poor 56

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adjustment in European-American adolescents than in African-American adolescents, and Wang, Pomerantz, and Chen (2007) found stronger relations between psychological control and motivation in U.S. adolescents in comparison to Chinese adolescents. With regard to the experience of specific parent behaviors, Marbell and Grolnick (2013, in press) showed that although certain types of autonomy support, in particular, perspective taking and opinion exchange, are associated with self-regulation in both the United States (an individualist culture valuing independence) and Ghana (a collectivist culture valuing interdependence), other aspects, including allowing children’s decision-making and choice, were associated with positive outcomes only in the United States. Similar questions can be asked regarding the influence of socioeconomic advantage and disadvantage on parenting and self-regulation. There is evidence that the stress associated with socioeconomic disadvantage affects parents’ ability to promote adaptive regulatory strategies in their children (Arnold, O’Leary, Wolff, and Acker, 1993). Further, children from low-socioeconomic status (SES) environments have more self-regulatory difficulties (Raver, 2004). There is evidence that sensitive and responsive parenting has similar effects on self-regulation in the context of disadvantage and high-risk populations as in low-risk populations (Landry, Smith, Miller-Loncar, Swank, 1997). However, there are some ways in which context may moderate the effects of parenting. There is some evidence that in difficult contexts the effects of facilitative and undermining parenting are magnified (Raver, 2004). For example, controlling parenting is more associated with child depression in dangerous as opposed to safer neighborhoods (Levitt, Grolnick, and Raftery-Helmer, 2018). Although complex, exploration of the ways in which parenting influences self-regulation will clearly need to consider the nuanced ways in which culture and context shape parenting and its effects. Clearly this is an area that merits future research.

Including Multimethod Assessments of Parenting and Self-Regulation The studies on parenting and self-regulation reviewed have included a variety of methods, including parent self-report, child self-report, observations of parents’ and children’s behavior, and reports of others, such as teachers. However, these methods are often used more exclusively with some age ranges than others. For example, most assessments of parenting in young children utilize observational methods, whereas most measures of parenting in older children utilize parent or child report. Further, behavior regulation (including executive functioning and emotion regulation) is often measured in young children through lab measures but more often measured by self-report for older children. It would be important for studies to cross these boundaries so that meaningful comparisons across developmental periods could be made. Furthermore, there is often a fine boundary between self-regulation measures and the outcomes that they are hypothesized to predict. For example, in some studies attention problems are measured as an aspect of self-regulation (e.g., Weis et al., 2016) and in others an outcome of it (e.g., Halligan et al., 2013). It would be important for researchers to explicate their rationales for such choices and to tease apart these constructs where possible. Finally, inclusion of multiple measures of parenting is important to elucidate the effects of particular parenting strategies. For example, Mathis and Bierman (2015) found that warm, sensitive, and directive-critical parenting was associated with emotion regulation and attention control, but only directive-critical parenting was uniquely associated with these outcomes.

Conclusions With accumulating evidence of the importance of children being able to regulate their behavior, whether indexed by their abilities to control their attention, suppress impulsive and inappropriate behavior, or modulate strong emotion, it is imperative to identify the factors that promote such 57

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capacities. However, the goals of socialization are more than simply having children comply with their parents’ wishes. Growth toward maturity requires children to take an active role in initiating and regulating their own behavior. Self-Determination Theory provides a framework for understanding how children develop toward increasingly autonomous self-regulation. This theory suggests that internalization of values, behaviors, and attitudes in the social surround is a natural and spontaneous process, part of the organism’s innate propensity toward mastery. However, the process is also subject to the facilitating or undermining effects of the social context. Three contextual dimensions—autonomy support, structure, and involvement—have been identified as key facilitators of intrinsic motivation and the internalization process. In this chapter, this three-dimensional social contextual framework was used to organize data on three issues relevant to self-regulation: behavior regulation, internalized self-regulation, and emotion regulation. In each of these areas, parenting research that corresponded to this dimensional framework was identified. Within different areas, the parenting dimensions have received different levels of attention. Within work on behavior regulation, the importance of parental sensitivity, with its roots in attachment theory, is emphasized, although other work supports the importance of both autonomy support and structure. Work on internalized self-regulation in younger children employs the concept of a mutually responsive orientation, which incorporates autonomy support and involvement within a bidirectional framework, as well as autonomy support and overall general responsiveness. With regard to internalized self-regulation in older children and adolescents, there is support for all three dimensions. Several studies emphasize that the way involvement and structure are provided, whether in an autonomy supportive or controlling manner, is crucial to its effects. Within the area of emotion regulation, parental responsiveness has been stressed. In addition, particular types of parental control that involve the manipulation of emotion, such as parental conditional regard and psychological control, have been emphasized. Clearly, the foci in these different areas are in part a function of the age range of the children being included in the research. However, it is interesting to consider whether the three dimensions have differential salience or centrality for different self-regulatory issues as well. Despite emphasizing different dimensions, there is consensus across areas of self-regulation that all three dimensions are important. In emotion regulation, the presence of a responsive parent who tailors her or his interventions to the child and actively models regulatory strategies in a nonintrusive way appears to facilitate self-regulation. Clearly, tolerating and working through, rather than dismissing, emotions is key. Work in behavior regulation, although widely divergent in focus, supports the notion that involved parents who provide rules and guidelines, who foster individuality by involving children in decisions and helping them to solve problems, tend to be higher not just on measures of compliance but also on self-regulation. This chapter focused on parenting, but it is clear that parents are not the only individuals who play a role in children’s development of self-regulation. Clearly, teachers vary in their involvement, autonomy support, and structure and are likely to have a major influence on children. Peers, of course, cannot be ignored. Piaget (1932/1977) originally hypothesized that peers, not parents, play the most significant role in children’s moral development. Research, however, gives parents an important role in helping children to deal with moral issues (Walker and Taylor, 1991). In the self-regulation literature, it is assumed that parents play the major role. However, it is likely that peers determine opportunities for self-regulation and present some of the regulatory challenges children need to negotiate. The individual and interacting roles of parents, teachers, and peers are clearly an area for future research. What are the implications of this work for professionals working with parents? Working with parents to help their children build regulatory skills through their support and conveyance of useful strategies without controlling and pressuring children’s behavior is a difficult line to walk and requires understanding the differences between involvement, autonomy support, and structure. In addition, professionals need to understand that it is not enough to help parents learn to increase child compliance. When socialization is successful, desired behaviors will not merely be undertaken in response to 58

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direct demands, but autonomously, as a result of personal endorsement of an activity, value, or belief. The development of self-regulation is a goal that necessitates different parenting strategies. Professionals in parenting and child development need to go beyond teaching about rewards and contingencies to a broader curriculum of socialization efforts that affect children’s self-regulation. Our research team has developed a preventive parenting intervention called the Parent Check-In, which teaches parents the tenets of SDT. It also provides strategies that parents can practice to facilitate their children’s selfregulation in the target areas of their choosing. A recent evaluation of a randomized controlled trial (RCT) of the program supports its effectiveness (Allen, Grolnick, and Cordova, 2017). We hope that more interventions to facilitate parenting that increases children’s self-regulation will be forthcoming.

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Developmental Psychology, 43(5), 1170–1186. doi: 10.1037/0012–1649.43.5.1170 Spinrad, T. L., Eisenberg, N., Silva, K. M., Eggum, N. D., Reiser, M., Edwards, A., . . . Hayashi, A. (2012). Longitudinal relations among maternal behaviors, effortful control and young children’s committed compliance. Developmental Psychology, 48(2), 552–566. doi: 10.1037/a0025898 Steinberg, L., Elmen, J. D., and Mounts, N. S. (1989). Authoritative parenting, psychosocial maturity, and academic success among adolescents. Child Development, 60(6), 1424–1436. doi: 10.2307/1130932 Tronick, E. Z. (1989). Emotions and emotional communication in infants. American Psychologist, 44, 112–119. Ursache, A., Blair, C., and Raver, C. C. (2012). The promotion of self-regulation as a means of enhancing school readiness and early achievement in children at risk for school failure. Child Development Perspectives, 6, 122–128. doi: 10.1111/j.1750-8606.2011.00209.x Van Lieshout, C. F. M. (1975). Young children’s reactions to barriers placed by their mothers. Child Development, 46, 879–886. Vansteenkiste, M., Zhou, M., Lens, W., and Soenens, B. (2005). Experiences of autonomy and control among Chinese learners: Vitalizing or immobilizing? Journal of Educational Psychology, 97, 468–483. Vaughn, B., Kopp, C., and Krakow, J. B. (1984). The emergence and consolidation of self-control from eighteen to thirty months of age: Normative trends and individual differences. Child Development, 55, 990–1004. doi: 10.1037/0012-1649.22.6.752 Vygotsky, L. S. (1978). Mind in society: The development of higher psychological processes. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Education Press. Walker, L., and Taylor, J. (1991). Family interactions and the development of moral reasoning. Child Development, 62, 264–283. Wang, Q., Pomerantz, E. M., and Chen, H. (2007). The role of parents’ control in early adolescents’ psychological functioning: A longitudinal investigation in the United States and China. Child Development, 78(5), 1592–1610. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.14678624.2007.01085.x Weis, M., Heikamp, T., and Trommsdorff, G. (2013). Gender differences in school achievement: The role of selfregulation. Frontiers in Psychology, 4, 1–10. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00442 Weis, M., Trommsdorff, G., and Munoz, L. (2016). Children’s self-regulation and school achievement in cultural contexts: The role of maternal restrictive control. Frontiers in Psychology, 7, 1–11. doi: 10.3389/ fpsyg.2016.00722 Whiting, B. B., and Edwards, C. P. (1988). Children of different worlds: The formation of social behavior. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Wood, D., Bruner, J. S., and Ross, G. (1976). The role of tutoring in problem solving. Child Psychology and Psychiatry and Allied Disciplines, 17(2), 89–100. doi: 10.1111/j.14697610.1976.tb00381.x Xu, M., Kushner Benson, S. N., Mudrey-Camino, R., and Steiner, R. P. (2010). The relationship between parental involvement, self-regulated learning, and reading achievement of fifth graders: A path analysis using the ECLSK database. Social Psychology of Education, 13(2), 237–269. doi: 10.1007/s11218-009-9104-4 Zeytinoglu, S., Calkins, S. D., Swingler, M. M., and Leerkes, E. M. (2017). Pathways from maternal effortful control to child self-regulation: The role of maternal emotional support. Journal of Family Psychology, 31(2), 170–180. doi: 10.1037/fam0000271

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3 PARENTING AND CHILD DISCIPLINE Jennifer E. Lansford

Introduction Parents are tasked with many responsibilities in rearing their children to be competent, wellfunctioning members of society. These responsibilities include providing for children’s physical needs and protecting them from harm, as well as providing for socioemotional and cognitive needs by offering love and stimulation. One of the most important ways that parents shape their children’s behavior is through the use of proactive discipline to encourage desired behavior in the future and reactive discipline to respond to misbehavior after it occurs. This chapter focuses on parents’ use of discipline to socialize desired child behaviors. The chapter begins by situating the study of parenting and child discipline in historical context and then presents central issues in this area of research. The chapter next turns to major theories that have guided our understanding of discipline. The bulk of the chapter then reviews research on predictors of different forms of discipline, child outcomes associated with different forms of discipline, how discipline is situated within the overall climate of the parent–child relationship, and moderators and mediators of links between parental discipline and child outcomes. Then the chapter reviews practical information including interventions, laws, and policies that have attempted to alter parents’ discipline. Finally, the chapter offers suggestions for future theoretical and research directions as well as concluding comments.

Historical Considerations in the Study of Parental Discipline The study of parental discipline has a long history within the field of psychology. Early psychological writings on parental discipline stemmed from the theoretical tenets of behaviorism. For example, Watson, the father of behaviorism, provided childrearing advice that emphasized how parents should structure their children’s daily routines in ways to prevent misbehavior and to minimize punishment (Watson and Watson, 1928). Many ideas about parents’ use of rewards and punishments to shape children’s behavior likewise stem from behaviorism (e.g., Skinner, 1938). Parents’ use of different forms of discipline has been subject to scientific inquiry at least since the publication of Sears, Maccoby, and Levin’s (1957) Patterns of Childrearing. This book detailed discipline techniques used by European-American parents in the Boston area in the 1950s, including why parents used particular discipline strategies and how discipline is related to children’s behavior. Prior to this study, researchers generally hypothesized that more parental control would be associated

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with better child behavior, but the Sears et al. study demonstrated the opposite. This early research set the stage for subsequent research that has now tested relations between different types of parental discipline and different aspects of child development, using increasingly complex conceptual models, increasingly diverse samples, and increasingly sophisticated analyses that incorporate mediators and moderators of links between discipline and child outcomes.

Central Issues in Understanding Parental Discipline Distinguishing different forms of parental discipline and methodological approaches that have been used to study parental discipline are central issues in the understanding of parental discipline.

Different Forms of Parental Discipline Parental discipline can be broadly categorized as being either reactive, responding to misbehavior that has occurred already, or proactive, focusing on preventing misbehavior from occurring in the future. An overarching framework for understanding a wide range of specific forms of discipline includes three main categories of discipline (Hoffman and Saltzstein, 1967): power assertion (which involves parents’ exertion of power and authority over the child), love withdrawal (which involves parents’ manipulation of children’s negative emotions, often through expressing anger or disapproval), and inductive reasoning (which involves discussing how other people are affected by children’s behaviors). Of these three categories, inductive reasoning has been found to be the most optimal type of discipline, predicting more positive child outcomes than either power assertion or love withdrawal (Hoffman and Saltzstein, 1967). Inductive reasoning helps children to understand how their actions affect other people and provides explanations about why certain behaviors are wrong or right. Thus, inductive reasoning is proactive in trying to affect children’s future behavior rather than merely reactive in punishing children’s past misbehavior; indeed, moral development, empathy, and perspective taking are all enhanced by the use of inductive reasoning (Hoffman, 1977). Furthermore, mothers at high risk for physically abusing their children use less inductive reasoning, more verbal and physical power assertion, and evaluate power assertion as being more appropriate than do mothers at low risk for physically abusing their children (Chilamkurti and Milner, 1993). In contrast to the widely accepted benefits of discipline involving inductive reasoning, powerassertive discipline has been more controversial and encompasses a range of specific forms of discipline that may vary in effectiveness. Baumrind (2012) distinguishes between coercive and confrontive forms of power assertion. Parents use coercive discipline in a domineering and arbitrary way to establish their authority. By contrast, parents use confrontive discipline in a negotiable way to bring about particular child behaviors rather than merely establishing parental authority. Although coercive discipline is related to negative child outcomes, confrontive discipline might help children to regulate their behavior constructively. Within the overarching categories of power assertion, love withdrawal, and inductive reasoning, parents use a number of specific forms of discipline, such as removing privileges, rewarding desired behaviors, implementing time-outs, and spanking, to name a few. Monitoring children’s behavior, talking with children, using distraction, and modeling desired behaviors were the most common discipline strategies in a longitudinal study of U.S. parents’ use of ten different forms of discipline with preschoolers; corporal punishment was one of the three least common strategies with preschoolers (Socolar, Savage, and Evans, 2007), who are more likely to be corporally punished than either younger or older children (Straus and Stewart, 1999). In other countries, parents show similar patterns of use of different forms of discipline. In a study of mothers’ reports of discipline experienced by their 2- to 4-year-old children in 24 low- and middle-income countries, the most common type of discipline was explaining why something was wrong, with 80% of mothers reporting that someone had 66

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explained to their child why something was wrong in the last month (Lansford and Deater-Deckard, 2012). Across the 24 countries, 63% of mothers reported that their child had experienced corporal punishment in the last month (Lansford and Deater-Deckard, 2012). Thus, although it is reassuring that the most commonly reported form of discipline is inductive reasoning, 20% of 2- to 4-year-olds across the 24 countries did not receive explanations in the last month of why something was wrong. Furthermore, although reasoning was more common than corporal punishment, the majority of children, across countries, still experienced corporal punishment in the last month. Some types of discipline appear to be common in particular cultural groups but not others. For example, Chinese parents use a form of discipline Fung (1999) described as “shaming” to teach children right from wrong. Parents of 2- to 4-year-olds in an ethnographic study used both verbal and nonverbal interactions with their children to instill shame after misbehavior, with the goal of teaching children moral behavior and socializing them to “confess and repent” after wrongdoing (Fung, 1999, p. 201). However, in a sample of children ages 7 to 14 in China and Canada, although shaming was perceived as being more common in China, with age, children in both countries increasingly perceived shaming as being detrimental to children’s self-worth and psychological well-being (Helwig, To, Wang, Liu, and Yang, 2014). Children in China and Canada evaluated inductive reasoning more favorably than shaming or love withdrawal. Parents do not use just a single form of discipline but instead vary their responses depending on the child’s misbehavior and contextual features of the situation. In open-ended, in-depth responses to hypothetical vignettes depicting common child behavior problems, mothers in Hong Kong and Taiwan were found to consider a wide range of disciplinary responses (Fung, Li, and Lam, 2017). Mothers endorsed different forms of discipline depending on the setting in which the misbehavior occurred (at home versus in public), who was present at the time (immediate family members versus strangers versus an acquaintance), which rules or conventions were violated (safety, health, social-conventional, or moral), possible outcomes (e.g., harm to self, inappropriate behavior), and how much conflict was involved. Furthermore, depending on contextual features of the misbehavior and situation, mothers endorsed a single disciplinary strategy, simultaneous strategies with multiple forms of discipline, contingent strategies with a particular response dependent on factors related to the child or situation, or ratcheting up when the mothers’ first strategy failed so mothers reported they would be more encouraging or harsher in a subsequent attempt (Fung et al., 2017). Thus, parents use a number of types of discipline, which may depend on families’ cultural context and features of situations in which children misbehave. To summarize, effective discipline is characterized by being proactive rather than reactive, using reasoning to help children understand the effects of their actions on other people, and avoiding corporal punishment. Particular forms of discipline are more common in some countries than others, although reasoning is generally used more frequently than corporal punishment across countries. Parents do not use just one form of discipline but rely on a number of different strategies used simultaneously or sequentially.

Methods of Study of Parental Discipline Parental discipline is usually assessed via self-reports of the frequency with which parents have used particular types of discipline in the last month, 6 months, or year. Commonly used measures include the Parent–child Conflict Tactics Scale (Straus, Hamby, Finkelhor, Moore, and Runyan, 1998), the Dimensions of Discipline Inventory (Straus and Fauchier, 2011), and the Discipline Interview (Huang et al., 2012; Lansford et al., 2005). An advantage of self-report measures is that it is possible to ask about a range of low-frequency behaviors that would be difficult to witness or that are unlikely to occur during naturalistic or laboratory-based observations. A disadvantage, however, is that selfreports are subject to imperfect recall and social desirability biases, with the potential for parents to 67

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underreport behaviors they perceive as being socially undesirable or overreport behaviors they believe would be self-enhancing (Morsbach and Prinz, 2006). To overcome these limitations, social desirability biases are sometimes statistically controlled in analyses (Bornstein et al., 2015). In addition, triangulating responses from multiple respondents (mother, father, and child) can provide different perspectives on whether and how often parents have used particular kinds of discipline. As a variation on self-report measures in which parents report on their actual behavior, propensity to use particular kinds of discipline is also sometimes assessed using analog methods, such as presenting parents with images, videos, or text depicting hypothetical vignettes involving a child’s misbehavior and asking parents what they would do to respond to each situation (e.g., Russa and Rodriguez, 2010). Responses can involve either closed-ended options for parents to select or open-ended questions that are then coded into categories, such as corporal punishment, manipulation of privileges, or inductive reasoning (Bombi, Di Norcia, Di Giunta, Pastorelli, and Lansford, 2015; Pettit, Bates, and Dodge, 1997). An advantage of using hypothetical vignettes is that the type of misbehavior, setting, and other situational factors can be manipulated to examine whether parents’ reported disciplinary responses vary by these factors (Fung et al., 2017). A disadvantage of using hypothetical vignettes is that parents are not being asked whether and how often they use particular forms of discipline with their own child. More rarely, parents are observed interacting with their children, and discipline encounters during the interactions are recorded and coded. An advantage of observations is that they can be coded by objective researchers to avoid social desirability biases that can be associated with self-reports. Disadvantages of observations are that they are time consuming and expensive to conduct, and lowfrequency forms of discipline may not be observed, even if they are salient to the parent–child relationship when they do occur. In a study in which audio recorders were worn by mothers of 2- to 5-year-old children for up to six nights, instances of corporal punishment were heard in almost half of the families (Holden, Williamson, and Holland, 2014). After 73% of the instances of corporal punishment, children were misbehaving again within ten minutes. The audio-recorded instances and self-reported instances of corporal punishment corresponded in 81% of the cases. Discipline can also be studied in the context of experiments. For example, boys with conduct disorder were paired either with mothers of conduct-disordered sons or with mothers of sons without conduct disorder. These boy–mother dyads were then observed engaging in three laboratory tasks; each mother completed the tasks with her own son and with two other boys. Mothers who were interacting with boys with conduct disorder were found to behave more negatively, whereas mothers interacting with boys without conduct disorder were found to behave more positively (Anderson, Lytton, and Romney, 1986). Boys with conduct disorder were found to be more noncompliant and to elicit more negative responses from both their own and other mothers, providing evidence for the importance of child effects in shaping the kinds of discipline they experience. Other experiments demonstrate that changes in parenting predict changes in children’s aggression (Patterson, Dishion, and Chamberlain, 1993) and that parents’ management strategies can be experimentally manipulated (Webster-Stratton, 1990). Finally, intervention studies offer an additional method for studying parental discipline. For example, families who were randomized to an intervention that improved positive parenting practices reduced young children’s behavior problems, whereas children’s behavior problems did not change in the families randomized to a control group (Dishion et al., 2008). In a different intervention designed to improve outcomes for children following their parents’ divorce, mothers who were randomized to the intervention rather than control group were found to improve in their use of positive discipline strategies, which, in turn, decreased children’s externalizing behavior problems (Tein, Sandler, MacKinnon, and Wolchik, 2004). Because laboratory experiments and randomized interventions manipulate exposure to different types of experiences, both methods offer the potential for rigorous testing of links between different forms of discipline and children’s behavior. 68

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Primary methods of studying parental discipline include self-reports, analog measures such as asking parents how they would respond to hypothetical vignettes, parent–child observations, experiments, and intervention studies. Each method has benefits and drawbacks that must be weighed when determining which approach to use for any given study. Converging evidence from several methods contributes to scientific rigor and increased confidence in findings, beyond what any method could do alone.

Theory in Parental Discipline Theories relevant to understanding parental discipline take a variety of forms, including distinguishing between parenting practices and parenting styles, delineating the role of parents’ and children’s emotions in discipline situations, and describing how observing and modeling others’ behavior affects parents’ and children’s behavior. Theories related to parental discipline differentiate parenting practices and parenting styles, referring to what parents do and how they do it, respectively. Many classic parenting theories describe parenting practices and styles in relation to dimensions that are broadly construed in terms of what parents do to control children’s behavior (most relevant to discipline) and the overall emotional climate of the parent–child relationship (which can affect how children receive and respond to discipline; see Rudolph, Lansford, and Rodkin, 2017). These theories have characterized major dimensions of parenting in terms of dominance versus submission and rejection versus acceptance (Symonds, 1939), hostility versus warmth and involvement versus detachment (Baldwin, 1955), strictness versus permissiveness and warmth (Sears et al., 1957), hostility versus love and control versus autonomy (Schaefer, 1959), and hostility versus warmth and permissiveness versus restrictiveness (Becker, 1964). All of these theories emphasize that parenting involves both behavioral (e.g., control, restrictiveness, permissiveness) and emotional (e.g., warmth, acceptance, hostility, rejection) dimensions (see Darling and Steinberg, 1993). As characterized well in Baumrind’s (1967) framework, behavioral and emotional dimensions of parenting may operate somewhat independently. Baumrind’s theoretical model described three types of parents: authoritarian, authoritative, and permissive. Authoritarian parents are high on the control dimension but low on the warmth dimension. Permissive parents are low on the control dimension but high on the warmth dimension. Authoritative parents are high on both the control and warmth dimensions. However, unlike authoritarian parents who expect children to follow their directives without question, authoritative parents provide more explanations and opportunities for children to voice their opinions. Children whose parents are authoritative have been found to be more socially competent and higher achieving academically than children whose parents are authoritarian or permissive (Baumrind, 1971). Others have theorized that it is not high levels of control but rather children’s freedom to negotiate rules and communicate openly with their parents in authoritative families that contributes to children’s social and academic competence (Lewis, 1981). Maccoby and Martin’s (1983) theory of parenting built on Baumrind’s theory by conceptualizing parenting within a two-by-two matrix characterized by high versus low demandingness, control, and supervision on one axis and responsiveness, warmth, and acceptance on the other. As in Baumrind’s theory, authoritative parents were high on both dimensions, whereas authoritarian parents were high on demandingness but low on responsiveness. Whereas in Baumrind’s theory, permissive parents were characterized just by being low on demandingness (regardless of their responsiveness), in Maccoby and Martin’s theory, neglecting parents were low in both demandingness and responsiveness, but indulgent parents were low on demandingness but high on responsiveness. Baumrind (1991) subsequently revised her theory to add a rejecting-neglecting parenting style characterized by low demandingness and responsiveness and to differentiate demandingness of authoritarian parents (which is highly restrictive) versus authoritative parents (which is not highly restrictive yet still exerts firm control). 69

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Dix (1991) proposed a theoretical model of how emotions can either undermine parenting or promote sensitive, responsive parenting depending on whether emotions are too strong, too weak, or inappropriate for a given situation. This emotion-focused model of parenting describes three processes: activation, engagement, and regulation. Activation refers to which emotion is experienced, as well as when and how strongly the emotion is experienced. Engagement refers to how individuals orient to events in ways that are consistent with their emotions and affects how they respond to events cognitively, physiologically, and behaviorally. Regulation refers to how individuals express, understand, and control their emotions. Emotions in parent–child interactions often depend on whether parents’ short-term (e.g., get the child’s teeth brushed) and long-term (e.g., promote the development of morality) goals are being thwarted or advanced. Emotions in parent–child interactions are generally more positive when parents’ and children’s goals and behaviors are aligned than when they are divergent. When parents’ and children’s goals and behaviors diverge, parents can respond with cooperative strategies (e.g., reasoning, negotiating), empathic strategies (e.g., going along with children’s wishes), or forceful strategies (e.g., imposing the parent’s will through physical force). Children are more likely to resist forceful strategies because they do not take children’s perspectives and desires into account, so use of force may undermine parents’ future attempts to gain children’s compliance. According to Dix’s model, parents’ perceptions of the stability, controllability, and importance of events determine the strength of the emotion induced. If parents experience emotions too strongly, they may react too harshly or intrusively, whereas if parents do not experience emotions strongly enough, they may not engage or respond to children sufficiently. It is important for parents to be able to regulate their emotions so that they appropriately match them to parenting situations and do not display emotions that are counterproductive. Parents are most likely to respond empathically to children when parents’ own concerns induce weaker emotions than children’s concerns. Understood in this emotion-focused framework, one reason that corporal punishment and other forms of harsh discipline may be ineffective is that harsh discipline induces negative emotions in children and parents, which undermines parents’ socialization attempts. Children will be less open to parents’ socialization attempts in the face of negative emotions, and such emotions can also shift attention and processing away from the parents’ message. This focus on children’s willing compliance is also a hallmark of Grusec, Danyliuk, Kil, and O’Neill’s (2017) conceptual model of discipline, which delineates how parents can use consistency, autonomy support, perspective taking, and parental acceptance of the child in discipline situations to facilitate children’s openness to parents’ socialization attempts. Together these models suggest that parents are most successful at fostering children’s moral development when they offer explanations and reason with children about the merits of particular behaviors and when the affective context of the parent–child relationship facilitates children’s motivation to attend and respond to parents (Smetana, 1999). As in Dix’s model, emotion plays a central role in the emotional security hypothesis proposed by Davies and Cummings (1994), which incorporates two clusters of parenting problems: poor child behavior management and parental rejection. Poor child behavior management can be either because parents’ supervision and discipline are too lax or because discipline is too harsh, both of which are related to more child externalizing and internalizing problems. Parental rejection can encompass negative emotions, intrusiveness, and withdrawal, all of which are related to children’s own anger, dysphoria, withdrawal, and noncompliance. Poor child behavior management and parental rejection can both compromise children’s emotional security and capacity to regulate their own emotions and, in turn, problematic behaviors that might stem from negative emotions. Thus, in Davies and Cummings’s model, the association between parenting and child outcomes is mediated by children’s emotional security. Parental rejection also plays a central role in Rohner’s (2004) interpersonal acceptance-rejection theory, which argues that children’s adjustment is determined largely by whether children perceive their parents as being accepting or rejecting of them. The theory has been supported empirically in 70

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a large number of studies in many countries (e.g., Khaleque and Rohner, 2002; Rohner and Lansford, 2017). Consistent with the theory, corporal punishment is related to child adjustment in part through children’s perceptions of their parents’ rejection (Rohner, Kean, and Cournoyer, 1991). The link between children’s perceptions of the justness and harshness of their parents’ use of corporal punishment and children’s psychological adjustment was mediated by children’s perceptions of their parents’ rejection versus acceptance (Rohner, Bourque, and Elordi, 1996). Thus, interpersonal acceptancerejection theory emphasizes that parents’ specific discipline behaviors are related to child outcomes in part because of the messages parents’ behaviors convey about love and acceptance of the child, on the one hand, versus rejection and hostility, on the other. Coercion theory is a useful framework that helps account for the development of externalizing behavior problems (Patterson, Capaldi, and Bank, 1991). In bidirectional coercive cycles, children’s aversive behaviors, such as whining, yelling, and hitting, are reinforced by parents’ withdrawal of discipline, and parents’ ineffective discipline, such as yelling or hitting, is reinforced when children temporarily stop behaving aversively. A prototypical example would be if a child asks for candy at the store, the parent says no, the child repeats the request more forcefully, the parent says no more firmly, the child throws a temper tantrum, and the parent gives in and buys the candy to avoid a scene or the parent smacks the child so the child stops making the request. In either scenario, aversive behavior has been reinforced (the child’s temper tantrum in the former or the parent’s use of corporal punishment in the latter). Over time, these coercive cycles escalate and generalize to other contexts such as peer relationships as children learn that they can get what they want through aggressive and antisocial behaviors (Dishion, 2014). Social learning theories also help account for links between parents’ use of corporal punishment and the development of children’s aggressive behavior problems. That is, as children observe their parents using aggression to handle interpersonal problems, they may imitate and model their own behaviors on their parents’ behavior over time (Bandura, 2016). Likewise, children develop normative beliefs about aggression through their experiences in parent–child relationships (Huesmann and Guerra, 1997). If parents use corporal punishment, children are more likely to perceive aggression as a legitimate and acceptable way to treat others, and they are deprived of opportunities to learn nonviolent ways of dealing with interpersonal conflicts. Normativeness theory has been proposed as a way of accounting for how and why child behaviors associated with particular forms of discipline might differ depending on the broader cultural context in which families live (Deater-Deckard and Dodge, 1997). A hypothesis derived from normativeness theory is that if parents use a form of discipline that is accepted and common in their cultural context (i.e., normative), then it will be related to more positive (or less negative) child outcomes than if parents use a form of discipline that is not normative in their cultural context (Lansford et al., 2005). If children perceive that their parents are behaving in a way that is consistent with the way other parents are behaving, then they may be more likely to regard their parents’ discipline as being acceptable. Children’s perceptions of the fairness and reasonableness of discipline are associated with its effectiveness (Grusec and Goodnow, 1994). Children are more likely to internalize parents’ socialization messages if they believe that their parents are behaving in an appropriate way. In addition, if parents perceive that they are behaving in a normative way, they may use a given form of discipline in a more planned and consistent rather than impulsive and unregulated way, which in turn would be less likely to make children anxious and fearful (Holden, Miller, and Harris, 1999; Straus and Mouradian, 1998). However, a caveat exists suggesting that an extreme position on cultural relativism should not be adopted. For example, in societies where corporal punishment is more normative, other forms of violence and aggression are also more normative (Lansford and Dodge, 2008). This suggests that even if at an individual level, corporal punishment is not as strongly related to worse child outcomes in societies in which it is normative as in which it is non-normative, at a societal level, corporal punishment is related to higher levels of aggression in the population as a whole (Lansford and Dodge, 2008). 71

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To summarize, theories relevant to understanding parental discipline often incorporate elements of parenting practices (what parents do in discipline situations) as well as parenting styles (the overall emotional climate of the parent–child relationship); parenting styles can affect how children interpret parents’ behaviors. Parenting practices often correspond to the control dimension and parenting styles to the warmth dimension of classic parenting theories. Many theoretical models give prominent placement to the role of parents’ and children’s emotions. Social learning frameworks and normativeness theory emphasize how observing others’ behavior affects what one perceives as being acceptable and desirable for one’s own behavior.

Classical and Modern Research in Parental Discipline This section provides an overview of classical and modern research in parental discipline by reviewing predictors of different forms of discipline, consequences of different forms of discipline, how discipline is situated in the broader context of parent–child relationships, and moderators and mediators of links between parental discipline and child outcomes.

Predictors of Discipline Parents’ use of particular forms of discipline is predicted by a range of individual- and communitylevel factors, such as family stress (Whipple and Webster-Stratton, 1991), poverty (Knutson, DeGarmo, Koeppl, and Reid, 2005), and parents’ negative attributions regarding children’s behaviors (Berlin, Dodge, and Reznick, 2013). In a longitudinal study of parents in nine countries, variance in parents’ use of corporal punishment was predicted by both individual-level (e.g., child externalizing behaviors) and community-level (e.g., norms about corporal punishment) factors (Lansford et al., 2015). Likewise, other forms of parental discipline also are predicted by both individual- and community-level factors. Individual characteristics of both children and parents predict the forms of discipline that parents use. Overall, parents are more likely to use a wide range of types of discipline as well as harsher forms of discipline with children who have characteristics that make their behavior more difficult to control (Larzelere, 2000). For instance, compared to children whose behaviors are easier to manage, children who have problems with conduct (Lytton, 1990), attention (Alizadeh, Applequist, and Coolidge, 2007), and noncompliance (Patterson, 2002) are more likely to experience harsh discipline. Likewise, children who have high levels of negative emotionality and irritable temperaments are less likely to comply with parents’ socialization efforts and more likely to elicit parents’ hostile and inconsistent discipline (Bates, Schermerhorn, and Petersen, 2014). Reciprocal, bidirectional, and transactional processes unfold over time so that children with these difficult characteristics elicit harsher discipline, such as corporal punishment, but harsher discipline also increases children’s risk for subsequent externalizing behavior problems (Lansford et al., 2011; Patterson, 1982). Specific types of child misbehavior also have been found to elicit different types of discipline. For example, children’s antisocial behaviors tend to elicit punishment, whereas failures to act prosocially tend to elicit other-oriented inductive reasoning (Grusec and Kuczynski, 1980). Other child characteristics in addition to behavior problems can increase the likelihood that parents will use harsh discipline. One mechanism that can account for this pattern is that characteristics of children that are challenging and salient evoke parental distress, which then leads to frustrated, angry, reactive discipline (Deater-Deckard, 2004). Consistent with this perspective, parents use harsher discipline with children who have disabilities than children without disabilities (for reviews, see Stalker and McArthur, 2012; Westcott and Jones, 1999; but for caveats see Leeb, Bitsko, Merrick, and Armour, 2012). Parents of children with disabilities may experience high levels of stress because of additional time and energy they must expend to manage the disability as well as stigma related to the disability 72

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(Deater-Deckard, 2004; Whittingham, Wee, Sanders, and Boyd, 2011). Parents of children with disabilities also may be more likely to react impulsively with corporal punishment rather than more deliberative forms of discipline if they are less confident in themselves as parents (Alizadeh et al., 2007; Jones and Prinz, 2005). Particularly if children’s disabilities involve communication difficulties, parents may be more likely to use corporal punishment if they do not feel able to communicate with the child verbally using explanations and reasoning (Knutson, Johnson, and Sullivan, 2004). However, children with all kinds of disabilities (not just those involving communication difficulties) have been found to be at greater risk for corporal punishment and less likely to experience only nonviolent discipline (Hendricks, Lansford, Deater-Deckard, and Bornstein, 2014). Focus group discussions with parents of children with disabilities suggest that extra time related to taking children to medical and therapy appointments, extra tasks related to managing the child’s disability, being in the spotlight when the disability draws attention, trouble distinguishing between behaviors that the child can and cannot control, and difficulty determining what behaviors are appropriate for their child given that standards for typically developing children may not apply (see also Weisleder, 2011) all increased parents’ stress and likelihood of using harsh discipline (Whittingham et al., 2011). Parents’ stress increases their use of harsh and inconsistent discipline through physiological, emotional, and cognitive mechanisms (Deater-Deckard, 2004). Physiologically, high levels of stress affect brain structure and function in ways that impair psychological functioning (see Lupien, McEwen, Gunnar, and Heim, 2009, for a review). High levels of stress also increase parents’ negative emotions such as anxiety and anger, as well as decrease parents’ capacity for regulating their emotions (DeaterDeckard, 2004). Cognitively, high levels of stress contribute to hostile attribution biases and other deficits in processing social information (Pinderhughes, Dodge, Zelli, Bates, and Pettit, 2000). In turn, physiological arousal, negative emotionality and dysregulation, and cognitive biases all decrease parents’ ability to discipline consistently and effectively. Unlike parents of children with externalizing problems or with disabilities, parents of children with internalizing problems, such as anxiety and depression, are less likely to use corporal punishment (Grogan-Kaylor and Otis, 2007), although parents’ use of corporal punishment predicts the subsequent development of internalizing problems (Gershoff, 2002; Lansford et al., 2014). Parents are likely responding in part to how they perceive their children as receiving different forms of discipline. As corporal punishment and other forms of discipline high in power assertion have been found to jeopardize the internalization of parents’ socialization attempts for children who are anxious and fearful (Kochanska, Aksan, and Joy, 2007), parents may respond by reducing their use of harsh discipline with such children. Parents’ characteristics, in addition to child characteristics, also predict parents’ use of different forms of discipline. For example, lower-SES parents are more likely to use corporal punishment and less likely to use inductive reasoning than higher-SES parents (Ryan, Kalil, Ziol-Guest, and Padilla, 2016). Parents who themselves experienced corporal punishment as children are more likely to use corporal punishment with their own children (Wang, Xing, and Zhao, 2014). Parents who hold social-cognitive biases that favor aggression, including making hostile attributions in ambiguous situations and positively evaluating aggressive responses, are more likely to use corporal punishment than are parents without these biases (Lansford et al., 2014; Milner, 2000). Parents who have an external locus of control and believe their child is responsible for parent–child interactions are more likely to have a harsh, angry disciplinary style compared to parents who believe they are responsible for parent– child interactions (Rodriguez, 2010). Some predictors of parental discipline are not related to individual child or parent characteristics but rather community-level factors. One of the most important of these factors involves community norms and expectations about advisable forms of discipline. In nationally representative samples of parents of 2- to 4-year-old children in 24 low- and middle-income countries, country of residence accounted for 27% to 38% of the variance in whether parents reported believing it was necessary 73

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to use corporal punishment to rear a child properly, 11% to 18% of the variance in whether parents reported using severe forms of corporal punishment (hitting on the head or beating with an implement), and 11% to 18% of the variance in parents’ reports of nonviolent forms of discipline, such as offering explanations or giving the child something else to do (Lansford and Deater-Deckard, 2012). To illustrate this range, 93% of parents in Syria reported believing it was necessary to use corporal punishment to rear a child properly in contrast to only 4% of parents in Albania. Forty percent of parents in Mongolia and Yemen reported that their child had experienced severe forms of corporal punishment in the last month compared to only 1% in Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine. No parents in Mongolia reported that their child experienced only nonviolent discipline in the last month, whereas 49% of parents in Albania did so. Country-wide differences in attitudes about and use of particular forms of discipline can be attributed in part to national laws and policies regarding childrearing. For example, as of October 2018, 54 countries had outlawed all forms of corporal punishment (Global Initiative to End All Corporal Punishment of Children, 2018). In some countries, attitudes about the acceptability of corporal punishment began declining even before the legal ban and then continued to decline after the ban (e.g., in Sweden, which was the first country to outlaw corporal punishment, see Durrant, 1999), but in other countries, legal bans have been passed with the goal of changing parents’ attitudes as well as behaviors (see Zolotor and Puzia, 2010). Some cultural groups are more tolerant or even encouraging of different forms of violence than others (e.g., Nisbett and Cohen, 1996). For example, cultural groups with higher levels of warfare, aggression between adults, and socialization of aggression in children are also characterized by harsher and more frequent corporal punishment than cultural groups with less endorsement of violence at a societal level (Lansford and Dodge, 2008). Thus, community-level factors can shape parental discipline. To summarize, both individual-level and community-level factors predict parents’ use of different types of discipline. At an individual level, harsher forms of discipline are predicted both by characteristics of children, such as conduct problems or disabilities, that make them more difficult to parent and by characteristics of parents, such as low levels of education or stressful life events, that leave them with fewer material or psychological resources to cope with difficult child behavior. At a community level, cultural norms regarding the appropriateness of particular forms of discipline as well as laws and policies shape how individual parents respond to their children’s misbehavior.

Consequences of Discipline Specific forms of discipline are generally related to a diverse set of child outcomes. For example, reviews and meta-analyses have demonstrated that corporal punishment predicts more child externalizing problems, internalizing problems, and academic difficulties as well as poorer relationships with parents, internalization of values, and moral development (e.g., Gershoff and Grogan-Kaylor, 2016). Regardless of how corporal punishment was operationalized, a rigorous meta-analysis found that 94% of effect sizes showed detrimental child outcomes associated with corporal punishment (Gershoff, 2002). Features of study designs did not moderate the links between corporal punishment and poorer child outcomes (Gershoff and Grogan-Kaylor, 2016). Likewise, the severity of corporal punishment and parents’ perceptions of its justness have not been found to moderate links between parents’ use of corporal punishment and children’s subsequent externalizing behaviors (Alampay et al., 2017). That is, more child externalizing behaviors are longitudinally predicted by more frequent corporal punishment, even if parents believe themselves to be justified in their use of corporal punishment and do not perceive it as being too severe. More research has focused on consequences of corporal punishment than other forms of discipline. However, research suggests that other forms of discipline, such as inductive reasoning, are related to positive child outcomes in many domains rather than a mixture of positive and negative outcomes. 74

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In a meta-analysis of how preschoolers’ self-regulation is related to different types of parenting, better child self-regulation was related to positive control (which included features of inductive reasoning, such as teaching, encouraging, and guiding the child) and to less negative control (which included power assertion; Karreman, van Tuijl, van Aken, and Deković, 2006). Other-oriented induction is especially important for promoting moral and prosocial behavior (e.g., Krevans and Gibbs, 1996). Adolescents’ perceptions of their mothers’ love withdrawal and power assertion are unrelated to adolescents’ moral identity (operationalized as adolescents’ ascribing moral qualities, such as kindness and fairness to themselves, more than nonmoral qualities, such as athleticism and intelligence), but mothers’ use of induction predicts higher moral identity (Patrick and Gibbs, 2012). Adolescents responded with more guilt as well as positive emotions to inductive discipline than to love withdrawal or power assertion and also regarded induction, including focusing on harm caused to other people and disappointment in expectations, as being a more appropriate form of discipline (Patrick and Gibbs, 2012). Across a number of outcomes, corporal punishment is related to more problematic child behaviors, emotions, and relationships, whereas inductive reasoning is related to more adaptive child behaviors, emotions, and relationships. One explanation for these consistent patterns of findings across several outcomes is that corporal punishment causes pain and models an aggressive response to an interpersonal conflict. By contrast, inductive reasoning increases empathy and prosocial behavior by focusing on how a child’s behavior affects other people.

Overall Parent–Child Relationship Climate Consistent with the idea from theoretical models that parenting practices and parenting styles are distinct, parental discipline (as a parenting practice) is situated in the overall context of the parent–child relationship, which may be shaped by a particular parenting style. The overall climate of the parent– child relationship affects how receptive children are to parents’ attempts to socialize them through particular forms of discipline (Grusec and Goodnow, 1994). If the overall parent–child relationship is warm and loving rather than hostile or neglectful, children will be more motivated to obey their parents, making discipline attempts easier and more effective. The overall parent–child relationship context may therefore moderate links between specific discipline attempts and child outcomes (e.g., Fletcher, Walls, Cook, Madison, and Bridges, 2008). For example, for children who were securely attached to their parents at 15 months, there was no association between parents’ later power assertion and the development of children’s antisocial behavior and resentful opposition between 25 and 67 months, links that were significant only for children who were insecurely attached at 15 months (Kochanska, Barry, Stellern, and O’Bleness, 2009). The question of whether links between corporal punishment and negative child outcomes are attenuated in the context of a generally positive parent–child relationship has been controversial and yielded mixed research findings. Some studies have shown that corporal punishment is unrelated to negative child outcomes if the parent–child relationship is generally warm and loving (McLoyd and Smith, 2002). Others have shown that even if the parent–child relationship is generally warm and loving, corporal punishment is still related to negative child outcomes (Stacks, Oshio, Gerard, and Roe, 2009). Still other studies have suggested that corporal punishment has even more negative effects in the context of a generally warm parent–child relationship (Lansford et al., 2014), perhaps because children have a difficult time resolving discrepancies in parents’ behaviors and feel uncertain from moment to moment about how parents will treat them. Parental discipline encompasses specific behaviors, but these behaviors are situated within the overall climate of the parent–child relationship. There is evidence that parent–child relationships that are loving and supportive are more conducive to the internalization of messages parents try to convey 75

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in their discipline responses. However, corporal punishment may have detrimental effects even in the context of generally warm parent–child relationships.

Main Effects and Moderators of Links Between Parental Discipline and Child Behavior Child gender, parent gender, child age, temperament, and culture or country have been examined both as main effect predictors of different forms of parental discipline and as potential moderators of links between parental discipline and children’s adjustment. Each will be considered in turn.

Child Gender The most consistent main effect of child gender on parental discipline reported in the literature is that sons are more likely to be disciplined with corporal punishment and harsh verbal responses than are daughters, but the effects are generally small and often inconsistent, with many studies reporting no gender differences (Jansen et al., 2012; Lytton and Romney, 1991; MacKenzie, Nicklas, BrooksGunn, and Waldfogel, 2011). Using nationally representative samples of families with 2- to 4-yearold children in 32 low- and middle-income countries, girls were found to experience less corporal punishment than boys, but the effect sizes were so small as to be trivial (Deater-Deckard and Lansford, 2016). Taken together, there is more evidence for similarities than differences in sons’ and daughters’ discipline by parents. Even if parents discipline sons and daughters in similar ways, gender might moderate links between parental discipline and child outcomes. In a meta-analysis, links between parents’ use of corporal punishment and children’s externalizing behavior outcomes were stronger if the sample included more boys than girls (Gershoff, 2002). One possibility is that boys who experience corporal punishment develop aggressive and antisocial behaviors, whereas girls who are corporally punished are more likely to develop internalizing problems, such as anxiety and depression (Gershoff, 2002). There is little evidence in the literature regarding whether child gender moderates links between parents’ use of other forms of discipline and children’s outcomes.

Parent Gender Studies that have examined the main effects of parents’ gender on their use of different forms of discipline generally find no differences between discipline used by mothers and fathers (e.g., Feldman and Klein, 2003) or that mothers use more of all types of discipline than do fathers (e.g., HallersHaalboom et al., 2016). In a study of mothers and fathers of 8-year-olds in nine countries, mothers reported using corporal punishment more frequently than fathers in seven of the countries (Lansford, Alampay, et al., 2010). In the other two countries (Sweden, where corporal punishment has been illegal since 1979, and Thailand), corporal punishment was used by very few mothers or fathers. Mothers, compared to fathers in the same families, also have been found to manage their children’s behaviors using more noncoercive verbal strategies (Volling, Blandon, and Gorvine, 2006). Compared to fathers, mothers may more frequently witness children’s misbehaviors and therefore be in a better position to respond to them because, on average, mothers spend more time with children than fathers do (Huerta et al., 2013). Child outcomes may depend not only on discipline they experience from each parent independently but also on the combination of discipline they experience from both parents (and other caregivers) jointly. In a study of “dyadic concordance types,” operationalized as whether corporal punishment was used by neither parent, just the mother, just the father, or both parents, adults reported engaging in more antisocial behavior if they recalled experiencing corporal punishment from both parents when 76

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they were children than if they recalled experiencing corporal punishment from just one parent or neither parent (Rebellon and Straus, 2017). These findings were consistent in Belgium, Canada, China, Greece, Italy, Poland, Russia, Scotland, Slovenia, Spain, Switzerland, and the United States and after controlling for retrospective reports of childhood misbehavior. Better emotional adjustment during adolescence also has been linked with having at least one authoritative parent rather than two authoritarian parents (McKinney and Renk, 2008). Thus, there is some evidence that mothers and fathers can buffer their children from adverse effects of some forms of discipline administered by the other parent and that children are especially at risk if both parents use detrimental forms of discipline.

Child Age Adaptive parenting requires tailoring discipline strategies to children’s age and developmental status. For toddlers and preschoolers, appropriate discipline may involve simply distracting children or giving them something different to do to redirect their attention away from misbehaviors, but as children develop cognitively and can understand more complex reasoning and explanations, parents’ discipline approaches will be more adaptive if they change to rely more on reasoning to manage children’s behaviors (Collins, Madsen, and Susman-Stillman, 2002). As children develop, parents also change their approach to discipline to appeal more to children’s sense of humor, guilt, and responsibility because parents perceive that older children are better able to control their own behavior and that, therefore, misbehaviors are more likely deliberate (Collins et al., 2002). Parents’ use of corporal punishment also declines as children grow older (Straus and Stewart, 1999). As children develop, they also come to regard parents’ authority as being less tied to their capacity to administer punishments and rewards and more tied to parents’ knowledge and skills, which increases the importance of inductive reasoning (Braine, Pomerantz, Lorber, and Krantz, 1991; Maccoby, 1984). Compared to 4-year-olds, 6-year-olds were less likely to say that they would adhere to social conventions because authority figures prohibited particular behaviors or to avoid punishments and more likely to refer to reasons that involved the accepted nature of the social conventions (Yau and Smetana, 2003). However, regardless of how authority figures responded, both ages thought moral transgressions were more serious than violations of social conventions, suggesting that the nature of the transgression is also important to understanding children’s perceptions of what parents’ disciplinary response should be (Padilla-Walker, 2008). The ultimate goal of parental discipline is to teach children how to behave in desired ways even in the absence of rewards and punishments, so having children internalize their parents’ socialization messages is important so that as children develop, they will behave because of an internalized set of values and standards rather than just in the presence of an authority figure to obtain rewards or avoid punishments. In a meta-analysis that tested age as a moderator of the association between parents’ use of corporal punishment and children’s externalizing behaviors, the association was stronger when the sample was 10 to 12 years of age than when the sample was younger or older (Gershoff, 2002). In explaining this curvilinear relation, Gershoff (2002) hypothesized that child effects may play a role because aggressive 10- to 12-year-olds elicit more corporal punishment than younger children do because parents believe that older children should be able to control their behavior and react more harshly when these expectations are not met. Furthermore, she hypothesized that the association may have been weaker for the adolescents older than age 12 because corporal punishment is rarely used with this older age group and that aggressive and antisocial behaviors for older adolescents may be more influenced by peers (Gershoff, 2002).

Temperament Children with more difficult temperaments elicit harsher and more inconsistent discipline from their parents, and harsh and inconsistent discipline increases children’s fearfulness, irritability, and negative 77

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emotionality (Lengua and Kovacs, 2005). Not only does temperament have main effects on the types of discipline parents use, temperament also moderates the way that particular forms of discipline are related to child outcomes. For example, for temperamentally fearful and anxious toddlers, socialization messages are internalized better when mothers deemphasize power and use gentle forms of discipline (Kochanska, 1995). For more temperamentally fearless toddlers, however, minimizing anxiety is less of a concern, but socialization messages were better internalized when toddlers are securely attached and mothers use this cooperative relationship as the basis of their discipline (Kochanska, 1995). Temperamental resistance to control also moderates the relation between parents’ restrictive control and children’s later externalizing behaviors, with more restrictive control predicting fewer child externalizing behaviors for children who are high but not low in resistance to control (Bates, Pettit, Dodge, and Ridge, 1998). It is possible that restrictive control gives children at risk for externalizing problems fewer opportunities to engage in such behaviors (Bates et al., 1998).

Culture or Country Different cultural groups and countries demonstrate large differences in parents’ use of different forms of discipline and beliefs in the appropriateness of different forms of discipline (Lansford and Deater-Deckard, 2012). As described earlier, country of residence predicts a large proportion of the variance in parents’ use of different forms of discipline (Lansford and Deater-Deckard, 2012), in part because of differences in laws and policies (Global Initiative to End All Corporal Punishment of Children, 2018). For example, corporal punishment in Finland was outlawed in 1983. Data from a representative sample of Finnish 15- to 80-year-olds demonstrated that corporal punishment was not decreasing in the 39 years prior to the legal ban, but children born after the legal ban were significantly less likely to have been corporally punished than children born before the legal ban, suggesting a turning point that could be attributed to the change in the law (Österman, Björkqvist, and Wahlbeck, 2014). However, even in some countries that have legally banned corporal punishment, large proportions of children continue to experience corporal punishment (Lansford et al., 2017). For example, three years after Togo outlawed corporal punishment, 77% of mothers reported that their child had experienced corporal punishment in the last month; eight years after Ukraine outlawed corporal punishment, 32% of mothers still reported that their child had experienced corporal punishment in the last month (Lansford et al., 2017). An analysis of five countries in Europe (Austria, France, Germany, Spain, and Sweden) that have varied in terms of their implementation of legal bans and parent education programs regarding the detriments of corporal punishment and benefits of using alternative forms of discipline showed that countries with the lowest rates of corporal punishment were those that had legally outlawed it as well as launched educational campaigns (Bussmann, Erthal, and Schroth, 2011). Most studies of whether cultural group moderates the link between corporal punishment and child outcomes have been conducted with different ethnic groups in the United States, but these links have now been tested in several countries as well. In a study of mother–child dyads in China, India, Italy, Kenya, the Philippines, and Thailand, the association between corporal punishment and child aggression and anxiety was weaker in countries in which corporal punishment was more normative, but more frequent corporal punishment was related to more child aggression and anxiety in all six countries (Lansford et al., 2005). In these same six countries, mothers’ expressions of disappointment and yelling were also related to more child aggression, and expressions of disappointment, time-outs, and shaming were related to more child anxiety; children’s perceptions of the normativeness of these forms of discipline moderated some of the associations between that type of discipline and child aggression and anxiety (Gershoff et al., 2010). A meta-analysis of links between corporal punishment and 17 child outcomes revealed that effect sizes did not differ by the country in which the study was conducted (Gershoff and Grogan-Kaylor, 2016). 78

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Cultural differences in discipline may arise not only in frequency of using particular strategies and links between certain forms of discipline and child outcomes. Differences across cultures exist both in parents’ perceptions of what are desired and undesired behaviors and in broader contexts that support desired behaviors. For example, in some societies, children have the opportunity to engage in prosocial behavior in the course of their everyday lives as they care for younger siblings or do chores that benefit the whole family (de Guzman, Edwards, and Carlo, 2005). In these contexts, prosocial behavior is often promoted implicitly as children take care of other family members’ needs rather than through more abstract inductive reasoning. However, if children have few chances to behave prosocially by directly contributing to the welfare of other people, parents may use inductive reasoning to try to socialize children to behave prosocially (Hastings, Utendale, and Sullivan, 2007). To summarize, a number of factors have been examined both in terms of main effects they may have on parents’ use of different types of discipline and in terms of ways in which they might moderate links between parents’ discipline and children’s adjustment. Child gender, parent gender, child age, temperament, and culture or country are among these factors. When main effects are found, boys generally experience more corporal punishment than girls, mothers use more of a variety of forms of discipline than do fathers, use of reasoning increases and use of corporal punishment decreases with child age, children with more difficult temperaments experience harsher forms of discipline than children with easier temperaments, and use of corporal punishment is more frequent in countries without legal prohibitions and with cultural norms that are accepting of its use. A number of moderation effects have been found, suggesting the importance of taking into account gender, age, temperament, and cultural contexts in understanding links between different types of discipline and children’s adjustment.

Mediators of Links Between Parental Discipline and Child Behavior Links between parental discipline and child behavior are often indirect or mediated by cognitive and emotional pathways involving the ways children perceive and respond to other people. For example, corporal punishment is related to the development of children’s social information processing biases and deficits, which in turn predict aggressive behavior (Weiss, Dodge, Bates, and Pettit, 1992). Corporal punishment increases the likelihood that children will believe that others acted with hostile intent, even in benign or ambiguous social situations; children who make hostile attributions are then more likely to respond aggressively (Dodge and Coie, 1987). Children who have experienced corporal punishment are also more likely to access aggression as a possible way to respond in a given social situation and to evaluate aggression more positively (Weiss et al., 1992). Links between different forms of discipline and child outcomes also are mediated by children’s perceptions of their parents and the parent–child relationship. For example, in a low-income U.S. sample, the link between corporal punishment and children’s psychological maladjustment was mediated by children’s perceptions of their parents as rejecting them (Rohner et al., 1996). In a sample from China, India, the Philippines, and Thailand, the links between corporal punishment and harsh verbal discipline and children’s anxiety and aggression were mediated by children’s perceptions of their mothers’ hostility (Lansford, Malone, et al., 2010). Thus, it may not be simply that some forms of discipline have direct effects on children’s behavioral and psychological adjustment, but that the way that discipline affects children’s development operates through information that discipline conveys to children about how their parents feel about them. In contrast to corporal punishment, which is linked to hostile attributions, positive evaluations of aggression, and perceptions of parents as being hostile and rejecting, inductive reasoning is linked to empathy, as it promotes taking other people’s perspectives and trying to understand the effects of one’s actions on others. The development of children’s empathy mediates the association between inductive reasoning and children’s prosocial behavior (Krevans and Gibbs, 1996). Experiencing power-assertive 79

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discipline during childhood, however, is related to less empathy in childhood as well as adulthood (Lopez, Bonenberger, and Schneider, 2001). The development of conscience also mediates the link between parents’ discipline and child outcomes, particularly with respect to moral behavior (Kochanska, 1993). Parents’ discipline can shape the extent to which children feel guilt and anxiety associated with misbehaving, as well as children’s capacity to inhibit prohibited behavior and behave prosocially (Kochanska, 1993). The development of children’s conscience is associated with their mothers’ references to emotions rather than rules or consequences in conflict episodes (Laible and Thompson, 2002). When preschoolers are securely attached to their mothers, discussions of situations in which children have misbehaved or behaved well are more likely to refer to moral evaluations and emotions, which in turn predict conscience development (Laible and Thompson, 2000). Taken together, research on mechanisms through which parental discipline affects child outcomes suggests the importance of cognitive and socioemotional pathways. Cognitively, experiencing corporal punishment increases the likelihood of children’s social information processing biases, which in turn increase future aggressive behavior. Socioemotional pathways involve children’s perceptions of their parents’ rejection or hostility as well as the development of empathy and conscience.

Practical Information About Parental Discipline Research on parental discipline has been used to inform policies related to child protection and in interventions designed to enhance parenting, thereby improving child outcomes. The 1989 United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) asserts children’s right to protection from all forms of abuse and exploitation and has been ratified by all countries except the United States. From a human rights perspective, corporal punishment is not just an inadvisable discipline strategy because it is related to worse child outcomes but is also unacceptable because using corporal punishment is disrespectful and a violation of the right to protection that all people, regardless of age, have. Periodic reviews of how well countries fare with respect to child protection have contributed to exponential growth in the number of countries that have outlawed all forms of corporal punishment (Global Initiative to End All Corporal Punishment of Children, 2018). Child protection through preventing all forms of violence against children continues to be prioritized in international circles, including in Target 16.2 of the Sustainable Development Goals, which were adopted in 2015 by the United Nations General Assembly to guide the international agenda through 2030 (United Nations, 2017). Despite the legal bans against corporal punishment in 54 countries as of October 2018, many countries still allow corporal punishment. For example, corporal punishment is legal in the United States, where laws try to distinguish corporal punishment from physical abuse by references to factors such as whether the act leaves bruises or marks that last more than 24 hours or results in pain but not injuries. Milder forms of corporal punishment are a risk factor for more severe forms of corporal punishment (Lansford, Wager, Bates, Pettit, and Dodge, 2012), suggesting a continuum of harsh treatment rather than a qualitative difference between corporal punishment and physical abuse (Russa and Rodriguez, 2010). The majority of parents in some countries continue to use corporal punishment (Lansford and Deater-Deckard, 2012), despite scientific evidence regarding its detrimental effects and international decrees that it is a violation of children’s rights (Gershoff, 2013). Therefore, many international intervention efforts have turned to ways to eliminate parents’ use of corporal punishment and promote parents’ use of nonpunitive forms of discipline (Britto, Ponguta, Reyes, and Karnati, 2015), in addition to legislation to outlaw corporal punishment (see Global Initiative to End All Corporal Punishment of Children, 2018). In many countries, legislation evolves over time. For example, in 1979 Sweden became the first country to outlaw all forms of corporal punishment, but intermediary legal reforms occurred for 80

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decades prior to the ban (Durrant and Janson, 2005). One notable intermediary reform was the removal in 1957 of the section of the Penal Code that exempted parents from physical assault charges in disciplinary cases. When the legal ban was passed, the news was widely publicized (e.g., with announcements on milk cartons). Efforts at raising public awareness were successful, as one year after the law was passed, more than 90% of the Swedish population was aware of the ban on corporal punishment (Ziegert, 1983). Since that time, legal refinements have continued to reaffirm and extend the protection of children’s rights (Durrant and Janson, 2005). Because corporal punishment is used more frequently in cultural groups where it is perceived as being more normative and accepted, as well as by parents within a cultural group who perceive it as being more normative and accepted (Lansford et al., 2014), some interventions have attempted to reduce or eliminate parents’ use of corporal punishment by changing their beliefs about its acceptability and effectiveness (Chavis et al., 2013; Lansford and Bornstein, 2007). Changing parents’ beliefs might be important, but it is likely not sufficient because in a diverse range of countries, more parents use corporal punishment than believe that it is necessary to use corporal punishment to rear children properly, suggesting that beliefs about discipline do not align perfectly with discipline behaviors (Lansford and Deater-Deckard, 2012). An example of an intervention that has attempted to change beliefs about the necessity and appropriateness of corporal punishment addresses the “spare the rod, spoil the child” barrier to eliminating corporal punishment among conservative Protestant religious groups (Perrin, Miller-Perrin, and Song, 2017). Conservative Protestants have been found to use more corporal punishment than other religious groups (Gershoff, Miller, and Holden, 1999). An intervention that randomly assigned students at a conservative Christian university to a research-based intervention (which presented research findings about the negative effects of corporal punishment), a biblical reinterpretation intervention (which offered a progressive reinterpretation of the “spare the rod, spoil the child” biblical passages), or a no-intervention control group found the greatest reduction in endorsement of corporal punishment when students were exposed to the biblical reinterpretation plus research-based intervention (Perrin et al., 2017). This research suggests that attempts to reduce corporal punishment will benefit from attending to reasons motivating its use. Ultimately, an important goal of parenting interventions focused on parental discipline is to improve child outcomes. In describing coercive cycles in which children’s misbehavior leads to harsh disciplinary responses that then lead to worse child behavior in a series of reciprocal transactions that escalate over time, Patterson (1982) argued that training parents in how to discipline their children more effectively held the greatest potential for reducing children’s antisocial behavior. Several interventions have shown promise in improving parental discipline and child outcomes (see www.blueprintsprograms.com for a summary). Parent Management Training is an example of a program that has been found to decrease both coercive parenting and children’s antisocial behavior, using rigorous randomized controlled trials (e.g., Forgatch, Patterson, DeGarmo, and Beldavs, 2009). Parents of 3- to 16-year-olds learn about effective discipline and family management strategies, and the program can be modified to meet the needs of individual families (Forgatch, DeGarmo, and Beldavs, 2005). Similarly, the Video feedback Intervention to promote Positive Parenting and Sensitive Discipline (VIPP-SD) was demonstrated in a randomized controlled trial to improve mothers’ attitudes about and use of sensitive discipline (operationalized as using distraction, inductive reasoning, or trying to understand the child’s perspective as opposed to commands, expressions of disapproval, physical obstruction, or giving in) with 1- to 3-year-olds (Van Zeijl et al., 2006). The VIPP-SD is a fairly intensive intervention for families of children with externalizing behavior problems, involving six in-home sessions of 1.5 hours each, but less intensive interventions also have been found to be beneficial. A group of parents randomly assigned to an intervention group that read summaries of scientific findings regarding the negative effects of corporal punishment showed a decline in positive attitudes about corporal punishment; the 81

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control group’s attitudes did not change over time (Holden, Brown, Baldwin, and Croft Caderao, 2014). Other interventions focus on promoting sensitive, responsive caregiving and positive forms of discipline such as inductive reasoning (e.g., Durrant et al., 2017). For example, the Positive Discipline in Everyday Parenting Program has been adapted for use in 13 countries, providing insights into ways to decrease punitive parenting in a range of contexts: Australia, Canada, Gambia, Georgia, Guatemala, Japan, Kosovo, Mongolia, Palestine, Paraguay, Philippines, the Solomon Islands, and Venezuela. Interventions attempting to alter parents’ discipline are most effective if they target not only beliefs and attitudes but also behaviors and if they give parents opportunities for practicing what they learned with their own child in the presence of a trained facilitator who can provide feedback on parent–child interactions and offer suggestions for changes (UNICEF, 2017). To summarize, international efforts to protect children from all forms of corporal punishment have accelerated following the Convention on the Rights of the Child. The number of countries that have outlawed corporal punishment continues to grow. Ideally, legal bans are accompanied by educational campaigns to make parents aware of the legal ban and advise them about alternate, effective forms of discipline. Even in countries that have not outlawed corporal punishment, parenting interventions often attempt to help parents use more proactive and inductive forms of discipline rather than resorting to corporal punishment.

Future Directions in Research on Parental Discipline Despite the long history of theoretical models of parental discipline and empirical studies of predictors and consequences of experiencing different types of discipline, future theory and research are especially needed in three key areas: child effects, neuroscience, and gene × environment interactions. First, additional research is needed to help understand child effects in relation to parental discipline. Because children with behavior problems elicit harsher and less consistent discipline and more of all kinds of discipline than do children who are well behaved, child effects should be well accounted for in statistical analyses of relations between parental discipline and child adjustment (Larzelere, Kuhn, and Johnson, 2004). Unless ways that children affect their parents are considered, models can be misspecified and counterintuitive. For example, if inductive reasoning appears to be related to more child aggression, the likely causal direction is not from parents’ inductive reasoning to children’s aggression but rather that more aggressive children elicit more parental attempts to address the aggression through inductive reasoning by explaining how aggression hurts other people (see Larzelere et al., 2004). Future research is needed to understand transactional relations between diverse forms of parental discipline and children’s outcomes to understand what forms of discipline are most effective and for whom, after taking into account children’s propensity for problem behaviors. Second, neuroscience is a burgeoning area of research with the potential for advancing understanding of ways in which parental discipline affects child outcomes. Corporal punishment is related to cortisol production and has been demonstrated to affect the brain through the hypothalamic– pituitary–adrenal (HPA) axis (Bugental, Martorell, and Barraza, 2003; Kohrt et al., 2014). Less gray matter (structural elements of the brain that are important in processing emotions and higher-level executive functions, such as making decisions) in the prefrontal cortex has been found for young adults who reported that as children they experienced corporal punishment at least one time a month and corporal punishment with an object at least one time a year compared to young adults who were not chronically corporally punished when they were children (Tomoda et al., 2009). Post-traumatic stress disorder (Bremner et al., 1997), depression (Fitzgerald, Laird, Maller, and Daskalakis, 2008), and other mental health problems (Gershoff, 2016) are affected by the area of the prefrontal cortex that also is affected by corporal punishment. Therefore, Gershoff (2016) has argued that corporal punishment is a form of toxic stress with harmful effects on brain structure and function. Future work in neuroscience offers the potential to understand other brain mechanisms that are implicated in links between parental discipline and children’s development. 82

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Third, future research on genetic factors and gene × environment interactions has the potential to contribute to knowledge regarding additional moderators of links between parental discipline and child outcomes. Studies using genetically sensitive twin designs have demonstrated that both genetic and shared environmental effects contribute to links between children’s prosocial behavior and more positive, noncoercive discipline as well as less punitive, coercive discipline (Knafo and Plomin, 2006). Meta-analyses of studies with genetically informative designs have demonstrated that parenting is shaped by parents’ genotype and environmental factors (Klahr and Burt, 2014), as well as by children’s genetically influenced behaviors (Avinun and Knafo, 2014). Specific genotypes contribute to children’s susceptibility to mothers’ positive discipline, which increases children’s compliance (Kok et al., 2013). Future genetically informative research offers the potential to disentangle the extent to which associations between parents’ impulsive, harsh discipline and children’s behavior problems can be accounted for by factors that are transmitted genetically from parent to child (manifested as parents’ aggression toward the child and children’s aggression toward peers in the two generations, respectively), as well as the extent to which genes can moderate effects of environmental experiences related to parental discipline on child outcomes. To summarize, future theoretical approaches and empirical studies will benefit from fully incorporating child effects into transactional models describing how parental discipline and children’s adjustment reciprocally influence one another over time. In addition, rapid advances in neuroimaging technology will make it possible for future research to advance understanding of how different forms of discipline are related to brain structure and function. Finally, future research on gene × environment interactions will provide an important advance in understanding how genetic factors may moderate links between the experience of particular types of discipline and children’s adjustment.

Conclusions The idea that parents can use rewards and punishments to shape children’s behavior stems from historical roots in behaviorism. Theories guiding the study of parental discipline often treat discipline as part of the “control” dimension of parenting, which is orthogonal to the “warmth” dimension; specific forms of discipline are parenting practices that are contextualized by parenting styles. The most frequently studied forms of discipline include inductive reasoning, in which parents discuss with children how their behavior affects other people, and power assertion, particularly corporal punishment. A large body of empirical work demonstrates the benefits of inductive reasoning in promoting prosocial behavior and the detriments of corporal punishment in predicting a range of problematic child outcomes. Potential moderators of links between particular forms of discipline and child outcomes include child gender, child age, temperament, and culture, but the general findings regarding the benefits of inductive reasoning and detriments of corporal punishment are robust. Mediators of links between parental discipline and child outcomes include cognitive biases and emotional insecurities that can stem from harsh discipline as well as empathy and the development of conscience that are supported through inductive reasoning. Theory and research on parental discipline are timely and important to advance scientific understanding as well as policies and practices to optimize parents’ use of nonpunitive, effective forms of discipline to protect children while socializing them to become well-functioning members of their respective societies.

Acknowledgments Lansford’s program of research on parental discipline has been funded by the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development grant RO1-HD054805 and Fogarty International Center grant RO3-TW008141. 83

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Child Development, 83, 62–75. Lansford, J. E., and Dodge, K. A. (2008). Cultural norms for adult corporal punishment of children and societal rates of endorsement and use of violence. Parenting: Science and Practice, 8, 257–270. Lansford, J. E., Godwin, J., Uribe Tirado, L. M., Zelli, A., Al-Hassan, S. M., Bacchini, D., . . . Alampay, L. P. (2015). Individual, family, and culture level contributions to child physical abuse and neglect: A longitudinal study in nine countries. Development and Psychopathology, 27, 1417–1428. Lansford, J. E., Malone, P. S., Dodge, K. A., Chang, L., Chaudhary, N., Tapanya, S., . . . Deater-Deckard, K. (2010). Children’s perceptions of maternal hostility as a mediator of the link between discipline and children’s adjustment in four countries. International Journal of Behavioral Development, 34, 452–461. Lansford, J. E., Sharma, C., Malone, P. S., Woodlief, D., Dodge, K. A., Oburu, P., . . . Di Giunta, L. (2014). 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New York, NY: Wiley. MacKenzie, M. J., Nicklas, E., Brooks-Gunn, J., and Waldfogel, J. (2011). Who spanks infants and toddlers? Evidence from the Fragile Families and Child Well-Being Study. Children and Youth Services Review, 33, 1364–1373. McKinney, C., and Renk, K. (2008). Differential parenting between mothers and fathers: Implications for late adolescents. Journal of Family Issues, 29, 806–827. McLoyd, V. C., and Smith, J. (2002). Physical discipline and behavior problems in African American, European American and Latino children: Emotional support as a moderator. Journal of Marriage and the Family, 64, 40–53. Milner, J. S. (2000). Social information processing and child physical abuse: Theory and research. In D. J. Hansen (Ed.), Nebraska symposium on motivation, Vol. 46, 1998: Motivation and child maltreatment (pp. 39–84). Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press. Morsbach, S. K., and Prinz, R. J. (2006). Understanding and improving the validity of self-report of parenting. 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4 PARENTING AND CHILDREN’S PROSOCIAL DEVELOPMENT Tracy L. Spinrad, Nancy Eisenberg, and Carlos Valiente

Introduction The topic of this chapter is the relation of parental characteristics and behaviors to children’s prosocial development and empathy-related responding. Because children’s motives for their morally relevant behaviors determine whether their actions are truly moral, and prosocial moral reasoning can reflect the range of motives used by children, socialization correlates of moral reasoning also are discussed. The role of parents in the socialization process has been a topic of considerable debate for decades. Various psychological theories emphasize different mechanisms of socialization and place differing emphases on the role of the parent versus the child in development (Maccoby, 1992). Moreover, because none of the major theories of development has adequately explained socialization, a number of mini-theories (i.e., a theory designed to deal with one specific issue rather than many aspects of development) have emerged to explain the socialization of morality. In the first section of this chapter, theories related to the socialization of prosocial tendencies (including prosocial behavior and empathy-related responding) and moral reasoning are briefly presented. Next, empirical findings regarding relations of parental practices and characteristics to prosocial tendencies and moral reasoning are reviewed. In general, we focus on the pattern of findings rather than the specifics of the many studies. Given the large amount of research on some of these topics, this review is not exhaustive.

Theoretical Perspectives on Parenting and Prosocial Development There are several major ways that developmental researchers have approached the study of prosocial behavior. Two grand theories have been central in the literature on socialization: psychoanalytic theory and behaviorism (from which social learning theory evolved) (Maccoby, 1992). In addition, two theoretical perspectives have been very influential in research and conceptualizations of the socialization of morality; these are Kohlberg’s (1969, 1984) cognitive developmental theory and Hoffman’s (1970, 1983, 2000) moral socialization theory. Each of these perspectives is briefly reviewed, with an emphasis on mechanisms relevant to moral development.

Psychoanalytic Theory Psychoanalytic theory was introduced early in the 20th century by Freud and has been critiqued and modified in various ways ever since. In the classic versions of this theory, early childhood is a time of 91

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plasticity, and, consequently, parent–child interactions have profound effects on children’s later functioning (see Cohler and Paul, 2019). According to Freud, children are driven by two major intrapsychic forces, sexuality (libido) and aggression, and parents and other socializers must impose unwanted restrictions on the child. In addition, children experience very intense conflict because they love their parents and need parental nurturance while at the same time they feel anger toward their parents and desire them sexually. If children express their anger and sexual feelings, they are likely to lose the parent’s love and support, and may even engender intense parental anger and aggression; thus, children are emotionally engulfed by conflict. Although descriptions of this conflict vary considerably in the writings of Freud and his disciples, the conflict generally is viewed as being resolved (at least to a fair degree) in childhood (e.g., at age 4 to 6 years, according to Freud) through the mechanism of identification. As is described by Maccoby (1992, p. 1007): Children “internalize” their parents and “introject” their values, forming a superego or conscience that is an internal representation of the parents (primarily in their regulatory capacity). Because the children’s incestuous wishes are directed primarily toward the opposite-sex parent, there is greater risk of retaliation or rejection by the same-sex parent, and conflict resolution therefore takes the form of identification primarily with the same-sex parent. This identification carries with it an adoption of appropriately sex-typed behaviors and attitudes, along with an adoption of a more general set of prosocial values. As a consequence of identification, the child develops a conscience (i.e., superego) and guilt feelings, which are feelings of resentment and hostility formerly directed toward the same-sex parent now turned inward (see Freud, 1925, 1959). Most traditional psychoanalytic theorists view parents as agents of control in the early years and sources of moral values on identification. Thus, parents play a major role in shaping children’s morality, albeit sometimes unintentionally. Although psychoanalytic conceptions play a minor role in current theory in developmental psychology (but see Emde, Johnson, and Easterbrooks, 1987), the psychoanalytic notion of identification has been modified by some less behavioral social learning theorists to refer to children’s internalization of parents’ norms, values, and standards as a consequence of a positive parent–child relationship (Mussen, Rutherford, Harris, and Keasey, 1970).

Behaviorism and Social Learning Theory In psychoanalytic theory, the child is an emotionally driven, egocentric, irrational being driven to morality only by emotions such as fear and anxiety, and later, guilt. In early behaviorism, the child also was conceptualized in nonrational terms—as a passive being to be shaped by socializers. The child learned through mechanisms such as classical and operant conditioning, particularly through parental contingencies. Behaviors that were reinforced (rewarded) continued; those that were punished dropped out of the child’s repertoire. There are numerous modern learning and social learning theories, all derived, at least in part, from behaviorism. In probably all versions, mechanisms of reinforcement and punishment still are important. For example, according to Gewirtz and Pelaez-Nogueras (1991, p. 162), “much of what is termed moral behavior involves responses (including verbal ones) that have been shaped and maintained by positive consequences (e.g., approval, acceptance, praise) or responses that avoid or eliminate aversive consequences (e.g., disapproval, rejection, punishment).” Moreover, the contingencies need not actually occur; people learn through observation and verbal behavior the likely consequences of a behavior. Of course, parents are likely to be among those who provide reinforcements and aversive consequences to the child. In modern social learning theory, imitation is central to the learning of new behaviors (Bandura, 1986). Indeed, some psychologists even reframed the psychoanalytic construct of identification into 92

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pervasive imitative, as a “selective process whereby a child acquires a range of the behavior repertory of a parent (usually the parent of the same gender as the child), including behaviors connoting moral values, attitudes, and standards” (Gewirtz and Pelaez-Nogueras, 1991, pp. 163–164). Viewed either narrowly or broadly, the process of imitating others in the child’s environment, including parents, is deemed an important source of morality. In Bandura’s view (1986, 1991), the process is even more complex. Moral rules or standards of behavior are fashioned from information from a variety of social sources, including tuition, others’ evaluative social reactions, and models. Based on experiences, people learn what factors are morally relevant and how much value to attach to each. Moral decision-making is an intricate process, and many factors must be weighed in each situation (Eisenberg, 1986; Staub, 1978). In addition, over time people change their conceptions due to experience with the social consequences of their actions. According to Bandura (1986, 1991), affect also plays a vital regulatory role in moral behavior. Transgressions are controlled by two major types of sanctions: social sanctions (e.g., social disapproval) and internalized self-sanctions. People frequently behave in moral ways to avoid social censure and externally imposed punishments; they may fear the shame, loneliness, or other costs associated with social sanctions. In regard to self-sanctions, people behave morally because to do so produces selfsatisfaction and self-respect, whereas immoral conduct results in self-reproof. Anticipation of these self-administered consequences provides the motivational force by which standards regulate behavior. Of course, people may possess self-regulatory capabilities but may not use them consistently or effectively in all circumstances, particularly if they do not perceive themselves as able to effectively exercise control over their own motivation, thoughts, and actions. Thus, according to contemporary social learning theory, parents play a multifaceted role in their child’s moral development. They provide information about behavioral alternatives, expectations, and possible contingencies for various courses of action, model relevant behaviors, and reinforce and punish the child for different actions. In addition, they may play a role in children’s development of self-evaluative reactions (e.g., guilt) and in children’s perceptions of, and actual ability to control, their own thoughts and actions.

Cognitive Developmental Theory Children play a very active role in their own moral development in cognitive developmental theory. According to Kohlberg (1969, 1984), the most influential proponent of a cognitive developmental perspective on morality, children actively interpret their environment and construct their own understanding of morality. In normal environments, children’s thinking about moral dilemmas proceeds through a predictable series of stages, although individuals may stop at different points in development. These stages emerge on account of children’s increasing capacity to understand and interpret their social environment; particularly important are changes with age in children’s ability to take the perspectives of other individuals and, later, of the broader society. The stages progress from externally oriented preconventional or heteronomous morality (based on avoidance of punishment and the superior power of authorities and a concrete, self-interested perspective), to conventional morality (based on considerations of mutual interpersonal expectations, relationships, and interpersonal conformity, or concern with keeping the social system going and the imperatives of conscience), to postconventional morality (based on concerns with social contracts, the greatest good, individual rights, and self-chosen universal ethical principles; see Colby and Kohlberg, 1987). Each stage is considered to represent an organized way of thinking, with movement to the next stage requiring a qualitative reorganization of the individual’s pattern of thinking rather than merely the learning of new content. Each higher stage is viewed as more adequate and involves a broader perspective than achieved at lower stages. At each stage, the child possesses a better understanding and can integrate more 93

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diverse points of view regarding moral conflicts (Colby and Kohlberg, 1987; see Lapsley, 2006). Although many of Kohlberg’s specific assertions have been challenged and alternative schema for conceptualizing moral reasoning have been proposed (Eisenberg, 1986; Gilligan, 1982), his theory dominated the field of morality for decades. In cognitive developmental theory, advances in cognition are necessary for advances in moral judgment. Such advances are likely to occur when children are ready cognitively and when they are exposed to morally relevant information that is more sophisticated than their current level and at a level that is optimally higher than their current level of functioning (i.e., just a little above their current level). In such circumstances, cognitive disequilibrium occurs, and the child seeks to better understand the moral conflict. Experiences that broaden the individual’s perspective, such as negotiation with others, participation in decision-making processes of groups or institutions, and role-taking opportunities in which the child can learn about others’ perspectives are viewed as promoting development (Mason and Gibbs, 1993; Walker and Hennig, 1999). Given the general emphasis on cognition and the child’s active role in promoting her or his own development, it is not surprising that socialization, particularly in the home, has been given relatively little attention by cognitive developmentalists (Walker and Hennig, 1999). Generally, parents are viewed as bystanders in the process of moral development; they are involved to the degree that they provide opportunities for cognitive conflict, discussion of issues of fairness and morality, perspective taking, participation in decision-making, and exposure to reasoning above their own stage (Walker and Hennig, 1999). According to Kohlberg (1969, p. 399), “family participation is not unique or critically necessary for moral development.”

Hoffman’s Theory of Moral Internalization Hoffman (1983, 1988, 2000) tried to address the question of how societal norms or rules, which are initially external (e.g., based on fear of sanctions), acquire an internal motivational force (i.e., acquire an obligatory, compelling quality experienced as derived from oneself with little or no collection of their origins). According to Hoffman (1983, 2000), although learning relevant to moral development can occur outside the disciplinary context and in interactions with other people, disciplinary encounters with parents are central to moral internalization. In disciplinary encounters, the child acts or is tempted to act in a manner that will adversely affect another. The parent intervenes and tries to change the child’s behavior in a manner that accords with the victim’s (or potential victim’s) needs. Disciplinary situations are similar to a range of moral encounters in which the child is tempted to act in a way that has negative consequences for others. Thus, what is learned in the disciplinary encounter is likely to influence whether or not children internalize norms and act in a manner consistent with these norms in subsequent moral encounters. Hoffman (1970, 1983) identified several categories of discipline. Inductive techniques point out the effect of the child’s behavior on others. They vary in complexity; early inductions are likely to be very simple (e.g., “If you push him, he’ll fall and cry”), whereas with older children parents may refer to subtler psychological effects or processes (e.g., “Don’t yell at him. He was only trying to help.” or “He feels bad because he was proud of his tower and you knocked it down.”) (Hoffman, 1983, p. 247). In many inductions, reparative actions are suggested by the parent. Hoffman argued that a moral orientation characterized by independence of external sanctions and by high levels of guilt is associated with frequent parental use of inductions. In contrast to inductions, power-assertive discipline involves the use of physical force, deprivation of possessions or privileges, direct commands, or threats. Hoffman (1970, 1983) asserted that consistent and predominant use of power assertion is associated with a moral orientation in children based on fear of external detection and punishment.

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In the third category of discipline discussed by Hoffman (1983, p. 247), love withdrawal techniques, the parent simply gives direct, but nonphysical, expressions of anger or disapproval of the child for engaging in some undesirable behavior (e.g., ignores the child, turns his or her back on the child, refuses to speak or listen to the child, explicitly states a dislike for the child, isolates or threatens to leave the child). Hoffman argued that such techniques are not systematically related to moral internalization. According to Hoffman (1970, 1983), inductions promote internalization for a variety of reasons. First, they induce an optimal (i.e., moderate) level of arousal for learning. Inductions are arousing enough to elicit the child’s attention but are unlikely to produce high levels of anxiety or anger. Thus, the child is likely to attend to and process the information embedded in the parent’s inductive statement. In addition, because of the information provided in the explanation, the parent’s discipline efforts may seem less arbitrary and, consequently, may be unlikely to induce reactance (i.e., the discipline may not be perceived as a threat to the child’s freedom). Further, inductions focus children’s attention on consequences of their behavior for others and capitalize on children’s capacity to feel another’s negative emotion (i.e., to empathize) and guilt based on the awareness of causing harm to another. Feelings of empathy and concern have been associated with altruistic motivation, and feelings of guilt motivate reparation. In contrast, power-assertive and love withdrawal techniques may elicit too much arousal due to fear of punishment or anxiety about loss of the parent’s love. In either case, the child’s attention is likely to be directed to the consequences of the deviant act for the self rather than for other people; moreover, these techniques heighten the child’s view that the relevant moral standard is external to the self. Hoffman also tried to explain how, over time, inductive practices result in children’s experiencing moral norms as originating from within themselves (i.e., as internalized). He hypothesized that the informational component of inductions is semantically organized, encoded in memory, and modified and integrated with similar information extracted by inductions in other disciplinary encounters. Important features of the process are (1) that the child plays an active role in processing the information and (2) that inductions focus on the child’s action and its consequences rather than on the parent as the disciplinary agent. Consequently, over time children are likely to remember the causal link between their actions and consequences for others rather than the external pressure or the specific disciplinary context. Thus, the inductive message, not the external source of the moral norm in the disciplinary context, is remembered at a later time. Further, when the stored information is recalled at a later time in a similar situation, the child is likely to experience the emotions of empathy and guilt associated with those memories. These emotions may serve as motives for acting in accordance with moral norms at the later point in time. In contrast, in situations involving strong power assertion or love withdrawal, the child is unlikely to store or later recall reasons for avoiding the course of action in question; nor is the child likely to experience empathy for a potential victim or anticipate guilt for transgressing against others. Many researchers examining parents’ role in moral development have studied the types of discipline discussed by Hoffman. However, Hoffman did not discuss in any detail how parents influence children’s moral development outside of the disciplinary context. Impetus for studying other parental practices, such as modeling and parental stimulation of children’s thinking about moral conflicts, has come primarily from social learning and cognitive developmental theories.

Positive Psychology and Positive Youth Development For much of the history of the study of children’s development, researchers utilized a deficit model— focusing on preventing or reducing children’s risks and shortcomings (Lerner, 2017). Positive youth development models have spurred increasing interest in the positive aspects of children’s development.

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Rather than focusing on negative aspects of development, such as children’s adjustment problems, these models emphasize the assets that enable youth to grow and succeed throughout life (Park, 2004). Although not theories per se, these movements take a strength-based approach rather than focusing on youths’ deficits. The goals of the positive psychology movement have been to emphasize positive qualities of individuals and to study how individuals flourish and thrive (see Seligman and Csikszentmihalyi, 2000). Similarly, a main focus for positive youth development researchers is to understand the conditions that foster youth success and well-being (Lerner, 2017). In addition to following a strength-based approach to studying development, there has been an upsurge of interest in the specific constructs of prosocial behavior, compassion, empathy, and altruism from researchers associated with the positive psychology movement and positive youth development. For example, Lerner and colleagues (2005) identified five components of positive youth development, with one of the components being caring (the others are competence, confidence, connection, and character). These models now focus on the components of positive development (such as prosocial behavior and sympathy) and how such strengths contribute to their contexts and their future positive development. It is expected that the trend to focus on assets of young people will continue in the coming years. Ideas about the role of socialization in children’s prosocial development have been influenced heavily by psychoanalytic theory, behaviorism and social learning theories, and cognitive developmental theory. More recently, Hoffman’s theory (particularly his views on socialization of empathy) and the positive psychology movement have made major contributions to the field. Each adds a unique perspective, and it is often useful to draw from multiple theories to understand prosocial/ moral development.

Methodological Issues in Existing Research in Parenting and Children’s Prosocial Development Prior to reviewing the empirical literature, it is important to start with a discussion of some of the methodological limitations of the existing empirical research. One important limitation in the existing research is the frequent dependence of researchers on parents for information about the child’s moral proclivities and the parents’ own behavior (Holden and Smith, 2019). Ideally, measures of the child’s prosocial behavior, empathy-related responding, or moral reasoning would be obtained from observation of children’s behavior or from moral reasoning interviews, and measures of parental characteristics and practices would be based on observations of the parents. However, it often is difficult or impossible to observe parents or children, especially for extended periods of time or in a variety of settings. Moreover, parents and older children may not act typically when they know they are being observed (Zegiob, Arnold, and Forehand, 1975). Consequently, interviewers frequently have interviewed parents about their childrearing practices, used questionnaire measures designed to assess variables such as parental warmth or discipline, and have questioned parents about their children’s moral development or obtained one-time assessments of moral behavior in a laboratory setting. Other complexities in studying prosocial behavior also should be considered. For example, researchers vary in the type of prosocial behavior studied (i.e., instrumental help, sharing, comforting), as well as their costliness (e.g., sharing resources at an expense to oneself, comforting someone in distress). Such nuances in measures of prosocial behavior are important because the various forms of prosocial actions may be more or less intrinsically motivated (see Eisenberg, VanSchyndel, and Spinrad, 2016). Such intricacies are often ignored in current research. Thus, the data on which conclusions are drawn are far from ideal. Because methods vary considerably across studies, if findings are similar across studies, they are not likely to be ascribable to any particular methodological shortfall. Moreover, sometimes data are available from more than one Western nation or ethnic group. When this is the case, we can have greater confidence in the data and are safer in generalizing from research findings in one group to other groups of people. In general, however, we 96

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must be cautious about assuming that the conclusions from research based on middle-class European North Americans or Europeans apply to other groups of people. Although the majority of studies has focused on maternal socialization of prosocial behavior, research on the influence of fathers’ parenting practices on prosocial behavior is beginning to flourish. As a whole, much of the existing evidence suggests that mothers’ parenting practices contribute more strongly to children’s prosocial behavior than fathers’ socialization strategies (Carlo, Roesch, and Melby, 1998; Daniel, Madigan, and Jenkins, 2016; Fortuna and Knafo, 2014; Hastings, McShane, Parker, and Ladha, 2007). However, more research examining the unique roles of mothers’ and fathers’ parenting on children’s empathy-related outcomes and moral reasoning is needed, particularly in understanding the role of fathers’ parenting on different types of prosocial behavior or at different ages (Hastings et al., 2007; Laible and Carlo, 2004; Nickerson, Mele, and Princiotta, 2008; Padilla-Walker, Nielson, and Day, 2016). Another caveat concerns conclusions regarding cause-and-effect relations between parental variables and children’s prosocial development. Implicit in the notions of socialization and childrearing practices is the assumption that it is the adult who is influencing the child. However, it is also likely that children, on account of differences in their characteristics and behaviors, influence how adults treat them (Bell and Harper, 1977). Much research on socialization of moral behavior and moral reasoning is correlational in nature, and correlations tell one nothing about the direction of causality. Indeed, there is evidence that children’s behaviors and temperament influence adults’ socialization efforts (Keller and Bell, 1979; Kuczynski and Kochanska, 1990; Maccoby and Martin, 1983; Patterson, 1982; Pastorelli et al., 2016) and that relations between socialization and child prosocial tendencies are bidirectional (Carlo, Mestre, Samper, Tur, and Armenta, 2011; Newton, Laible, Carlo, Steele, and McGinley, 2014; Padilla-Walker, Carlo, Christensen, and Yorgason, 2012). Furthermore, there is little doubt that heredity contributes to some of the associations found between parental characteristics or behaviors and children’s behavior (Collins, Maccoby, Steinberg, Hetherington, and Bornstein, 2000). Parent and child behaviors are interwoven; partners regulate each other’s behavior, and coherent expectations about each other’s behavior, joint goals, and shared meanings may emerge (Maccoby, 1992; Parke and Buriel, 1998). Thus, the processes underlying the socialization of children’s morality are much more complex than the available research indicates. Although all methods of measurement have limitations, it is important for researchers to examine whether findings converge across methods. Further, researchers need to conduct research that is sensitive to issues regarding the direction of effects. With such improvements in methodologies, our confidence in the research considering the role of socializers on children’s prosocial reactions will improve.

The Relations of Parental Characteristics and Behaviors to Children’s Prosocial Development In this section of the chapter, we briefly summarize empirical findings on parental variables associated with prosocial behavior and thinking.

Prosocial Behavior Prosocial behavior frequently is defined as voluntary behavior intended to benefit another (Eisenberg and Fabes, 1998; Eisenberg, Fabes, and Spinrad, 2006; Eisenberg, Spinrad, and Knafo-Noam, 2015). Most parents who desire to foster prosocial behaviors really want to enhance one type of prosocial responding—altruistic behavior. Altruistic behaviors are voluntary, intentional actions that benefit another, and are not motivated by the desire to obtain external material or social rewards. In thinking about motives, we have found it useful to differentiate among children’s empathy (an affective response that is the same, or similar, to what another is feeling), sympathy (an emotional response that 97

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involves feelings of concern for others), and personal distress (a self-focused reaction that involves discomfort or anxiety when viewing another’s distress; see Eisenberg et al., 2015). Prosocial behaviors, particularly altruistically motivated behaviors, are thought to be performed for internalized reasons (e.g., empathy, sympathy), the desire to live up to internalized values, or processes such as guilt (Eisenberg et al., 2016). Unfortunately, when we observe a prosocial behavior, we often cannot ascertain the actor’s motives. This makes it difficult to determine which socialization practices are related to the development of altruistic behaviors versus nonaltruistically motivated prosocial behaviors.

Inductions Hoffman (2000) proposed that parental inductions, a discipline strategy characterized by attempts to provide explanations and reasons for behavior, should be related to higher empathy and prosocial behavior because such practices generate an optimal level of arousal for learning. Indeed, inductive discipline (particularly other-oriented reasoning) has been associated with higher empathy/sympathy in children (Hoffman, 1975; Laible, Eye, and Carlo, 2008), which in turn has been related to children’s prosocial behavior (Carlo, Knight, McGinley, and Hayes, 2011; Farrant, Devine, Maybery, and Fletcher, 2012; Janssens and Gerris, 1992; Krevans and Gibbs, 1996; Schuhmacher, Collard, and Kärtner, 2017; Stewart and McBride-Chang, 2000; see Eisenberg and Fabes, 1998; Eisenberg et al., 2006; Eisenberg et al., 2015). Eisenberg, VanSchyndel, and Hofer (2015) reported long-term longitudinal relations between mothers’ reports of inductive discipline in both childhood and adolescence to relatively high friend-reported sympathy in adulthood. The effectiveness of inductions has been demonstrated for children as young as 1 1/2 to 2 1/2 years of age if inductions were administered with affective force (i.e., emotion; Zahn-Waxler, Radke-Yarrow, and King, 1979). Moreover, mothers’ explanations to their children for their own sadness in ongoing social interactions (which may or may not have involved disciplinary issues) have been associated with children’s prosocial behavior at preschool (Denham and Grout, 1992). Such verbalizations may help children to understand others’ emotions. According to one study, inductions are associated with prosocial development only if verbalized by socializers who typically do not use power-assertive (punitive) techniques (Hoffman, 1963) or if children have had a history of inductive discipline (Dlugokinski and Firestone, 1974). When inductions are part of a generally democratic parenting style, such parenting has been associated with teacher and peer reports of prosocial behavior (Dekovic and Janssens, 1992; Janssens and Dekovic, 1997). Similarly, researchers have shown a positive relation between authoritative parenting style (parenting that provides reasonable demands and expectations balanced with responsiveness) and children’s prosocial behavior (Hastings et al., 2007; Padilla-Walker et al., 2012) and sympathy (Taylor, Eisenberg, and Spinrad, 2015).

Power-Assertive, Punitive Techniques of Discipline In general, socializers’ use of power-assertive techniques of discipline, such as physical punishment or deprivation of privileges, has been found to be negatively related to children’s prosocial behavior (Asbury, Dunn, Pike, and Plomin, 2003; Brody and Shaffer, 1982; Ensor and Hughes, 2010; Hastings, Zahn-Waxler, Robinson, Usher, and Bridges, 2000; Padilla-Walker et al., 2016; see Eisenberg et al., 2015) and negatively related to empathy/sympathy (Cornell and Frick, 2007; Garner, 2012; Laible and Carlo, 2004; Krevans and Gibbs, 1996; Spinrad et al., 1999). As suggested by Hoffman (1983), children attribute helping induced by power-assertive techniques to external motives (Dix and Grusec, 1983; Smith, Gelfand, Hartmann, and Partlow, 1979). Nonetheless, as noted by Hoffman (1983, 2000), there is a difference between the occasional use of power-assertive techniques in the context of a positive parent–child relationship and the use of punishment as the preferred, predominant mode of discipline. When power-assertive techniques are used in a measured and rational manner by parents who 98

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generally are warm and supportive, set high standards, and usually use nonpower-assertive disciplinary techniques such as reasoning, children tend to be socially responsible and positive in their behavior (Baumrind, 1971, 1993). In contrast, it appears that the frequent use of power-assertive techniques, especially by hostile, cold socializers, is negatively related to prosocial development and may hinder the effectiveness of other socialization techniques that usually promote prosocial development (Hoffman, 1963, 1983, 2000). For example, Dutch parents who use power assertion as part of an authoritarian pattern of discipline have elementary school children who were viewed as low in helpfulness by their peers, although not by their teachers (Dekovic and Janssens, 1992). Similarly, positive parenting practices interact with parents’ use of corporal punishment to predict prosocial behavior for girls, but not boys. The positive relation between positive parenting and prosocial behavior was stronger when parents did not use corporal punishment (Piché, Huỳćnh, Clemént, and Durrant, 2016). Although punishment can induce immediate compliance with socializers’ expectations for prosocial behavior if the socializer monitors the child’s behavior, there is as yet little evidence that punishment for selfishness has long-term, generalizable effects. It should be emphasized, however, that most mothers infrequently use punishment (especially physical punishment) to induce helping or in response to children’s failure to help (Grusec, 1982, 1991; Grusec, Dix, and Mills, 1982; Zahn-Waxler et al., 1979).

Love Withdrawal There appears to be no consistent relation between parents’ use of love withdrawal as discipline and children’s prosocial behavior (Brody and Shaffer, 1982; Krevans and Gibbs, 1996). It is likely that the effects of love withdrawal vary with the context and frequency in which it is administered.

Nurturance and Emotional Support Parental warmth and supportiveness are thought to promote children’s prosocial tendencies and cooperation with others (Eisenberg, Eggum-Wilkens, and Spinrad, 2015; Grusec, 2006, 2011). Because warmth and supportive practices are reciprocal and nurturing, these characteristics are thought to foster positive parent–child relationships and children’s receptiveness to parents’ socialization efforts. Further, intuitively, such parenting may be a model for sympathy and prosocial behavior (Eisenberg et al., 2015; Eisenberg and Spinrad, 2014). Consistent with this perspective, in general there seems to be a modest, positive relation between parental warmth (particularly maternal warmth) and children’s and adolescents’ prosocial development (Carlo, Mestre, et al., 2011; Daniel et al., 2016; Domitrovich and Bierman, 2001; Hastings et al., 2007; Janssens and Gerris, 1992; Knafo and Plomin, 2006; Padilla-Walker et al., 2016; see Brody and Shaffer, 1982). For example, mothers’ warmth has been positively associated with prosocial behavior towards family members, and fathers’ warmth is related to prosocial behavior toward peers (PadillaWalker et al., 2016). Maternal sensitivity and responsiveness, constructs similar to warmth, also have been associated with prosocial responding (Bronstein, Fox, Kamon, and Knolls, 2007; Davidov and Grusec, 2006; Laible, Carlo, Davis, and Karahuta, 2016). Similarly, there is some evidence that children with a secure attachment to a parent are more prosocial than insecurely attached children (Carlo, McGinley, Hayes, and Martinez, 2012; Gross, Stern, Brett, and Cassidy, 2017; Iannotti, Cummings, Pierrehumbert, Milano, and Zahn-Waxler, 1992; Kestenbaum, Farber, and Sroufe, 1989; Ma, Cheung, and Shek, 2007; Yoo, Feng, and Day, 2013). Nonetheless, the relation between parental support and children’s prosocial behavior is fragile, and the two frequently have been unrelated or inconsistently correlated (Iannotti et al., 1992; Krevans and Gibbs, 1996; Wentzel and McNamara, 1999; see Eisenberg et al., 2006; Eisenberg, Spinrad, & 99

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Knafo-Noam, 2015). However, in many studies, parental nurturance was not assessed directly; rather, measures of parental behaviors were based on parental or child report of socializers’ warmth. When socializers’ nurturance has been observed or controlled experimentally, the relation of socializers’ nurturance and support to children’s prosocial behavior has been found to be somewhat stronger and clearer than in the literature involving parental self-report (see Bryant and Crockenberg, 1980; Yarrow, Scott, and Waxler, 1973; Zahn-Waxler et al., 1979). Parental warmth, support, and sympathy are also associated with their children’s affective sympathy and empathy (Eisenberg, Fabes, et al.,1992; Fabes, Eisenberg, and Miller, 1990; Hastings et al., 2000; Malti, Eisenberg, Kim, and Buchmann, 2013; Miklikowska, Duriez, and Soenens, 2011; Spinrad et al., 1999; cf. Iannotti et al., 1992; Koestner, Franz, and Weinberger, 1990). In a long-term longitudinal study, Eisenberg et al. (2015) showed that mothers’ reported warmth in childhood predicted sympathy in early adulthood. Maternal sensitivity/responsiveness also has been related to higher sympathy/ empathy (Kiang, Moreno, and Robinson, 2004; Moreno, Klute, and Robinson, 2008; Spinrad and Stifter, 2006; Tong et al., 2012). Feldman (2007a, 2007b) showed that mother–infant synchrony in the first year of life predicted empathy in Israeli adolescents. Attachment security has been linked with empathy (Diamond, Fagundes, and Butterworth, 2012; Nickerson et al., 2008; van der Mark, van IJzendoorn, and Bakermans-Kranenburg, 2002). Despite such evidence, some investigators have shown no (or mixed) relations (Davidov and Grusec, 2006; Soenens, Duriez, Vansteenkiste, and Goossens, 2007). It is logical to hypothesize that warm, empathic parenting promotes children’s prosocial behavior through its effects on children’s perspective taking, empathy, and sympathy. However, Janssens and Gerris (1992) found that Dutch children’s empathy did not mediate the effects of parental support for either mothers or fathers on prosocial behavior; for mothers, support had a direct (unmediated) effect on 9- to 12-year-olds’ prosocial behavior.

Modeling Much research on modeling of prosocial behavior has taken place in laboratory work where children’s imitation of an unfamiliar adult’s prosocial behavior or selfishness has been assessed. In general, people (including children) who have viewed a prosocial model are more prosocial themselves than are people who have not viewed a prosocial model or who have viewed a stingy or unhelpful model (see Eisenberg et al., 2006; Eisenberg et al., 2015; Radke-Yarrow, Zahn-Waxler, and Chapman, 1983, for reviews). Even in the laboratory, the effects of observing a prosocial model have been found to persist over time (for days or even months; Grusec, Saas-Kortsaak, and Simutis, 1978; Rice and Grusec, 1975; Rushton, 1975) and to generalize to somewhat new and different situations (see Eisenberg et al., 2015). Despite the preponderance of evidence indicating that children imitate prosocial others, it also is clear that some models are imitated more than others. For example, nurturance by the model is related to children’s imitation of prosocial behavior, albeit in a complex manner. It appears that noncontingent nurturance (unconditional constant nurturance) is interpreted by children as indicating permissiveness and, consequently, children do not assist if there is a material cost to doing so (Grusec, 1971; Grusec and Skubiski, 1970; Weissbrod, 1980). However, when adult nurturance is part of an ongoing relationship and is not unconditional (which generally is true in real life), nurturance increases the effectiveness of a model (Yarrow et al., 1973). Some of the most compelling evidence of the role of modeling in the family in real-life situations comes from studies of people in Europe who saved Jews from the Nazis during World War II. Rescuing activities were often highly dangerous and could result in death if discovered. Two groups of researchers found that rescuers tended to come from families in which parents modeled generosity, helpfulness, and similar behaviors (London, 1970; Oliner and Oliner, 1988). Similar findings were 100

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obtained in a study of the “freedom riders” in the late 1950s and early 1960s, a group of young adults (many European-American) who engaged in activities designed to increase equal rights and opportunities for African-Americans in the southern parts of the United States. Those who were highly committed and involved in the civil rights effort reported that their parents had been excellent models of prosocial behavior and concern for others, working for worthy causes, protesting injustices, and discussing their activities with their children (Rosenhan, 1970). Along the same lines, Hart and Fegley (1995) found that minority youth who were exemplars of caring were more likely than their peers to incorporate aspects of parentally related representations (e.g., what their mothers were like or expected of them) in their self-representations. Moreover, there is evidence that parental volunteerism is positively related to volunteerism in adolescent offspring (Bekkers, 2007; McGinley, Lipperman-Kreda, Byrnes, and Carlo, 2010; McLellan and Youniss, 2003) and grown children years later (Janoski and Wilson, 1995). Thus, there is evidence suggesting that parental modeling of prosocial behavior, which no doubt is often combined with a variety of other parental behaviors that are likely to foster children’s prosocial behavior, is associated with adult children’s willingness to assist others at a cost to themselves. Of course, hereditary factors also could contribute to similarities in the behavior of parents and children. Children may also learn to express sympathy through modeling their parents’ empathy-related responding (Eisenberg, Fabes, et al., 1992; Eisenberg, Fabes, Schaller, Carlo, and Miller, 1991; Fabes et al., 1990). For example, Eisenberg et al. (1991) showed that parents’ sympathy was related to lower personal distress reactions in same-sex children and, for both parents, sympathy was positively associated with sons’ dispositional sympathy. In another study, Farrant and colleagues (2012) showed that maternal empathy was positively associated with children’s empathy and prosocial behavior. Such relations could certainly be due to other processes (i.e., genetic transmission), but it is likely that modeling may be one mechanism for children’s learning prosocial behavior and empathy-related responding (Farrant et al., 2012).

Moral Preachings In an attempt to modify or influence children’s behaviors, socializers sometimes symbolically model prosocial behavior (say that they are going to act in a prosocial manner) or discuss the merits or consequences of prosocial actions. Such verbalizations frequently have been labeled preachings or exhortations and represent attempts to influence an individual’s future behavior, not a disciplinary response to prior behavior. Researchers have found that the effectiveness of preachings varies as a function of their content. Children’s sharing is enhanced by appeals that provide symbolic modeling, that is they include a description of what the model intends to do (Grusec and Skubiski, 1970; Rice and Grusec, 1975) or include reasons for assisting that are likely to evoke empathy and sympathy (Burleson and Fennelly, 1981; Eisenberg-Berg and Geisheker, 1979; Perry, Bussey, and Freiberg, 1981). In contrast, preachings that are power-assertive in content (involve threats of disapproval; Perry et al., 1981) or refer to the norm of sharing (Bryan and Walbek, 1970) or self-oriented reasons for sharing (Burleson and Fennelly, 1981) are relatively ineffective. The effects of preaching with compelling content can be relatively durable; in experimental studies they have lasted over a three-week (Grusec et al., 1978) or even eight-week (Rushton, 1975) period. It is possible that preachings, even those providing reasons, can backfire if they are viewed by the child as putting pressure on the child to assist. Consistent with findings that children react negatively to attempts to limit their freedom (Brehm, 1981), children may respond negatively and feel unwilling to assist if they feel pressured to comply with an adult’s reasoning (see McGrath and Power, 1990; McGrath, Wilson, and Frassetto, 1995). In addition, if preachings are perceived as applying pressure, children may attribute their helping to external causes and, consequently, be less willing to assist at a later time (Lepper, 1983). 101

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Nearly all the studies on preachings have been conducted in laboratory settings. However, it is clear from research on parental use of inductions, verbal demandingness, and other types of verbalizations that parents’ verbalizations can influence children’s prosocial behavior (Dekovic and Janssens, 1992). Thus, it is likely that parents’ statements about the importance, consequences, or reasons for prosocial action in nondisciplinary settings promote children’s tendencies to perform prosocial behaviors.

Assignment of Responsibility Practice performing prosocial behaviors seems to be useful for promoting prosocial tendencies (Barton, 1981; Staub, 1979). Children who were assigned responsibility to teach others or who were induced to participate in prosocial activities subsequently displayed more prosocial behavior (Staub, 1979). Similarly, children who were induced to donate to needy others in one context were more likely to help other people one or two days later (this was true for children in second grade or older, but not kindergartners; Eisenberg, Cialdini, McCreath, and Shell, 1987). Furthermore, assigning a specific child responsibility for others seems to enhance prosocial behavior (Maruyama, Fraser, and Miller, 1982; Peterson, 1983). In cross-cultural research, Whiting and Whiting (1975) found that children from non-Western cultures, in which youngsters are routinely assigned responsibilities for assisting others (e.g., caregiving activities), were more prosocial than children from other cultures. Even young toddlers whose mothers encouraged them to assist in household chores and routines tend to behave more prosocially with others (Hammond and Carpendale, 2015; Köster, Cavalcante, Vera Cruz, Dôgo Resende, and Kärtner, 2016). Grusec, Goodnow, and Cohen (1996) showed that routine (but not requested) participation in household chores was related to youth prosocial behavior in the family. Finally, participation in voluntary community service sometimes has been linked to greater commitment to helping others in the future (Yates and Youniss, 1996). Even mandatory voluntary service appears to sometimes increase prosocial behavior (Hart, Donnelly, Youniss, and Atkins, 2007; see Eisenberg et al., 2006).

Reinforcement Although both material (Warren, Warren-Rogers, and Baer, 1976) and social reinforcement (Gelfand, Hartmann, Cromer, Smith, and Page, 1975; Grusec and Redler, 1980) in the laboratory have been found to increase the frequency of prosocial behavior immediately subsequent to the reinforcement, it is not clear whether the effects of material reinforcement are enduring and generalize to new situations. In most research in which reinforced prosocial behaviors have generalized to new settings or have been enduring, reinforcement was used in combination with modeling and other techniques (Barton, 1981; Rushton, 1975; see Eisenberg et al., 2015). It is likely that the receipt of concrete rewards for a prosocial action leads to the child perceiving that the performance of the prosocial behavior reflected external, and not internal, motivational factors (Lepper, 1983; Szynal-Brown and Morgan, 1983). If this is true, the child would be expected to repeat the prosocial behavior only in settings in which she or he believes that rewards might be forthcoming. Evidence of the negative effects of rewards on the development of altruism has been established (Carlo, McGinley, Hayes, Batenhorst, and Wilkinson, 2007). For example, Fabes, Fultz, Eisenberg, May-Plumlee, and Christopher (1989) found that second- to fifth-graders who believed that there would be a reward for helping assisted more in that context than did other children. However, the promise of a reward led to less helping when the children were given a second opportunity to assist in a context in which rewards were not mentioned and the children were alone. Warneken and Tomasello (2008) showed that 20-month-olds who received a reward for prosocial behavior were less likely to engage in prosocial behavior than were those who received verbal praise or no reward for prosocial action. Ulber, Hamann, and Tomasello (2016) obtained similar results with 3-year-olds’ 102

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costly prosocial behaviors. In other experimental work, 24-month-olds tended to pick up dropped objects (instrumental helping) at high rates, regardless of whether or not a parent was present to witness or guide young children’s helping, indicating intrinsic motivation for helping (Warneken and Tomasello, 2013). Thus, children do not seem to need encouragement for helping and those offered rewards for prosocial actions seemed to be less intrinsically motivated to help when there were no rewards for doing so. It is also possible that parental reinforcement of children’s prosocial behavior varies as a function of characteristics of the child. Eisenberg, Wolchik, Goldberg, and Engel (1992) found that mothers and fathers used more social reinforcement (i.e., positive affect) after children engaged in prosocial acts requested by the parent if their children were low in the tendency to perform such prosocial behaviors. It is likely that these parents administered more reinforcement to relatively noncompliant children in an attempt to increase the frequency of their prosocial behavior. Consistent with this notion, Grusec (1991) found that preschoolers who were prosocial were somewhat less likely to receive a response from their mother when they were helpful than were less prosocial children.

Emotion Socialization Fewer investigators have examined relations of parents’ emotion-related socialization practices to children’s prosocial behavior. Children’s sympathy and prosocial behavior seem to be related to how parents respond to children’s expression of emotion in the home. If parents work to reduce their children’s negative emotions and to help them find appropriate ways to deal with negative emotions, children might learn how to regulate their negative emotions, including personal distress, and to be prosocial and sympathetic to others’ negative emotions. For example, parents of elementary school children who emphasized the need for their sons to control their negative emotions that are not harmful to others tended to experience self-focused distressed responses rather than sympathy when confronted with another’s distress. In contrast, same-sex parental restrictiveness in regard to the expression of emotion that might hurt another’s feelings was associated with sympathy (Eisenberg et al., 1991). However, such restrictiveness may backfire with younger children if it is not ageappropriate (Eisenberg, Fabes, Carlo, Troyer, et al., 1992). Parents who encourage their sons to try to take action to deal with stressful situations tend to have sons who are prosocial and sympathetic (Eisenberg, Fabes, and Murphy, 1996; Eisenberg et al., 1991; Scrimgeour, Davis, and Buss, 2016). Similarly, mothers who encouraged their toddlers to express their emotions at 18 months of age have children relatively high in empathy 6 months later (Taylor, Eisenberg, Spinrad, Eggum, and Sulik, 2013). The combination of mothers’ encouragement to use instrumental coping and mothers’ reports of tendencies to comfort their 30-month-olds when distressed predict children’s sympathy at 42 months, but not vice versa (Eisenberg, Spinrad, Taylor, and Liew, in press). Mothers’ knowledge of what their child would want for comfort (i.e., accuracy regarding what their children said would comfort them when distressed) is positively related to prosocial behavior for children who were prone to distress (and not for children who were not; Vinik, Almas, and Grusec, 2011) Moreover, mothers’ discussion of their own and their children’s emotions with their children sometimes has been associated with empathy-related responding and prosocial behavior (Brownell, Svetlova, Anderson, Nichols, and Drummond, 2013; Garner, Dunsmore, and Southam-Gerrow, 2008; Denham and Grout, 1992; Eisenberg et al., 1992). However, focusing too much on children’s distress in stressful situations sometimes has been associated with children experiencing less empathy or sympathy, perhaps because some parents talk more about emotion with children who are prone to overarousal or too much empathy (so they experience self-focused personal distress; Trommsdorff, 1995). Alternatively, parents who focus on emotions with children who cannot cope with the emotion may overarouse their children, with the consequence that their children do not learn to regulate their own 103

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distress. Indeed, mothers of younger children often try to buffer their children from experiencing too much negative emotion when dealing with empathy-inducing information, and doing so is associated with more sympathy and helpfulness (Fabes et al., 1994). There also appears to be some relation between emotion expressed in the home and children’s prosocial tendencies, although this relation is quite complex (see Eisenberg et al., 2015). Sometimes, but not always, parental expression of positive emotion has been linked to children’s prosocial behavior (Denham and Grout, 1992; Eisenberg, Liew, and Pidada, 2001; Eisenberg et al., 2015; Eisenberg, Fabes, Schaller, Miller, et al., 1991; Garner, Jones, and Miner, 1994; Michalik et al., 2007; Valiente et al., 2004; Spinrad et al., 1999; Zhou et al., 2002). Conversely, the expression of negative hostile emotion in the home generally has been linked to low levels of sympathy (Batanova and Loukas, 2012; Crockenberg, 1985; Denham and Grout, 1992; Eisenberg, Fabes, Carlo, Troyer, et al., 1992), at least outside of the conflict situation (see Eisenberg et al., 2006; Eisenberg, Spinrad, & Knafo-Noam, 2015, for further review and discussion). The relations between parents’ expression of emotion and children’s sympathy and prosocial behavior may change with age. For example, parents’ negative dominant expressivity (e.g., anger) was related to low levels of boys’, but not girls’, sympathy in childhood (Michalik et al., 2007). However, in adolescence, parents’ negative emotionality is related to higher sympathy in girls and boys and girls’ lower prosocial behavior, but not in childhood (Michalik et al., 2007). What is probably most important is whether the emotion is expressed in a manner in which the child does not feel threatened or overwhelmed and can learn about emotions and how to regulate them.

Children’s Characteristics as Moderators and Mediators of the Relations of Parenting to Children’s Prosocial Behavior Although prior research focused primarily on the ways in which parenting practices are directly associated with children’s prosocial behavior and empathy-related responding, some children may be more receptive to socialization efforts than others. For example, Kochanska (1995) theorized that children who are temperamentally fearful would be more receptive to socialization efforts (and more likely to internalize parental norms) than fearless children. Indeed, Kochanska showed that gentle maternal control, a parenting strategy thought to elicit an optimal level of arousal, predicted higher internalization of values (i.e., guilt) for children who were temperamentally fearful, but not for children who were low in fearfulness (Kochanska, 1991; Kochanska, Aksan, and Joy, 2007). Cornell and Frick (2007) similarly showed that the interaction between behavioral inhibition and parenting predicted children’s guilt and empathy. Negative relations between inconsistent parenting and guilt or empathy are significant for uninhibited, but not inhibited, children. In terms of prosocial outcomes, harsh parenting predicts low prosocial behaviors for children high in negative emotionality, whereas the relation is not significant for children low in negative emotionality (Slagt, Semon Dubas, and Aken, 2016). Relations between parenting practices and children’s prosocial tendencies vary based on differences in children’s genetic markers. Specifically, parenting (or attachment) predicts prosocial behavior or empathy only among children carrying the DRD4-III 7-repeat allele (Bakermans-Kranenburg and van Ijzendoorn, 2011; Knafo, Israel, and Ebstein, 2011; Knafo and Uzefovsky, 2013; see Fortuna and Knafo, 2014, for further discussion of related issues). Thus, parental socialization practices likely do not operate in isolation. Undoubtedly, relations between parenting practices and children’s prosocial outcomes may be moderated by factors such as children’s sex, age, genetic makeup, temperamental characteristics, and culture. Clearly, there is much more work to be done in this area. In addition to the role of children’s characteristics as moderators of relations between parenting and prosociality, researchers have been investigating potential mediating processes involved in these relations. For example, children’s ability to regulate their emotions and behavior (i.e., effortful control) is expected to predict children’s prosocial behavior and other-oriented responding because such selfregulation abilities are likely involved in children’s tendencies to experience optimal levels of arousal 104

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when faced with others’ distress, rather than becoming overly aroused and experiencing personal distress reactions. Self-regulation abilities mediate the relations between parenting and prosocial behavior (Davidov and Grusec, 2006; Laible et al., 2017; Padilla-Walker and Christensen, 2011; Williams and Berthelsen, 2017) and between parenting and sympathy or empathy (Eisenberg et al., 2001; Panfile and Laible, 2012; Taylor et al., 2015). Other aspects of children’s characteristics have been shown to mediate relations between parenting and prosocial tendencies. For example, children’s cognitive and language development and social engagement of the mother mediated the relation between mothers’ emotional availability and children’s empathy (Moreno et al., 2008). Further evidence indicates that children’s emotion knowledge (Ensor, Spencer, and Hughes, 2011) and emotional expressiveness (Laible, 2007) mediate the relations between parent–child attachment/mother–child reciprocity and children’s prosocial behavior in preschool.

Cultural Determinants of Prosocial Behavior Research on cultural and subcultural differences in prosocial behavior also provides insight into the role of the social environment. People in different cultures vary in their socialization goals (e.g., relational verses individualistic) and in their valuing of prosocial behaviors and cooperation (De Guzman, Brown, Carlo, and Knight, 2012; Knight and Carlo, 2012; Suizzo, 2007; see Eisenberg et al., 2015). Studies comparing prosocial behavior across cultures generally have focused on children’s cooperation and distribution of resources. For example, House and colleagues (2013) compared 3- to 14-yearold children from Los Angeles and from more traditional cultures (including hunter-gathering and horticulture/pastoralism societies) and found no differences in low-cost prosocial behavior. However, differences were found between cultures in costly prosocial behaviors. Specifically, when there was a cost, children from Los Angeles and the Aka (a hunter-gathering culture) from Africa showed the most dramatic increases in prosocial behavior in early adolescence and made the most prosocial choices at the older ages compared to other groups. Researchers also have demonstrated that children from traditional cultures/subcultures (e.g., Mexican-American children) are more cooperative than their European-American peers (de Guzman and Carlo, 2004; Knight, Kagan, and Buriel, 1981; see Knight and Carlo, 2012). In studies that do not use allocation tasks, few differences have been found among Western, industrialized countries (Russell, Hart, Robinson, and Olsen, 2003; Yagmurlu and Sanson, 2009). When comparing prosocial action between Asian and Western cultures, differences favoring Asian children have sometimes been found, perhaps due to the increased value for cooperation with group members in Asian cultures (Stevenson, 1991; Stewart and McBride-Chang, 2000). Thus, differences across cultures likely depend on the kind of prosocial behavior studied (i.e., distribution of resources, sharing, helping), characteristics of the context (i.e., high versus low cost), and the countries or cultures being compared (e.g., traditional, Western). Furthermore, in understanding subcultural differences in the United States, researchers have shown that individual differences in Mexican-American youths’ acculturation patterns are associated with lower prosocial behavior (de Guzman and Carlo, 2004; Knight and Carlo, 2012). Further, youths’ valuing of familism (i.e., an emphasis on family support, loyalty, and interdependence among family members) embedded within the Mexican-American culture has been shown to predict a broad range of prosocial tendencies (Armenta, Knight, Carlo, and Jacobson, 2011; Knight, Carlo, Mahrer, and Davis, 2016). Advancement of this line of research would likely benefit from the consideration of potential mediators and moderators of the relations between parenting and prosocial behavior. The strength or direction of the relation between parenting strategies and children’s prosocial behavior may differ across cultures and societies. For example, Eisenberg et al. (2001) showed that parental expression of positive emotions was unrelated to sympathy in Indonesian children (although 105

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it tends to be positively related in the United States), whereas negative relations of parental expression of negative emotion were found in both groups. The findings may be due to a general discouragement of intense emotional expression (either positive or negative) in Indonesia and highlights the potential moderating role of culture in the relations of parenting to children’s prosocial development.

Summary A variety of parenting dimensions has been examined in relation to children’s prosocial behavior. However, the configuration of a number of parenting behaviors, not any single behavior, appears to have the greatest impact on children’s prosocial behavior. Authoritative parents who are generally warm and supportive but who also encourage and respect the child’s autonomy, use constructive disciplinary techniques such as inductions, and set and enforce high standards of behavior (Baumrind, 1971, 1993) are likely to rear prosocial children. Moreover, the effects of authoritative parenting are likely to be augmented if parents also model prosocial actions, discuss the effects of helping on others, and involve children in helping activities without coercing their participation. Complexities in the relations also have been shown, such that children’s characteristics and parental practices may interact in their effects. Furthermore, researchers are increasingly focusing on the processes underlying the socialization of children’s prosocial tendencies. Additionally, researchers are beginning to pay attention to the mechanisms by which children’s prosocial actions vary for children in different cultures, although more work in this area is needed.

Moral Judgment Socializers typically have been assigned a circumscribed role in moral development by cognitive developmental theorists. Thus, it is not surprising that the contributions of parenting to the development of moral reasoning have received relatively little attention. Those that do typically pertain to aspects of the environment that Kohlberg deemed important: opportunities for perspective taking and for engendering cognitive conflict.

Provision of Role-Taking Opportunities and Promotion of Autonomous Thinking The research provides some support for Kohlberg’s assertion that provision of role-taking opportunities for the autonomous construction of moral ideas fosters children’s moral reasoning. For example, Holstein (1972) found that parents who encouraged their children’s participation in discussion and decision-making are more likely to have children who reason at relatively high levels (see, however, Speicher, 1992). Leahy (1981) found that adolescent males’ level of moral judgment was correlated with low maternal punitiveness and control, low maternal emphasis on maintaining boundaries between the child and others, and paternal acceptance and incorporation of the son into the family. Findings for daughters were less consistent. Daughters’ higher-level reasoning was correlated with low paternal ambivalence about autonomy, low paternal protectiveness, and low maternal intrusiveness, as well as paternal emphasis on control and supervision (see Eisenberg, 1977, for somewhat similar results). Similarly, Pratt, Skoe, and Arnold (2004) showed that parental autonomy encouragement during adolescence was related to higher moral reasoning in young adulthood. However, more work in this area is needed—especially with regard to the role that children’s moral judgment has on parenting practices. That is, perhaps parents provide more autonomy when their teens exhibit higher levels of moral reasoning. Studies on actual or observed styles of parent–child interactions have produced a mixed pattern of findings. In an early study of mothers’ and sons’ discussions of moral dilemmas, mothers of higher reasoning boys, in comparison with mothers whose sons exhibited lower moral reasoning, were more 106

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dominant and hostile and less warm and encouraging (Jurkovic and Prentice, 1974). Buck, Walsh, and Rothman (1981) examined the relation of parental practices during a discussion of how to handle sons’ aggression with 10- to 13-year-old boys’ moral reasoning. Boys with higher moral reasoning had parents who considered their son’s view, used reasoning themselves, and tended to encourage the expression of the son’s view. Language during parent–child interactions also has been examined. In a study of elementary school girls, Kruger (1992) coded transactive (reasoning about reasoning) statements, questions, and responses in mother–child discussions of moral dilemmas. High use by mother and daughter of transactive statements (spontaneously produced critiques, refinements, extensions, or significant paraphrases of ideas), particularly those that focused on the partner’s ideas, was associated with daughters’ higher-level moral reasoning immediately after the interaction session. Thus, daughters’ moral reasoning was associated with egalitarian interactions with their mothers in which both partners were highly involved in a discussion of the moral dilemmas. Similar findings were obtained for fathers’ (but not mothers’) use of transactive statements with their adolescents (Pratt, Arnold, Pratt, and Diessner, 1999). Walker and colleagues (Walker and Hennig, 1999; Walker and Taylor, 1991; Walker, Hennig, and Krettenauer, 2000) investigated the role of parental emphasis on autonomous thinking and provision of opportunities for critical thinking. Parents’ interaction style during a discussion of moral issues with their first-, fourth-, seventh-, or tenth-grade child was used to predict elementary and high school children’s reasoning two or four years later. During interaction sessions, parents and their child discussed hypothetical and real-life moral dilemmas (one in the child’s life) and attempted to reach a consensus. Parents generally used lower levels of moral reasoning when discussing issues with their children than was evidenced in an individual assessment of the parents’ reasoning level, and they used lower-level reasoning more with children reasoning at low levels. Children’s moral reasoning years later was best predicted by discussions of the real-life rather than hypothetical moral dilemma. Parental behaviors that best predicted children’s moral growth were characterized by a Socratic questioning style, supportive interactions, and the presentation of higher-level reasoning. A large discrepancy between parents and child (about one stage) was predictive of children’s development. Moral growth was associated with parental behaviors, such as eliciting the child’s opinion, drawing out the child’s reasoning with appropriate probing questions, paraphrasing, and checking for understanding, all in the context of emotional support and attentiveness. Parent behaviors, such as critiquing and directly challenging the child (especially in a hostile manner), presenting of counterconsiderations, and simply providing information, were not associated with children’s moral growth. Direct challenges to the child’s reasoning may have been viewed as hostile by the child and, consequently, may have been counterproductive, whereas simple provision of information may have been viewed as lecturing. Overall, Walker and his colleagues’ findings suggest that parental practices that promote consideration of higher-level moral ideas but do so in a supportive rather than heavy-handed manner are associated with children’s moral growth. Recchia, Wainryb, Bourne, and Pasupathi (2014) observed mothers and their children or adolescents discussing past moral actions and found that mothers and their offspring discussed positive consequences for helping others, and mothers often emphasized children’s positive moral behaviors and characteristics (“You are such a compassionate person”) in these conversations. Thus, conversations about moral behaviors provide important opportunities for moral socialization.

Disciplinary Practices Comprehensive reviews of relations of various modes of discipline to children’s moral development were published by Hoffman in 1970(b) and Brody and Shaffer in 1982. Thus, in this review their findings are cited and updated with discussion of subsequent work. Consistent with Hoffman’s theorizing, both Hoffman (1970) and Brody and Shaffer (1982) found predominantly negative relations between parental power-assertive practices and children’s moral 107

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reasoning, particularly for mothers. Punitive discipline has been negatively related to moral reasoning in European-American and Mexican-American, but not Taiwanese, youth (Shen, Carlo, and Knight, 2013). Love withdrawal procedures were for the most part unrelated to children’s moral reasoning, although both positive and negative associations were found. Furthermore, the preponderance of studies supports the proposed positive relation between mothers’ use of inductions and children’s moral reasoning; findings for fathers are rare and less consistent, although more positive than negative relations are apparent (Janssens and Dekovic, 1997; Janssen, Janssens, and Gerris, 1992). The results of empirical studies since the 1980s tend to be similar. In general, inductive parental practices have been associated with higher-level moral reasoning in offspring (but not always, see Carlo, Knight, et al., 2011). In a study of Dutch children aged 9 to 13, both mothers’ and fathers’ use of inductions rather than power assertion was significantly positively related to the level of children’s moral reasoning (Janssen et al.,1992), although in a similar sample, maternal, but not paternal, inductions related to Dutch children’s moral reasoning about prosocial moral conflicts (Janssens and Gerris, 1992). In another study with elementary-school-aged Dutch children, mothers’ but not fathers’ use of victim-oriented inductions was associated with children’s internalized moral judgments (de Veer and Janssens, 1992). Thus, the strength of the roles of mothers versus fathers is somewhat unclear. Further complexities in research show that the positive relation frequently holds for only some children and not others: for upper-middle-class girls and older boys in India but not other sex, age, and social class groups (Saraswathi and Sundaresan, 1980); for older (15 to 16 years) but not younger uppermiddle class boys and girls in India (Parikh, 1980); and for Israeli fathers’ and adolescents’ reports of parental induction, but not mothers’ reports of their own use of induction (Eisikovits and Sagi, 1982). Although inductive discipline is not related to all measures of moral reasoning for all samples, inductive discipline seems, in general, to be associated with higher levels of children’s moral reasoning. Furthermore, the literature also indicates that inductive discipline predicts offsprings’ moral reasoning through its impact on children’s sympathy and/or perspective taking (Eisenberg, Zhou, and Koller, 2001; Lopez, Bonenberger, and Schneider, 2001; Shen et al., 2013). The style of parenting, more than any one disciplinary practice, may be associated with children’s moral reasoning. Consistent with this notion, Janssens and Dekovic (1997) found that children were higher in moral reasoning about helping dilemmas if their parents were supportive, authoritative (e.g., gave explanations or suggestions, asked the child stimulating questions to help find solutions), and used less restrictive practices (e.g., commands or orders such as “don’t do that”) with their children. Other investigators have noted relations between authoritative parenting and higher-level moral reasoning among adolescents (Boyes and Allen, 1993; Pratt et al., 1999; Pratt et al., 2004). Similarly, Laible and colleagues (2008) showed that persistent discipline was related to adolescents’ higher level of moral cognition (internalization and moral reasoning).

Affective Environment Hoffman (1970) argued that parental warmth provides an optimal environment for socialization because children are more likely to attend to parents and care about pleasing their parents when the relationship generally is supportive. There is some support for the role of parental warmth in fostering children’s moral reasoning (Powers, 1988; Palmer and Hollin, 1996). Walker and Taylor (1991) found that children’s moral growth was linked to a supportive, positive environment during family discussion of moral issues. Similarly, Malti et al. (2013) showed that high levels of parental emotional support were related to consistently high levels of moral reasoning throughout middle childhood (see also Buck et al., 1981, Speicher, 1992, for similar findings). In other studies, researchers have found relations between parental nurturance and moral reasoning for one parent but not the other, one sex but not the other, one age but not others, or for children from middle-class but not lower-income families (Hart, 1988; Hoffman and Saltzstein, 1967; Eisenberg, Lennon, and Roth, 1983; Smart and Smart, 1976). 108

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Perhaps parental warmth does not exert a direct effect on children’s moral reasoning; it may simply influence the effectiveness of other parental practices in fostering the growth of moral reasoning (i.e., it may be a moderator variable). As suggested by Baumrind’s work (1971, 1993), when parental warmth is not combined with appropriate parental disciplinary practices, it may result in a permissive parenting style, one that is not associated with positive child outcomes. This research may explain why associations between parental warmth and moral reasoning are mixed in the research literature and why authoritative parenting (which includes support, control, and practices such as induction) has been linked to higher-level moral judgment (Boyes and Allen, 1993; Janssens and Dekovic, 1997; Pratt et al., 1999). Carlo, Mestre, et al. (2011) showed that both mothers’ and fathers’ high warmth and low strict control each related to higher adolescent moral reasoning.

Relation Between Parents’ and Children’s Moral Reasoning A number of investigators have examined the correlation between parents’ and children’s levels of moral reasoning. A positive relation could reflect a number of factors, including similarity between parents’ and children’s cognitive abilities or parents with higher-level moral reasoning promoting their children’s moral reasoning by stimulating cognitive conflict or using optimal childrearing practices. Findings have been inconsistent. Some researchers have found significant correlations between parents’ and children’s moral reasoning (Buck et al., 1981; Janssen et al., 1992); others have not (Walker and Taylor, 1991). In one longitudinal sample, mothers’ and fathers’ levels of moral judgment were positively related to those of sons and daughters in adolescence and early adulthood; in another sample, only fathers’ and sons’ reasoning were consistently positively related (Speicher, 1994). Moreover, in some research, the size of the relation varies with the age of the child (Parikh, 1980; compare with Speicher, 1994). Furthermore, adolescents who reported closer agreement with their parents about the importance of moral values had parents who were more authoritative, suggesting that adolescents may be more receptive to socialization efforts when parents are warmer and appropriately demanding (Pratt, Hunsberger, Pancer, and Alisat, 2003). In general, there appears to be a weak positive relation between children’s and parents’ moral reasoning, but one that varies across samples, gender of parent or child, and sometimes age of child, and may depend on general parenting style. An important question is whether parents at different levels of reasoning evidence different styles of interaction in moral discussions. Walker and Taylor (1991) found no evidence of a relation between parents’ moral reasoning and their interaction style. In contrast, Buck et al. (1981) found that parents who reason at higher levels had sons who participated and reasoned more and who communicated more fully in family discussions. These findings indirectly support the notion that parents at high levels of moral reasoning create a different family environment than those at lower levels. In fact, Janssen et al. (1992) found that parents’ moral reasoning and their use of inductive versus power-assertive discipline were correlated. Thus, the relation between parent and child moral reasoning probably arises at least partly because parents who use higher-level reasoning also use more inductive and less power-assertive practices. However, children reasoning at higher levels also may elicit different parental reactions.

Cultural Determinants of Prosocial Moral Reasoning As with prosocial behavior, cultural environments undoubtedly influence children’s prosocial moral reasoning. Although research on cultural differences in prosocial moral reasoning is limited, most of the findings have noted more similarities than differences across cultures (Carlo, Mestre, et al., 2011; Mahtani Stewart and McBride-Chang, 2000; see Eisenberg et al., 2006). Chadha and Misra (2004) studied Indian children and showed similar structure of prosocial moral reasoning, with only a few 109

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distinctive lines of reasoning that seem to be indicative of the Indian culture (such as shame orientation or community brotherhood). When cultural differences have been found, however, the pattern of differences is not very consistent. For example, Carlo, Koller, Eisenberg, Da Silva, and Frohlich (1996) found that U.S. adolescents scored higher on internalized prosocial moral reasoning than Brazilian adolescents, and Spanish adolescents scored higher than Turkish adolescents in another study (Kumru, Carlo, Mestre, and Samper, 2012). More subtle differences were found in the prosocial moral reasoning of children from the United States compared to those in Israel and Germany (Boehnke, Silbereisen, Eisenberg, Reykowski, and Palmonari, 1989; Eisenberg, Hertz-Lazarowitz, and Fuchs, 1990). Beyond cultural and subcultural group differences, it is important to understand how socialization practices might promote prosocial moral reasoning deemed particularly salient to specific cultures. Few researchers have examined such questions; as an exception, Shen et al. (2013) showed that punitive parenting was negatively related to prosocial moral reasoning in Mexican-American and European-American adolescents but was unrelated to prosocial moral reasoning for Taiwanese youth. These findings indicate that culture may moderate the effects of particular parenting practices on prosocial moral reasoning. Further, a focus on cultural values provides evidence of the processes that may account for cultural differences. For example, the importance of family cohesion, familism, is central to MexicanAmerican culture. Indeed, the cultural value of familism has been shown to predict higher prosocial moral reasoning in Mexican-American youth (Knight, Carlo, Basilio, and Jacobson, 2015). Further research studying a wider array of cultures and subcultures, with a focus on such mediational processes is needed.

Summary Although there is relatively little research on the socialization of moral reasoning, particularly by parents, some tentative conclusions can be drawn. Children with higher-level moral reasoning tend to have parents who are supportive and encourage autonomous thinking, who stimulate their children’s moral thinking by means of their conversational style and by involving their children in moral discussions, and who use inductive rather than power-assertive modes of reasoning. In addition, there may be a weak relation between parents’ and children’s moral reasoning, one that is partially mediated by the nature of the parent–child interaction. However, it is unclear if these findings generalize to nonWestern countries, as there is little work on relations of parenting to moral judgment in those countries. Because it is unclear that systems for coding moral judgment developed in the United States by Kohlberg and others appropriately represent the development of moral judgment in non-Western, nonindustrialized countries, the task of determining what aspects of parenting relate to level of and moral judgment in those countries is especially challenging.

Parent Training Programs for Improving Prosocial Development A number of prevention and intervention programs have been designed and implemented with the goal of improving prosocial environments. Consistent with Kazdin’s (1987) recommendations, interventions are increasingly multidimensional and delivered from a developmental perspective. In a meta-analysis, Malti, Chaparro, Zuffianò, and Colasante (2016) examined 19 school-based intervention programs that emphasized the promotion of empathy or related constructs (e.g., perspective taking, prosocial behavior). Program effects were stronger when programs were implemented at younger ages and incorporated skills such as emotion understanding and perspective taking. Three such programs will be briefly reviewed (also see McCord and Tremblay, 1992).

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The Fast Track Program utilizes a multicomponent longitudinal design to assess the effects of the program’s seven components, including parent training and parent–child relationship enhancement (Conduct Problems Prevention Research Group or CPPRG, 1992). The Fast Track program offers a universal intervention, beginning at grade 1 and continuing through grade 6. The 10% of children displaying the highest level of conduct problems were selected to participate in an additional series of interventions. Parents in the intervention group reported more warmth, more consistent discipline, and less harsh discipline (CPPRG, 1999a). Children in classrooms where the intervention was delivered showed decreased levels of aggression (CPPRG, 1999b) and improved interpersonal skills/ prosocial behavior (Bierman et al., 2010; Sorensen, Dodge, and CPPRG, 2016). Furthermore, parents and teachers credit children in the intervention group with making positive changes in their behaviors (CPPRG, 1999a). The Metropolitan Area Child Study is a longitudinal study of a prevention field trial meant to evaluate the impact of a school-wide, peer, and family intervention designed to prevent antisocial behavior in urban children (second- to fifth-graders) living in poor neighborhoods. The program was designed to address how much intervention is necessary and how the process of the intervention affects children’s behaviors (Guerra, Eron, Huesmann, Tolan, and Van Acker, 1997). The alteration of parenting practices was associated with decreases in children’s aggressive behavior (Tolan, Hanish, McKay, and Dickey, 2002). The Oregon Social Learning Center tested a universal prevention program for conduct disorder for first-graders and fifth-graders. The multicomponent program is delivered in the home and school (Reid, Eddy, Fetrow, and Stoolmiller, 1999). Teachers were exposed to new ways of managing off-task students, and parents complete a parent training program. The most aggressive children experienced the most improvement (Stoolmiller, Eddy, and Reid, 2000). Additionally, mothers in the intervention group who used the most aversive behaviors initially experienced the most change (Reid et al., 1999). The three programs reviewed show promise that socializers can reduce children’s aggressive behaviors. As more data emerge, it will be important to examine the cost-effectiveness of delivering largescale interventions.

Future Directions in Understanding Parenting Influences on Children’s Prosocial Development Our understanding of the role of parents in the prosocial development of children is more complete in regard to some aspects of functioning than others. We know quite a bit about parental contributions to the development of children’s prosocial and aggressive behavior, and much less about their role in the development of guilt, dishonesty and lying, and moral reasoning. Furthermore, mothers have been studied much more frequently than fathers, with the consequence that we know much more about mothers’ than fathers’ roles in moral socialization. In addition, much of the available information comes from studies of middle-class European-American children; it is quite possible that parental practices and characteristics have different meanings and consequences in different socioeconomic and cultural groups (Bornstein, 1995). Although research has provided us with some information regarding the correlates of children’s morality, there is much to learn about the processes involved in the socialization of children’s moral behavior and reasoning. It is one thing to know that a given parental characteristic or practice is associated with children’s moral functioning; it is another to know why this is so. There is a need for research examining how parents and children jointly influence children’s moral development. In addition, there is much to learn about the variables that moderate the relation of quality and type of parenting to moral outcomes, including gender of the child, cultural and socioeconomic status, children’s temperament, and the presence of factors that buffer the negative effects of poor-quality parenting.

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Conclusions It is possible to draw some tentative conclusions regarding the role of parents’ behaviors and characteristics in children’s moral development. In general, moral children tend to have parents who are warm and supportive rather than use inductive discipline, provide opportunities for children to learn about others’ perspectives and feelings, and involve children in family decision-making and in the process of thinking about moral decisions. Parents of moral children also are likely to model moral behaviors and thinking themselves and provide opportunities for their children to do so. Parents who exhibit this configuration of behaviors appear to foster the development of concern and caring about others and create a positive parent–child relationship that the child is invested in maintaining. In addition, these parents provide information about what behaviors are expected of the child and why and foster an internal rather than external sense of morality. Children who develop internal motives for acting in moral ways based on moral principles and caring for others are likely to act in a moral manner in diverse settings, particularly if their level of moral reasoning is relatively mature. Both theory and the empirical data support the conclusion that parents play an important role in their children’s prosocial and moral development. This is not surprising because children learn much about relationships and ways of treating other people in the familial context. However, children are not simply passive recipients of moral values and behaviors; they appear to be active participants in the process of moral socialization. Children’s cognitive abilities influence what they understand, and their temperament and style of interaction affect how parents react to them and discipline them. Styles of parent–child interaction evolve as a consequence of characteristics and behaviors of both participants.

Acknowledgments Work on this chapter was supported by funding from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) (R01HD068522). The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the NIH.

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5 PARENTING AND MORAL DEVELOPMENT Judith G. Smetana, Courtney L. Ball, and Ha Na Yoo

Introduction The role of parents has been a central but somewhat vexing issue in the psychological study of moral development. Although scholars typically consider parents essential to the socialization of children’s moral norms and values, researchers vary as to whether they believe that morality is directly transmitted—and thus differ in how central they view parents to these developmental processes. Socialization is typically defined as “the processes whereby naïve individuals are taught the skills, behavior patterns, values, and motivations needed for competent functioning in the[ir] culture” (Maccoby, 2007, p. 13). According to this view, adult members of society, and parents in particular, are responsible for transmitting societal norms and values to children. Other scholars, especially those from earlier structuraldevelopmental perspectives (e.g., Kohlberg, 1969; Piaget, 1932/1965), are more agnostic about whether parents directly inculcate moral norms. Instead, these researchers view morality as constructed from social experiences broadly considered, and with a greater emphasis on peer interactions. Indeed, some scholars (e.g., Piaget, 1932/1965) even view parents as inhibiting moral growth. This chapter describes how these wide variations in views are connected to ongoing debates about the nature and definition of morality as well as the processes theorized to account for its development. Researchers mostly agree, however, that morality pertains to individuals’ treatment of others and how individuals ought to behave. In the present chapter, we review theoretical approaches and related empirical research on moral development. Our primary focus is on how different theories and corresponding research inform our understanding of parents’ contributions to young persons’ moral development. We focus mostly on the prescriptive, obligatory aspects of morality, which typically pertain to inhibitory acts—the “don’ts” of morality (like not stealing money for food) rather than the more positive or prosocial acts (like giving money for food to a poor person; Kahn, 1992), as these discretionary behaviors are covered elsewhere (Spinrad, Eisenberg, and Valiente, 2019). In the first section of our chapter, we provide an overview of three foundational psychological theories central to research on moral development: psychoanalytic theory, behaviorism and its more recent instantiation in social learning theory, and structural-developmental theory. We consider each theory’s perspective on parents’ role in moral development. These foundational theories have evolved into newer forms, and these contemporary theories are discussed in the section that follows. Next, we draw on these various theoretical approaches to consider different strands of contemporary research on parenting and moral development. This is followed by some reflection on the limitations of our knowledge and future directions for research. In the final section, we briefly consider implications for practice.

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Foundational Theories of Moral Development Three “grand theories” of development guided the early psychological research on moral development: psychoanalytic theory (Freud, 1930/1961), behaviorism—as initially described by Watson (1930), later expanded by Skinner (1971), and elaborated by social learning theorists—and structuraldevelopmental theory, which originated with Piaget (1932/1965) and was further developed by Kohlberg (1969). More complete descriptions of these foundational theories’ contributions to the study of moral development can be found in Killen and Smetana (2015), but here we briefly outline their views and their contributions to our understanding of parenting and moral development.

Psychoanalytic Theory Early parent–child relationships were central to Freud’s (1930/1961) theory of psychosexual development. Development during the first few years of life was described as occurring through a series of developmental stages that posed conflicts between satisfying bodily urges and the need to comply with societal expectations. According to Freud, progress through the stages was biologically based but was also influenced by the environment, as instantiated in parent–child relationships. Freud’s developmental progression culminated at around 5 or 6 years of age in the Oedipal conflict, with its resolution leading to the development of the superego, the moral “organ” that contains the conscience and the ego ideal. Prior to the development of the superego, children’s morality was considered entirely governed by external processes and dependent on parental enforcement. With the emergence of the superego, parental values were internalized in the ego ideal and enforced by the conscience in the form of guilt for misbehavior. In Freud’s view, guilt was a punitive force reflecting the child’s aggression towards the father, which is turned inward towards the self as the Oedipal conflict is resolved. The process of moral development was seen as universal, but the content—the particular moral values that children internalized in their ego ideal—was contingent on the particular values parents endorsed. Freud developed his theory from clinical insights rather than empirical research. Researchers quickly realized that Freud’s theoretical propositions regarding how children come to internalize parental values (referred to as the child’s identification with the parent) produced internally inconsistent and contradictory hypotheses, making them difficult to test empirically. However, in the 1940s and 1950s, researchers melded Freudian theory—particularly his notion of drives—with behaviorist stimulus-response theory (see Grusec, 1992, 2006, for a more detailed discussion). The resulting research focused on children’s internalization of parental values. Sears, Maccoby, and Levin (1957) was one of the first studies to examine the effects of parental discipline on children’s conscience development and moral behavior. Their study was ultimately unsuccessful, however, particularly in articulating and testing the Freudian drive aspects of this theoretical synthesis. Although many of Freud’s theoretical notions (and particularly his formulation of biologically based drives) were ultimately abandoned, other aspects of Freud’s writings have had a lasting impact on moral developmental research, albeit transformed in significant ways. Thus, Freud’s influence is felt in the emphasis on early childhood as a critical period for moral development, the description of the conscience as an internalized agency that enforces moral values, and the focus on the role of guilt in maintaining moral behavior.

Behaviorism and Social Learning Theory Behaviorism As elaborated in Watson’s (1930) theory of classical conditioning and Skinner’s (1971) subsequent theory of operant conditioning, behaviorism asserted that psychological theorists should focus on studying observable behavior. Although much of the empirical support for these theories was obtained

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from experiments on animal conditioning, Watson’s and Skinner’s research had a major impact on theories of morality (and American psychology, more generally). In Beyond Freedom and Dignity, Skinner (1971) devoted a chapter to the assertion that moral values possess no special status—that is, they do not differ from other learned behaviors—and like them, are acquired through reinforcement. Thus, environmental contingencies were thought to account for moral behavior. Skinner and his followers were not concerned with child development and accordingly did not emphasize the role of parents, as behaviorists believed that the same reinforcement processes were operative across the life span and relevant to all learned behavior.

Social Learning Theory Bandura and Mischel drew on Skinnerian theory to understand children’s socialization. Their influential finding that reinforcement could not account for all of children’s learning led to the formulation of social learning theory (Bandura and McDonald, 1963). They proposed that, in addition to reinforcement, children acquire novel behavior through processes of imitation and observation. Indeed, observational learning was seen as the most central and efficient source of children’s learning. Several influential laboratory experimental paradigms were developed to test these notions and are still in use in moral development research today. For instance, in Bandura and McDonald’s (1963) “forbidden toy” paradigm (also referred to as a resistance to temptation task), children were given pairs of toys to play with and told to refrain from touching the more attractive one when the experimenter left the room; the measure of internalized morality was the amount of time the child desisted from touching the toy. In the cheating paradigm, children were left alone to play a game or correct a test; morality was measured in terms of how quickly and how much they cheated. Two central assumptions of these approaches were that these experimental situations simulated the types of interactions parents had with children and that the findings of these studies generalize beyond the laboratory. These accounts stressed the role of adult status and power, as children were found to be more likely to model and learn correct behavior from more powerful (but also more nurturant) models. Cognitive components were eventually incorporated into their approach, as reflected in the name change to social-cognitive learning theory. This perspective led to extensive research on the conditions that lead children to emulate and comply with adult standards (cf. Bandura and Walters, 1977). Grusec (2006) noted that Bandura did not conceptualize internalization as a strictly passive (“social mold”) process. Rather, he proposed that children attend to conflicting information and choose which behavior or norm to adopt based on a number of factors, including the characteristics of the socialization agent and the value placed on the norm. But because the primary focus of this research was on compliance with parental directives, the early socialization theorists did not attend to the content of the values parents wanted children to acquire.

Structural-Developmental Theory Although Piaget (1932/1965) was primarily concerned with the origins of knowledge, The Moral Judgment of the Child extended his constructivist theory to consider the development of moral judgment and behavior. In keeping with the tenets of constructivism, Piaget asserted that children’s moral understanding emerges from the continual interaction of adaptive, biological mechanisms and environmental influences (mainly peer interactions). Piaget asserted that the hierarchical nature of parent– child relationships imposes constraints on children’s moral understanding. Specifically, he argued that children develop a heteronomous stage of moral reasoning in middle childhood, where morality is viewed in terms of unilateral respect for parental rules and authority. Peer interactions were seen as more equal and reciprocal than parent–child interactions and as characterized by mutual respect and cooperation. Thus, Piaget proposed that children’s participation in such interactions beyond the family 124

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transformed children’s heteronomous reasoning into a second stage of autonomous moral reasoning, where rules were evaluated based on individuals’ intentions and needs. Piaget’s theory offered a radical departure from both psychoanalytic and behaviorist theories in that parent–child relationships were seen as inhibiting moral growth, whereas, by providing opportunities for children to work through moral conflicts, peer interactions were characterized as promoting more mature moral understanding. Kohlberg (1969; Colby and Kohlberg, 1987) was one of the first U.S. advocates of Piaget’s constructivist approach, but he believed that Piaget’s tasks led Piaget to underestimate the nature of moral reasoning. These concerns, along with more general criticisms of behaviorist approaches prominent at that time, led Kohlberg to study moral reasoning in older children, adolescents, and emerging adults using hypothetical dilemmas that presented conflicts between issues involving law, life, interpersonal obligations, trust, and authority. Based on responses to these complex dilemmas and informed by philosopher Rawls’s (1971) theory of justice, Kohlberg proposed that moral judgments develop through a series of six universal, sequential, and hierarchical stages of progressively more differentiated and integrated concepts of justice. In this view, individuals are unable to distinguish between moral principles and more arbitrary conventional norms until early adulthood, when (and if ) they develop principled moral reasoning. Although the theory was substantially revised during the 1970s and 1980s based on extensive research, key aspects of his theory were not empirically supported (see Lapsley, 2006; Turiel, 2015). Kohlberg’s focus was on the underlying structure of moral reasoning rather than on the content of particular judgments. Kohlberg was interested in identifying the specific mechanisms that facilitate higher stages of moral reasoning; he sought these processes in interactions with peers, not parents. Indeed, echoing Piaget, he stated, “family participation is not unique or critically necessary for moral development” (1976, p. 399). Accordingly, Kohlberg’s colleagues (Berkowitz and Gibbs, 1983) analyzed college students’ discussions of hypothetical moral dilemmas and found that discussions that involve cognitive challenges to another’s moral reasoning (termed transactive dialogues) were most effective in predicting stage change (although the changes that resulted were modest, at best). These findings informed the development of moral education programs in schools that promoted the use of peer discussions of hypothetical dilemmas to foster moral growth. Research discussed later, however, also examined the role of parents in facilitating higher-level moral reasoning. Although not following directly from Piaget or Kohlberg’s work, Hoffman’s research on parental discipline is structural-developmental in its theoretical roots. Hoffman (1970) conducted an extensive analysis and critique of Bandura’s research on imitation as the central mechanism of moral internalization and concluded that the effects of modeling found in this body of research reflected an external— not an internalized—moral orientation. For instance, he argued that children imitated deviant models (such as an aggressive actor), suggesting that such models had a disinhibiting effect on behavior. However, conclusive evidence for the role of modeling was not obtained in situations where models inhibited negative behaviors (for instance, when models refrained from hitting). Hoffman (1963, 1970) also analyzed prior research on parental discipline techniques and reformulated them into three types of discipline practices hypothesized to have different effects on moral internalization. Reflecting structural-developmental tenets, Hoffman asserted that internalization of values is fostered by inductive discipline, where parental demands are accompanied by reasoning and explanations and children participate in decision-making. These practices were thought to facilitate an internalized moral orientation by helping the child to understand (and feel guilt for) the negative consequences of misbehavior for others. Guilt was seen as a positive force in internalization because it draws on children’s empathic abilities and makes it more likely that children would be concerned about others in the future. In contrast, Hoffman proposed that both parental love withdrawal (withholding affection and attention) and power assertion (the use of force, restraint, or physical punishment) were punitive strategies that would foster an external moral orientation. These practices were thought to control the child’s behavior by instilling anxiety and a more negative sense of guilt focused on fear 125

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of punishment or loss of affection. Hoffman’s theorizing and research (Hoffman and Saltzstein, 1967) remains influential both in research on parental discipline and in conceptualizations of the role of empathy and guilt in moral development.

Summary Classic psychoanalytic theory emphasized early childhood as a critical developmental period and focused on conscience as the central moral agency and guilt as facilitating moral behavior. Behaviorism and social learning theory highlighted the role of environmental contingencies, particularly patterns of reinforcement and processes of imitation and observation, in the acquisition and maintenance of moral behavior. Accordingly, these accounts stressed the importance of adult status and power and generated extensive research investigating the conditions that facilitate children’s internalization of and compliance with parental standards. In turn, Piaget’s and Kohlberg’s structural-developmental theories focused on children and adolescents’ active role (in interaction with environmental influences) in their own moral development and prioritized the significance of peer over adult/parent interactions. These theories continue to influence current theoretical approaches to moral development.

Current Theories of Moral Development Reflecting their different meta-theoretical commitments, the foundational theories just reviewed vary as to whether they define morality as pertaining primarily to emotions, behaviors, or cognitions. They also differ in how they define mature morality and the processes thought to account for its development, including the centrality of parents to children’s moral development. But as developmental science has moved towards a more integrated, relational meta-theory (Overton, 2015), these broad “conceptual splits” (in Overton’s terms) have been mostly resolved, and there has been much more integration and recognition of common ground. For instance, rather than viewing emotions, cognitions, and behaviors as distinct or as dualities (e.g., emotions versus judgments or judgments versus behavior), most current theories recognize their interrelations. More germane to the concerns of the present chapter, major changes have occurred in views regarding the role of parents in moral development. As we describe later, Freudian notions of conscience have been reconceptualized, with parental interactions now playing a more direct and central role. Socialization theories continue to focus on parental contributions but have increasingly acknowledged the child’s agency or active construction of morality. Social domain theory, a constructivist approach that emerged in response to critiques of Kohlbergian theory, has considered parents’ contributions to children’s moral understanding and emotions.

Freudian Theory Revisited Although interest in the conscience as a central mechanism in moral development lost favor for many decades, it has been revived and reinvigorated. Kochanska and her colleagues have acknowledged their debt to Freudian and neo-psychoanalytic theories (Kochanska and Kim, 2014), although their broader program of research also draws heavily on social learning theory and incorporates attachment theory (Ainsworth, Bell, and Stayton, 1974; Bowlby, 1969/1982). Kochanska and her colleagues view the conscience, understood as internalized values and standards of behavior (Kochanska, Koenig, Barry, Kim, and Yoon, 2010), as emerging at much younger ages (i.e., among older infants and toddlers) than Freudian theory proposed. Indeed, toddlerhood and early childhood are considered critical periods for moral development, particularly for the processes seen as foundational for conscience development (Kochanska and Thompson, 1997). Furthermore, their formulation regarding the structure of conscience has been derived empirically rather than theoretically. Consistent with Freudian notions, 126

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however, the focus has been on how children internalize adult norms by developing internal mechanisms for inhibiting negative and promoting positive behaviors. The theoretical emphasis on guilt relative to other moral emotions also is consistent with Freudian theory, although its conceptualization is more akin to Hoffman’s positive view than to Freud’s more punitive characterization of guilt. Kochanska and her colleagues define conscience as an autonomous inner guidance system that is free of external control and leads to self-regulated, rule-compatible conduct (internalization of parental prohibitions and requests; Kochanska and Aksan, 2006; Kochanska et al., 2010). More specifically, they have examined conscience as an integration of moral emotions and behavior, self-regulatory and motivational processes, and moral cognition (Kochanska and Thompson, 1997). Kochanska and colleagues’ results suggest that moral emotions and moral behavior (typically assessed as compliance without surveillance to parental rules, as assessed in nonsocial contexts) are related yet (statistically) separable constructs that become more stable and coherent over time (Kochanska and Thompson, 1997)—a finding that is more consistent with social learning theory than with the Freudian notion of conscience as a unified internal agency. Moreover, although Kochanska included moral cognition in her notion of conscience, it occupies a lesser role in her empirical work, perhaps because conscience is typically measured in early childhood. According to Kochanska, the development of the conscience leads to autonomous behavior, where children are genuinely motivated to comply with parental wishes and values, broadly considered. Thus, she has drawn distinctions between committed compliance, which is associated with conscience development and involves children’s willing and eager desire to follow parental directives, and situational compliance, where compliance is externally maintained (Kochanska and Aksan, 1995; Kochanska, Aksan, and Koenig, 1995). Young children’s cumulative experiences involving (non)compliance with parental rules and consequent moral emotions are seen as gradually incorporated into views about their moral self (representation of oneself as good and moral). For instance, a longitudinal study found that individual differences in parental prohibitions in early childhood (from 25 to 52 months of age) were positively associated with the moral self at 67 months (Kochanska et al., 2010). Similar to theories of moral identity and character discussed later, the moral self links conscience with moral motivation and conduct. By adolescence, the internalization of values also involves greater integration of moral values into the self-concept (Krettenauer, Campbell, and Hertz, 2013).

Social Learning Theory Revisited Grusec can be credited with important transformations in the social learning theory/socialization view of parenting and moral development. Prior to her research and theorizing, these approaches did not pay much attention to the content of the values children internalized. Starting in the 1980s, however, Grusec and her colleagues (Grusec, Dix, and Mills, 1982; Grusec and Kuczynski, 1980; Kuczynski, 1984) examined parental disciplinary responses when parents had different (short- versus long-term) socialization goals or the child committed different types of transgressions (e.g., harm to self or objects, or physical or psychological harm to others). Mothers’ use of reasoning versus more power-assertive strategies varied according to both the type of transgression children committed and mothers’ childrearing goals (Hastings and Grusec, 1998). Thus, rather than viewing parents as having a unitary, consistent approach to discipline, Grusec and her colleagues proposed that parents vary their disciplinary practices according to children’s involvement in different types of events or transgressions. In later papers, Grusec and others (Grusec and Goodnow, 1994; Grusec, Goodnow, and Kuczynski, 2000) more explicitly acknowledged children’s agency in the socialization process. Their argument was that, consistent with their prior research as well as social domain theory (discussed in the following section), children would be more likely to accept parental reasons and explanations that match the type of misdeed committed. Therefore, they posited that parental disciplinary practices will be effective only if applied in ways that are appropriate to the type of situation that elicited a parental 127

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response. More generally, they proposed that disciplinary processes positively affect the internalization of parental values and standards only when children accurately perceive parental messages, as this is necessary for their acceptance. Grusec and her colleagues delineated a number of factors related to the parental message (for instance, whether messages are clearly, consistently, and redundantly stated and whether their importance to the parent is made clear), as well as characteristics of the child (such as temperament, mood, and developmental status) that influence this process. Further, Grusec and her colleagues described the process of internalization as proceeding in a series of steps, using an information processing framework that emphasizes intergenerational agreement about values. They also articulated other features of parental discipline that may enhance the likelihood of child internalization. For instance, parents should be autonomy supportive (providing rationales for their rules and allowing children choices within limits) and consider the child’s perspective, as giving the child choices may enhance the likelihood that they will comply with parental directives (Grusec, Danyliuk, Kil, and O’Neill, 2017). Grusec and Davidov (2010) have proposed a domain-specific socialization model. Drawing on the insight that children and their caregivers interact in different ways depending on the particular goals, motivations, values, and skills parents want their children to acquire, these researchers described five domains of socialization: control, protection, guided learning, group participation, and mutual reciprocity. Grusec and Davidov (2010) asserted that these domains are characterized by different socialization goals, social relationships, and social interactions and that effective parenting differs accordingly. Parent–child interactions in each of the hypothesized domains are seen as guiding children’s behavior and, eventually, successful adaptation to society, with different socialization outcomes associated with each domain. The control domain appears to be most central to moral development. This domain focuses on children’s acceptance and obedience to cultural rules, leading to children’s moral and principled behavior (as well as self-control). Appropriate parenting in the control domain is characterized by parents’ use of authority that, both in type and degree, successfully modifies children’s behavior to fit the caregiver’s goals. Moral values also may be facilitated through interactions in other domains. For instance, although the protection domain pertains to providing comfort and protection, Vinik, Johnston, Grusec, and Farrell (2013) hypothesized that securely attached children would be better able to understand others’ distress and respond more sympathetically and with less antisocial behavior than would children who are more insecurely attached. Children are also thought to learn moral values through interactions in the guided learning domain (e.g., through conversations that occur outside of the context of transgressions or conflicts). Such discussions, which allow for parental scaffolding of conversations, are seen as particularly effective for moral internalization (Grusec and Davidov, 2010).

Structural-Developmental Theory Revisited Kohlberg’s theory has led to newer theoretical perspectives, including theories focused on the moral self and social domain theory, which distinguishes morality from other types of social knowledge. These are described in turn next.

Moral Self and Identity Kohlberg’s theory left little room for constructs like self, identity, and personality (Lapsley and Narvaez, 2004), which some researchers believe are crucial for explaining links between moral judgment and action. Indeed, concepts of the moral self (i.e., how children represent their moral behavioral preferences) and moral identity (i.e., older children and adolescents’ commitment to moral values and their centrality to their self-concept; Sengsavang and Krettenauer, 2015) pertain primarily to motivational processes thought to account for the distinction between knowing versus doing the morally right thing 128

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(Hardy and Carlo, 2011). Although most developmental research has focused on moral identity in adolescents, some studies have been conducted on the moral self in early childhood (e.g., Kochanska et al., 2007, 2010) and more recently in middle childhood (Krettenauer et al., 2013; Sengsavang and Krettenauer, 2015). For instance, Krettenauer and colleagues (2013) demonstrated the presence of a moral self in children as young as 5 years of age. They used a puppet interview adapted from Kochanska (2002), although their conceptualization differs from Kochanska’s in defining the moral self in terms of children’s preferences for fair and just acts (e.g., consistent with social domain theory definitions of morality). Children watched puppet pairs alternately stating preferences either in favor of or against prosocial (helping, sharing, caring) and antisocial behaviors (verbal and physical aggression, stealing). For each (im)moral behavior, children were asked which puppet was more like them and how similar they are to their chosen puppet (with higher scores indicating a stronger moral self, understood as behavioral preferences for prosocial and against antisocial behaviors). Theorists interested in the moral self assert that moral principles become increasingly integrated into the self-concept through development (Blasi, 2004; Krettenauer, 2011) and that individuals vary in how integrated moral principles and values are in their self-understanding and self-concepts (Aquino and Reed, 2002; Hardy and Carlo, 2011). Moral motivations and principles are thought to be more central to some individuals than others (Blasi, 2004; Colby and Damon, 1994), among those who emphasize these characteristics, moral schemas are described as continually available, readily primed, and easily activated for processing social information (Hardy, Bhattacharjee, Reed, and Aquino, 2010; Lapsley and Hill, 2008). Thus, some individuals appear more motivated to translate their moral beliefs into moral behavior. Indeed, research indicates that the integration of moral values into one’s sense of self and identity is associated with less antisocial and more prosocial behavior (Johnston and Krettenauer, 2011; Kochanska et al., 2010), moral emotions (Krettenauer, 2011), concerns for out-group members (Hardy et al., 2010), and sustained moral commitment, as obtained in retrospective accounts of moral “exemplars” (Colby and Damon, 1994). Although more consistent with social learning theory than structural-developmental theory, Bandura’s (1999) social-cognitive theory of the moral self likewise asserts that moral reasoning is linked to moral action through affective, self-regulatory mechanisms. According to Bandura, children develop a moral self by constructing standards of right and wrong that serve as guides and deterrents for (im) moral conduct. These standards may be directly socialized or may develop from evaluative reactions to one’s conduct and exposure to the self-evaluative standards modeled by others. Moral agency involves capacities embedded in broader developmental and self-regulatory systems that are required to inhibit acting immorally and, inversely, to engage in moral and prosocial conduct (Bandura, 2002). Self-regulatory processes are used to monitor conduct, judge it in relation to one’s internalized moral standards and circumstances, and regulate actions, for instance, by activating negative self-sanctions (e.g., through feelings of guilt or remorse in response to perceived violations; Bandura, 2002). These mechanisms are considered central for regulating and motivating moral reasoning and behavior (Bandura, Barbaranelli, Caprara, and Pastorelli, 1996). The construct of moral disengagement describes the process by which individuals reconcile their involvement in immoral behavior. According to Bandura, self-reactive influences are activated only when confronting moral issues; moral disengagement occurs after deciding on one’s course of action and then cognitively restructuring one’s immoral position or conduct into benign or worthy ones. It is assumed that moral disengagement occurs post-hoc—that is, after selecting a course of action, and that the moral choices are straightforward rather than involving a complex web of competing concerns (see Dahl and Waltzer, 2018, for an elaboration of these arguments). Bandura and colleagues assert that self-sanctions can be disengaged from perceived moral conflict or immoral conduct through numerous processes, including invoking moral justifications (i.e., reconstruing immoral conduct as personally and socially acceptable by portraying it as in service of valued moral principles) or disavowing one’s role by using diffusion and displacement of responsibility, disregarding or misrepresenting 129

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(e.g., euphemistic labeling) the action’s harmful consequences for others, and vilifying and dehumanizing the victim with unjustified blame (Bandura, 1999, 2002, 2016; Bandura et al., 1996). Although much research has examined processes of moral disengagement, the role of parenting has received little attention in the development of these mechanisms.

Social Domain Theory In contrast to Kohlberg’s differentiation model, Turiel (1979, 1983) proposed that even young children distinguish between moral issues, defined as individuals’ prescriptive understanding of others’ welfare, fairness, and rights, and social conventions, or the arbitrary, agreed-on social norms and uniformities that structure social interactions and provide guides for appropriate behavior. Thus, from early ages on, children are thought to view moral transgressions (such as hitting, teasing, excluding, or stealing) as wrong across contexts and situations, because they have negative consequences for others’ rights or welfare. In contrast, the more arbitrary and context-specific social conventions (such as etiquette or forms of address) are considered wrong only when deemed so by rules and/or authorities. These propositions have been extensively supported in research with preschool and older children (reviewed in Smetana, 2011, 2013; Smetana, Jambon, and Ball, 2014). Moreover, empirical methods for identifying prototypical moral issues have been developed and successfully used to investigate more complex, multifaceted issues that involve conflicts or coordinations between different domains of thought. These include children’s understanding of rights, which may conflict with societal laws (Helwig, Ruck, and Peterson-Badali, 2014), peer exclusion and intergroup relationships (Killen and Rutland, 2011), controversial social issues such as beliefs and attitudes about homosexuality and behaviors towards LGBT youth (Heinze and Horn, 2009; Horn, 2006; Horn, Szalacha, and Drill, 2008), and many other complex issues. Different domains of social knowledge are proposed to develop from qualitatively distinct social interactions. Evidence for this claim comes primarily from observational studies of teacher and child responses to transgressions in schools and on playgrounds (Nucci and Nucci, 1982a, 1982b; Nucci and Turiel, 1978; Smetana, 1984; Tisak, Nucci, and Jankowski, 1996), and from studies of parent– child interactions discussed later. Parents are considered important for the construction of moral and social knowledge due to the emotional bonds between parents and children, the intense emotions that their interactions elicit, and because parents are emotionally invested in, care deeply about—and are charged by society with—teaching children right from wrong (Smetana, 1997, 1999; Wainryb and Recchia, 2017). Children construct social knowledge from various interactions, conversations, and conflicts with parents and others, including siblings, peers, and other adults. Both their direct experiences and observations of others’ interactions contribute to the development of social knowledge (Smetana, 1997; Smetana & Jambon, 2018), and as described later in the chapter, social experiences and interactions vary by domain. Thus, research has focused on the domain specificity of parents’ affective and behavioral responses to transgressions as well as parent–child conversations and interactions around moral events. Because social domain theory emphasizes children’s active construction of moral and social knowledge, children’s evaluations of the appropriateness or fairness of parental interventions are considered important. As they grow older, children have more agency to accept or reject parental values and expectations. Children and adolescents generally view moral, social-conventional, and prudential issues (e.g., pertaining to comfort, health, and harm to the self ) as legitimately regulated by adults. Indeed, children studied from the preschool years to late childhood have been shown to strongly endorse compliance with parental moral rules and report feeling good about doing so (Lagattuta, Nucci, and Bosacki, 2010; Smetana, Wong, Ball, and Yau, 2014). However, adults’ moral authority is limited. It does not extend to causing harm, prescribing immoral acts, or being unjust or unfair. Under such conditions, children are less likely to comply with parental expectations or internalize parental messages. 130

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Children and adolescents (as well as adults) also draw boundaries between issues that are seen as appropriately regulated by adults and those that are personal and up to the child to decide (e.g., issues regarding privacy; control over one’s body; and choices regarding leisure activities, personal tastes, and friendships). Parents and children generally concur that parents do not have authority over children’s personal domain choices, although they may disagree about what falls within that domain. Thus, both in the United States (Lagattuta et al., 2010) and in Hong Kong (Smetana, Wong, et al., 2014), the same children who endorsed compliance for moral issues also believed that actors would (and to some extent should) disobey rules intruding on their personal domains and viewed noncompliance as eliciting positive feelings when hypothetical actors disobeyed. Furthermore, parents and children in different cultures typically disagree about where the boundaries of parental authority should be drawn, especially during adolescence, which is characterized by the rapid growth of autonomy. Disagreements about parental authority legitimacy lead to increases in parent–adolescent conflicts, particularly in early and middle adolescence, as well as greater nondisclosure, secrecy, and concealment about activities in middle adolescence (Smetana, 2011).

Summary Theoretical descriptions of moral development differ widely. Kochanska and her colleagues focus on the development of conscience, or an autonomous inner guidance system that results in rule-abiding conduct. Socialization theories emphasize how parents’ different socialization goals lead them to employ different disciplinary practices, resulting in divergent developmental outcomes. Theories of the moral self have arisen to explain moral as well as immoral behavior (e.g., through processes of moral disengagement). Social domain theory describes morality as a distinct domain of social knowledge constructed from social interactions and pertaining to judgments regarding others’ welfare, fairness, and rights.

Current Research on Moral Development In this section, we review contemporary empirical research on parenting and moral development. First, we consider research on parenting styles and the role of authoritative parenting in fostering mature morality. We then consider how the quality of children’s relationships with their parents, assessed in terms of attachment security and parental responsiveness, influences moral development. Next, we discuss associations between different parental disciplinary practices and various aspects of moral development, as well as research on children’s evaluations of the appropriateness and fairness of different practices. Although there is some overlap, as several of the studies compare different disciplinary practices, these sections are organized in terms of research on parental power assertion; induction; and psychological control, guilt, and shame. Finally, we go beyond the discipline context to consider other types of parent–child interactions that are important for moral development, including parent–child conversations, reminisces, and management of conflicts.

Parenting Styles and Authoritative Parenting Research on global parenting styles (Baumrind, 1971) generally demonstrates that authoritative parenting, defined in terms of parents’ high levels of responsiveness to and consideration of the child’s needs, along with high levels of demandingness (e.g., having clear, strong expectations for mature conduct), is optimal for social and emotional development. Several studies confirm that this is also the case for morality, although the majority of studies focus on late childhood and adolescence. An exception is Taylor, Eisenberg, and Spinrad (2015). They found that authoritative parenting, observed when children were 42 months of age, was related to 72- and 84-month-olds’ feelings of sympathy or concern for others who are distressed or in need, as mediated by effortful control. 131

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Leman (2005) found that British early adolescents (12-year-olds) of authoritative parents were more likely to justify hypothetical moral misbehavior with justifications pertaining to reciprocity and equality than were youth with authoritarian parents (who are highly strict and demanding but low in responsiveness to their child). In a sample of middle adolescents, Hardy et al. (2010) found that several dimensions associated with authoritative parenting, including autonomy support, responsiveness, and demandingness, were linked with public and private aspects of moral identity. Pratt, Hunsberger, Pancer, and Alisat (2003) found that, in more authoritative families, late adolescents and their parents were more congruent in their values (both moral and nonmoral) than were other families. Finally, Smetana (1995) found that parenting styles differentiated 12- through 17-year-olds’ perceptions of parental authority legitimacy. Authoritarian parents “moralized” conventional issues and treated them as obligatory, much like prototypical moral issues. In contrast, permissive parents overextended the boundaries of the personal domain and treated conventional issues as up to children to decide. Only authoritative parents maintained clear boundaries among moral, conventional, and personal issues in their judgments and justifications of hypothetical, prototypical issues.

Attachment to Caregivers and Parental Responsiveness Attachment Relationships Researchers across the theoretical spectrum hypothesize that the quality of children’s attachment relationships with their caregivers, which develops during the first year of life, provides an important building block for successful moral development (Berkowitz and Grych, 1998; Grusec and Goodnow, 1994; Kochanska and Kim, 2012; Smetana, 1997; Thompson, 2012). Securely attached children are more confident and more trusting that caregivers will be available and responsive in situations of threat or distress (Laible and Thompson, 2000). Therefore, they may be more cooperative and receptive to parents’ socialization expectations and view parental control as benevolent rather than ill intended. Furthermore, parental influence may be more effective in warm, mutual relationships that foster more secure attachment than in relationships that are less warm, mutual, and secure (Hoffman, 1970, 2000; Kochanska and Thompson, 1997). Evidence supporting these claims has focused primarily—but not exclusively—on conscience development in early childhood (Kochanska and Kim, 2012; Laible, 2004a; Laible and Thompson, 2000). Consistent with theorizing, parenting practices appear to operate differently according to child attachment quality. Longitudinal research indicates that for securely but not insecurely attached infants, mothers’ positive parenting (i.e., sensitive, responsive, and inductive discipline) in the first three and a half years of life predicts children’s honesty in games, views of the moral self, and moral cognition at 52 and 56 months (Kochanska et al., 2007, 2010). Kochanska and Kim (2012) found that although main effects of attachment quality generally are not found in longitudinal analyses spanning infancy to middle childhood, variations in attachment relationships set the stage for different developmental trajectories. These researchers demonstrated that in insecure dyads, and particularly among children who were anger-prone, a pattern of coercion emerged leading to more power-assertive parenting and, hence, a pathway towards conduct disorders (see the later section for greater elaboration) that include some morally relevant mediators. These links were not observed in secure dyads. Several longitudinal studies suggest that early insecurity may amplify detrimental cascades, whereas infant and toddler security appears to defuse these developmental risks (Boldt, Kochanska, and Jonas, 2017; Nordling, Boldt, O’Bleness, and Kochanska, 2016). Examining both mother–child and father– child attachment—and utilizing a range of attachment measures completed by mothers, fathers, and trained observers—children’s cumulative history of attachment security from infancy to late childhood facilitated children’s later self-regulation and socialization, whereas insecurity was associated with poorer adjustment. For instance, in relationships with both mothers and fathers, children’s higher 132

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negativity (i.e., rejection of parental rules and modeling attempts) at 25, 38, 52, and 67 months was associated with more detrimental outcomes (i.e., higher child externalizing problems and lower parent– child relationship quality) at ages 10 and 12 years, but only in formerly insecure infant dyads (Boldt et al., 2017) (broadly conceived). Thus, attachment security predicted their orientations towards rules and, in turn, later adjustment. Given the dearth of research focusing on fathers, it is notable that attachment relationships with mothers versus fathers lead to different moral outcomes. For instance, Nordling et al. (2016) found that children’s security to mothers but not fathers predicted their effortful control, which in turn led directly to greater regard for rules. In other studies, however, children’s attachment security with mothers versus fathers was not associated with different outcomes (Boldt et al., 2017). Research has also shown that greater attachment security is linked with toddlers’ more sympathetic responses to mothers’ simulated displays of anger and sadness (Denham, 1994) and 4-year-olds’ greater committed compliance and evaluative statements (e.g., references to good and bad behavior; Laible, 2004a; Laible and Thompson, 2000). Furthermore, in a female sample, 22-month-olds who were more securely attached demonstrated more empathic concern to an experimenter (but not to a mother) who simulated distress, as well as more committed compliance in a laboratory task (van der Mark, Bakermans-Kranenburg, and van IJzendoorn, 2002; van der Mark, van IJzendoorn, and Bakermans-Kranenburg, 2002). Similarly, a paper reporting on two longitudinal studies of community families, including mothers, fathers, and children from 14 to 80 months and mothers and children from 15 to 45 months, as well as a study of low-income, diverse mothers and their 30-month-old toddlers, found that attachment security with mothers was related to higher levels of empathy (Kim and Kochanska, 2017). Consistent with research on adolescents (Carlo, Knight, McGinley, and Hayes, 2011; Carlo, McGinley, Hayes, Batenhorst, and Wilkinson, 2007), variations in children’s empathy moderated associations between parental relationships and prosocial behavior, with individual differences in empathy linked to prosociality, but only in insecure children (Kim and Kochanska, 2017). Secure attachments, measured either retrospectively or concurrently by the Adult Attachment Interview (AAI), also are associated with morality in adolescence and adulthood. Thus, adolescents who evidenced more secure-autonomous attachment representations on the AAI also endorsed more mature moral reasoning on a paper-and-pencil version of Kohlberg’s moral judgment measure (van IJzendoorn and Zwart-Woudstra, 1995). Furthermore, adult moral exemplars (recipients of Canadian awards for exceptional bravery or caring) reported more secure childhood attachments (measured retrospectively and across many different interpersonal relationships) than did a matched comparison group of adults (Walker and Frimer, 2007). Caring exemplars reported more secure relationships than did those nominated as being exceptionally brave. These studies suggest that across childhood and adolescence, children who have more secure attachment relationships with their caregivers may develop more mature morality.

Responsive Parenting Similarly, there is consensus across different theoretical approaches that responsive, reciprocal, and cooperative parent–child relationships foster moral development, broadly considered. As with attachment, the claim is that parental warmth, affection, and responsiveness enhance the likelihood that children will be receptive to parental discipline and that they will like and respect the parent; thus, they will be more open to consider parental messages and others’ needs (Grusec and Goodnow, 1994; Hoffman, 1979; Kochanska, Aksan, Prisco, and Adams, 2008; Maccoby, 2007; Maccoby and Martin, 1983). Kochanska referred to this as a mutually responsive orientation (MRO) and described it as the responsiveness and shared positivity characteristic of the parent–child dyad (Kochanska, Forman, Aksan, and Dunbar, 2005). The centrality of a mutually responsive orientation in promoting different positive moral developmental outcomes has been supported in numerous longitudinal studies of both mother–child and 133

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father–child relationships (Kochanska et al., 2008). For instance, in a longitudinal study of associations between early mother–child MRO and conscience development, Kochanska et al. (2005) found that mother–child MRO when children were 9, 14, and 22 months old had a direct positive effect on 45-month-olds’ guilt following a perceived transgression. Furthermore, MRO influenced moral cognition (selfish/antisocial versus prosocial/moral internalized moral judgments) by promoting children’s enjoyment of interactions with their mothers. They examined whether maternal power assertion also mediated the relation between MRO and conscience but found that it did not. Research also generally supports the importance of the interplay between parent–child MRO and child temperament for moral development. For instance, for relatively fearless children, positive mother–child relationships predicted greater endorsement of moral characteristics as like the moral self three years later, but for relatively fearful children, the opposite was found (Kochanska, Aksan, and Joy, 2007). Moreover, maternal power assertion had detrimental effects on their future moral self. Furthermore, as demonstrated in two longitudinal studies, Kochanska and Kim (2014) showed that when parent–child relationships (both mother–child and father–child) are mutually responsive, reciprocal, and close (i.e., high in MRO), young children respond to gentle discipline, develop committed compliance, and accept parents’ socialization messages, even when the child displayed low levels of effortful control. However, when both MRO and children’s effortful control were low, children’s internalization of parental standards and moral conduct (ability to resist temptation and engage in rule-compatible behavior) was compromised. Moreover, variations in positivity, warmth, or responsiveness in parent–child relationships are particularly consequential for temperamentally difficult or developmentally vulnerable children, such as those with callous-unemotional (CU) traits, a well-established risk factor for antisocial behavior (Van der Graaff, Branje, De Wied, and Meeus, 2012; Waller et al., 2014). Kochanska, Kim, Boldt, and Yoon (2013) investigated whether children’s CU traits moderate links between mother–child and father– child MRO and shared positive affect (observed in extended and diverse naturalistic contexts when children were 38 and 52 months old) and their externalizing problems at 67, 80, and 100 months. For children with elevated CU traits, higher mother–child MRO and greater father–child shared positive affect predicted decreases in child behavior problems, but not for children relatively low in CU. The studies discussed thus far have primarily investigated responsive parenting as assessed in early childhood, although they have documented its long-term effects. Several other researchers, however, have focused on the importance of responsive parenting in middle childhood and beyond. For instance, Malti, Eisenberg, Kim, and Buchmann (2013) examined the longitudinal role of parental support on developmental trajectories of moral emotion attributions, moral reasoning, and sympathy across three years. The different measures of moral functioning showed low-stable, increasing, and high-stable trajectories of growth (with moral emotion attributions also decreasing over time). Both child- and parent-reported supportive parenting were associated with membership in the high-stable group across the different measures. These findings suggest that greater parental support may help maintain high levels of moral functioning and perhaps facilitate the integration of affective and cognitive moral components. In one of the very few studies to examine the moral self in childhood, Sengsavang and Krettenauer (2015) found that parental support (5- to 8-year-old children’s perceived support from parents, averaged across mothers and fathers) was related to children’s more moral self (measured by the moral puppet interview described in an earlier section). In turn, high levels of negative parent–child interaction (children’s perceived antagonism and conflict with parents averaged across mothers and fathers) exacerbated the negative association found between children’s moral self and aggressive behavior. Using a large, representative, longitudinal survey of Swiss 15- and 21-year-olds, Malti and Buchmann (2010) also examined the role of parental support in moral motivation. They examined the strength of responses to hypothetical stories prioritizing moral concerns over nonmoral desires. Their cross-sectional analyses confirmed the importance of parental support in moral motivation for middle 134

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adolescents, but not for older youth. That is, they found that 15-year-olds who were higher in parental support and social justice values reported greater moral motivation. Among 21-year-olds, however, social justice values as well as better friendship quality predicted greater moral motivation. These findings suggest that friendship support may replace parental support in facilitating moral motivation as youth grow older. Several studies have distinguished different components of responsiveness. For instance, one longitudinal investigation found that parents’ positive emotion expressivity mediated the over-time effects of parental warmth on elementary school-age children’s empathic responding, as measured behaviorally (e.g., in terms of facial expressivity) and in terms of self-report (Zhou et al., 2002). In contrast, Davidov and Grusec (2006) distinguished parental responsiveness to children’s distress from parental warmth and found differential associations with child outcomes. Only mothers’ self-reported and observed responsiveness to distress (but not warmth) was associated with 6- to 8-year-olds’ empathy and prosocial responding; similar but marginal findings were found for fathers. In contrast, parental warmth (but not responsiveness to distress) was associated with nonmoral outcomes (for instance, regulation of positive affect). Vinik, Almas, and Grusec (2011) examined maternal responsiveness in terms of mothers’ knowledge of their children’s thoughts and feelings (rather than their observed or reported levels of responsiveness). They found that mothers who were better able to identify events that distress and comfort their child had 10- to 12-year-olds who responded more empathically to both videotaped and experimental simulations of distress. Furthermore, children whose mothers more accurately understood how to comfort them were more prosocial, but only when children were high in distress proneness. Walker and Taylor (1991) demonstrated the importance of responsive parenting in the development of more mature moral reasoning during adolescence. These researchers examined whether the type of challenging, critiquing parent–adolescent interactions (labeled operational here but called transactive in prior research) found to facilitate Kohlbergian moral stage change in Berkowitz and Gibbs’s (1983) study of unacquainted college students also applied to parents’ interactions with their middle adolescents. Their longitudinal study yielded two unanticipated findings. First, growth in adolescents’ moral reasoning was fostered only in the context of discussion of real-life dilemmas, not hypothetical ones. Second, stage change occurred only through parents’ supportive (representational) interactions, where parents paraphrased or restated their teen’s point of view, rather than through operational statements. Subsequent research comparing the influence of peer versus parent–adolescent interactions on moral reasoning development (Walker, Hennig, and Krettenauer, 2000) also found that only supportive interactions predicted moral growth in both contexts. The researchers speculated that differences between their findings and past research may be because they studied friends rather than unacquainted peers, who may have been more reluctant to critique their partner’s opinions. They concluded that a more gentle, “Socratic” interaction style, where individuals solicit others’ opinions and check their understanding, may be optimal for moral reasoning development. Other research suggests that the effectiveness of different kinds of interactions may differ for mothers and fathers. Pratt, Arnold, Pratt, and Diessner (1999) found that fathers’ use of operational statements in family discussions of moral dilemmas contributed to growth over time in middle adolescents’ moral reasoning maturity, whereas mothers influenced their adolescents’ moral reasoning through their responsiveness to teens’ perspectives (as evidenced in socialization narratives). Kohlberg’s approach emphasizes justice reasoning, but supportive family interactions also contributed to increases in care-based moral reasoning from late adolescence to early adulthood (Pratt, Skoe, and Arnold, 2004). Most of the research just discussed includes Western, middle-class samples, but To, Helwig, and Yang (2017) examined associations among rural and urban Chinese adolescents’ perceptions of parent and teacher responsiveness, autonomy support, and adolescents’ evaluations of rights. They distinguished between nurturance rights, which pertain to parents’ and others’ obligation to provide 135

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and protect children’s welfare, and self-determination rights, which are roughly equivalent to personal issues (e.g., right to privacy, control over personal issues). Greater maternal responsiveness (as well as teacher autonomy support) was associated only with greater endorsement of nurturance rights. In contrast, and consistent with the notion that exercising personal choices facilitates autonomy development (Smetana, 2011), maternal autonomy support was associated with teens’ endorsement of self-determination rights.

Summary Research strongly supports the notion that the nature of the parent–child relationship, whether measured in terms of children’s attachment to their caregiver, parents’ responsiveness to their child, or dyadic MRO, is associated with various measures of children’s moral development. Positivity in the parent–child bond is seen as enhancing the likelihood that children are motivated to listen to parents, comply with their requests, and internalize their values. It is worth noting that compliance or rule-following behavior covers a wide range of behaviors, not all of which can be considered to be morally relevant. Furthermore, responsiveness is a broad term, and there is a need for greater specificity in defining the different components of responsiveness and in identifying the particular forms that are linked to specific aspects of moral development. What is interpreted as responsive parenting also may vary at different ages, highlighting the necessity of having more developmentally informed accounts. In addition, more cross-cultural research is needed, as several scholars have noted that connectedness is more likely to be expressed in terms of dyadic warmth and responsiveness in Western families and in terms of family obligations in Eastern (e.g., Chinese) families (Chao and Tseng, 2002; Hardway and Fuligni, 2006). Thus, the implications of these cultural variations for moral development need to be determined.

Power Assertion and Harsh Discipline As with responsive parenting, researchers have noted that power assertion is a broad category (Grusec and Goodnow, 1994; Smetana, 1997) that has been defined in different ways. It may include verbal and physical pressure, harsh and punitive parenting (yelling, scolding), rejecting parenting, and physical punishment. These practices are considered separately next.

Power Assertion Kochanska and her colleagues’ research provides support for the notion that parental power assertion, defined in terms of physical and verbal pressure by a relatively angry parent, undermines morally relevant functioning. For instance, Kochanska (1991) found that mothers of toddlers who deemphasized their use of power had children with a more internalized conscience six years later, as assessed in terms of affective and cognitive reactions to narratives produced in response to semi-projective stories. However, significant findings were obtained only for children who were relatively prone to fearful arousal. Mothers who employed more power assertion with their 33-month-olds had children with less developed moral selves three years later (Kochanska et al., 2007). Although power assertion generally has negative effects, research also has shown some variations in findings depending on whether power assertion is examined in tasks where parents assert power to obtain help or assistance (such as in clean-up tasks) or deter misbehavior. Findings also vary depending on the particular moral outcome variables assessed. For instance, in studying young children and their mothers, Kochanska, Aksan, and Nichols (2003) found that power assertion when children were 14- to 45-months-old showed no associations with later (56- and 73-month-olds’) moral cognition 136

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or compliant behavior in a helping context, negative associations at these ages with resistance to temptation when mothers were asked to prevent misbehavior in lab tasks, and positive associations with 56-month-old children’s moral cognition in a lab-based mother–child discourse task. Kochanska, Padavich, and Koenig (1996) found that greater maternal power assertion, observed naturalistically in the home, was associated concurrently with lower levels of toddler compliance and mother-reported conscience development and also over time with assessments of antisocial and good behavior themes in preschoolers’ narratives. More recently, Kim and Kochanska (2015; Kochanska and Kim, 2012) sought to identify the specific developmental mechanisms that account for the detrimental effects of power assertion across childhood and adolescence. A maladaptive developmental cascade links maternal power assertion in early childhood to the development of an angry, adversarial, and resentful stance where the child feels alienated and disconnected from the parent. In turn, this resentful stance is connected to later rulebreaking behavior and difficulty in delaying in laboratory tasks (Kochanska and Kim, 2012), reduced guilt, empathy, and sensitivity to violations of standards (Kim and Kochanska, 2015; Kochanska, Barry, Stellern, and O’Bleness, 2009; Kochanska, Brock, and Boldt, 2016), and later externalizing and internalizing behaviors. Parental responsiveness also moderates the link between parental power assertion and a resentful, angry orientation toward the parent. Results of two studies by Dahl (2016; Dahl and Chan, 2017) remind us that parental power assertion may be an effective strategy in inhibiting misbehavior during infancy and very early childhood, when children lack the communicative abilities to regulate and control their behavior. The researchers observed mother–child interactions at home during the infants’ second year of life. Using Kochanska’s definition of power assertion as physical interventions (e.g., restraining the child) and maternal control, both studies found that mothers used power assertion more in response to moral than prudential and pragmatic transgressions. Dahl and Chan (2017) further found that mothers engaged in more power assertion when there was greater physical danger to their child and others (e.g., for prudential and moral transgressions) and that mothers’ power-assertive responses to moral transgressions increased when dyads were observed five months later. As these results suggest, power assertion may be developmentally appropriate for maintaining young children’s safety and well-being.

Harsh Discipline Corporal punishment, physical discipline, and yelling or scolding also can be considered powerassertive disciplinary practices. Little research has directly examined the influence of physical discipline and corporal punishment on moral developmental outcomes; rather, research has focused mostly on their effects on children’s externalizing behaviors, including aggression. Inasmuch as aggression entails intentional harm to others, however, it can be seen as (im)moral behavior (see Jambon and Smetana, 2018, for an elaboration of this argument). Several large-scale international studies have shown that physical and corporal punishment have adverse effects on children and that they generally lead to greater externalizing behavior. However, the effects are moderated somewhat by the cultural normativeness of the practices (Gershoff et al., 2010; Lansford et al., 2005). One study examined associations among neighborhood risk, maternal harsh punishment, and 3½ -year-olds’ moral judgments (Ball, Smetana, Sturge-Apple, Suor, and Skibo, 2017). Children whose mothers engaged in more harsh discipline, as observed during a mother–child clean-up task, rated moral transgressions as more serious and deserving of punishment, and this effect was amplified among mothers who were more inconsistent in their use of harsh discipline. However, young children who were both consistently and harshly disciplined had a less sophisticated understanding of morality, as assessed by criterion judgments, than children who were less consistently or less harshly disciplined. That is, children who were consistently and harshly disciplined were less likely than others to understand that moral transgressions are wrong in the absence of rules and authority prohibitions and that 137

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moral rules are inalterable. Grusec and Goodnow (1994) asserted that parental consistency in disciplining children helps make parental messages clearer, thereby facilitating moral development. However, Ball et al.’s (2017) findings suggest that harsh discipline consistently applied may communicate the wrong message. Children may learn that moral transgressions should be condemned and warrant punishment, but not why. Thus, these findings are consistent with previous research (Kochanska et al., 2003; Laible and Thompson, 2002) in showing that coercive discipline undermines the internalization of parents’ moral messages.

Rejecting Parenting Hyde, Shaw, and Moilanen (2010) defined rejecting parenting in terms of mothers’ critical statements and verbal and physical (dis)approval, as well as global ratings of hostility, lack of warmth, and punitiveness. They assessed rejecting parenting in home and laboratory contexts across different tasks in a sample of ethnically diverse, low-income families with 1½ - and 2-year-old boys. Rejecting parenting in infancy predicted moral disengagement at age 15, although parent- and child-reported empathy at age 12 more robustly predicted moral disengagement than earlier rejecting parenting. Furthermore, an exploratory path analysis showed that antisocial behavior at age 16 and 17 was predicted by two different paths—one from rejecting parenting in infancy to children’s lower levels of empathy, and in turn, moral disengagement, and one through poor social information processing.

Summary The studies reviewed in this section demonstrate that, much as Hoffman (1970) hypothesized, different forms of harsh, rejecting, or power-assertive parenting undermine behavioral, social-cognitive, and affective dimensions of morality. Early research (Kuczynski, 1984) indicated that power assertion may be effective in stopping harmful behavior and inducing short-term compliance, but it does not lead to moral internalization (defined as rule-following behavior or resistance to temptation) or an understanding of why moral transgressions are wrong (Ball et al., 2017). Dahl’s research (2016; Dahl and Chan, 2017) shows that most mothers employ power assertion with their toddlers to stop misbehavior that is particularly harmful or unsafe. Nevertheless, as Grusec and Goodnow (1994) noted, extremely angry, negative, coercive, or punitive responses may scare the child, threaten their sense of security, and promote aversive emotional reactions, all of which threaten moral development.

Inductive Discipline Comparisons of Effectiveness Similar to research on power assertion, and typically drawing on Hoffman’s (1970) theorizing, researchers have compared parental induction with other disciplinary practices in terms of their influence on moral development. Although these studies are meant to demonstrate the effectiveness of induction over other practices, most studies have been cross-sectional, limiting conclusions that can be drawn about the direction of effects. Jagers, Bingham, and Hans (1996) examined associations between poor, inner-city, AfricanAmerican mothers’ reports of their parenting practices and kindergarteners’ ability to differentiate moral and conventional transgressions, as assessed in terms of judgments of rule independence and generalizability across contexts. Supporting the role of induction, mothers who talked more with their children and denied privileges and ignored transgressions less had children who were better able to distinguish moral from conventional transgressions. Mothers’ yelling and corporal punishment were not linked with their ability to distinguish the domains. 138

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Krevans and Gibbs (1996) developed a questionnaire based on Hoffman and Saltzstein (1967) that asks children and parents to rate how typical it would be for the parent to use different disciplinary practices, including inductive discipline, power assertion, and love withdrawal in response to hypothetical scenarios. Studying early adolescents and their mothers, these researchers found that only mothers’ use of inductive discipline showed significant (and positive) associations with children’s empathic responsiveness and maturity. Moreover, these links were found for both mothers’ and children’s reports of parenting. The results also showed that, at least cross-sectionally, empathy mediated the link between parental induction and prosocial behavior. In an extension of this work, Patrick and Gibbs (2012) examined associations between inductive and other forms of parental discipline (assessed by the aforementioned questionnaire) and 10- and 16-year-olds’ moral identity. They hypothesized that, compared to other-oriented inductions, those that include parents’ disappointed expectations may be particularly salient for moral self-development because they indicate to youth that they are capable of better behavior. Overall, induction was used more than other forms of parental discipline, and 16-year-olds (but not younger teens) who received both types of parental inductions ascribed more moral attributes to the self. When types of inductions were examined separately, however, other-oriented inductions had positive effects on moral identity, but parental expressions of disappointed expectations did not. Thus, these results did not support the distinctive role of parents’ disappointed expectations in moral self-ratings. As expected, however, power assertion and love withdrawal were not associated with ratings of the moral self, although increased power assertion was linked with decreases in teenagers’ positive and guilt-related emotional responses. [Recall that in the Sengsavang and Krettenauer (2015) study discussed earlier, however, perceived antagonistic and conflictive interactions with parents—which are certainly negative if not directly power assertive—had negative effects on the moral self.] In a further extension, Patrick and Gibbs (2016) demonstrated that 10- to 16-year-olds who viewed their mothers as more warm and accepting also saw their mothers as employing more inductive, as compared to love withdrawal and coercive (e.g., power-assertive), discipline. Among mothers primarily using induction, more maternal acceptance was linked with a stronger moral identity. Finally, Laible, Eye, and Carlo (2008) studied the effects of middle adolescents’ perceptions of parental discipline consistency, induction, and power assertion on affective and cognitive measures of conscience. As expected, lower levels of parental power assertion and higher levels of inductive reasoning were correlated with more other-oriented moral emotions. However, adolescents’ reactivity appeared to account for the findings, as effects for the different disciplinary strategies disappeared when negative reactivity was included in the analyses. Only maternal discipline consistency, not parental practices per se, was associated with their measures of moral cognition (internalized values and prosocial moral reasoning).

Evaluations of Induction Researchers have proposed that children will be more accepting of parents’ messages (and therefore internalize parental values more) when they see those messages as appropriate and fair (Grusec and Goodnow, 1994; Smetana, 1997, 2011). Accordingly, another line of research has examined whether youth view parental induction as more fair or appropriate than other discipline practices. In their aforementioned study of 10- and 16-year-olds, Patrick and Gibbs (2012) found that power assertion was rated as less appropriate and more unfair and that parental inductions (e.g., other-oriented and disappointed parental inductions combined) were seen as more appropriate and fair relative to other discipline practices. In addition, adolescents endorsed morally relevant self characteristics more when parental inductions, particularly those expressing parental disappointment, were seen as more appropriate or fair. Thus, when appropriateness ratings were added to their analyses, the importance of parents’ disappointed expectations became evident. Furthermore, children who felt more accepted 139

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were more likely to view both power assertion and induction (but not love withdrawal) as more fair (Patrick and Gibbs, 2016). Several studies have extended this research to consider whether evaluations of parental induction vary according to whether parents are responding to prosocial versus antisocial acts. For instance, Padilla-Walker and Carlo (2004) distinguished between middle adolescents’ evaluations of the appropriateness of parental power assertion (yelling and lecturing) and induction (talking), as well as praise and control, in reaction to antisocial versus prosocial behavior. Adolescents viewed yelling and lecturing as inappropriate across contexts, whereas parental induction was seen as highly appropriate only in antisocial situations. Praise is not often studied as a discipline practice, perhaps because moral development research typically focuses on responses to misbehavior. However, these researchers found that praise was rated as highly appropriate in prosocial contexts. (Research with young children has shown that unlike rewards, which may be perceived as extrinsically motivating, praise does not undermine very young children’s altruistic tendencies; Warneken and Tomasello, 2008). Padilla-Walker and Carlo (2004) further found that, except for guilt, adolescents who reported having more negative emotional responses to parental discipline also rated the discipline practice as less appropriate. Consistent with Hoffman’s (2000) claim that parental induction promotes moral development by inducing empathic guilt, adolescents who reported higher levels of guilt in response to antisocial situations viewed parents as using more induction, and they rated it as more appropriate (Padilla-Walker and Carlo, 2004). Researchers also have considered whether parents’ use of different discipline strategies and ratings of their appropriateness vary according to the transgression domain (e.g., moral, conventional, prudential, personal). In one study (Padilla-Walker, 2008), middle adolescents reported that their mothers punished more for prudential and moral than other transgressions, whereas, in keeping with the nature of the personal domain, they yelled less, talked more, and were less likely to take action for personal as compared to other types of violations. In each domain, more talking (reasoning) was associated with greater appropriateness ratings. Thus, reasoning is more effective than other parental practices in promoting moral development and is perceived as such by teenagers. Middle adolescents also viewed maternal inaction as less appropriate for moral acts, suggesting that teens believed that mothers should respond to (and not ignore) moral transgressions. Teens considered yelling and punishment as less appropriate for conventional and personal transgressions. Furthermore, children’s endorsement of personal values of honesty, kindness, and fairness were modestly and positively correlated with ratings of the appropriateness of maternal discipline. Chilamkurti and Milner (1993) studied maternal use of different disciplinary strategies and evaluation of those practices in a sample of 6- to 10-year-olds and their mothers, who were selected to be at either high or low risk for child abuse. The researchers found that both use and evaluations of disciplinary strategies varied by domain (moral, conventional, and personal) and informant. Mothers reported employing more reasoning and explanations (e.g., inductive discipline) for moral than other transgressions, more verbal force for conventional than other transgressions, and more simple statements and requests for personal transgressions. Particularly for moral transgressions, however, children’s and mothers’ reports were not congruent. Children viewed their mothers as using more physical than verbal force and in turn, more simple requests for moral transgressions than mothers reported using. Not surprisingly, high-risk mothers reported using verbal force more—and when assessing others’ disciplinary strategies, viewed power-assertive discipline as more appropriate—than did low-risk mothers. The latter viewed their discipline practices as more appropriate than did highrisk mothers.

Domain Specificity in Parental Reasoning and Responses Several researchers (Grusec and Goodnow, 1994; Maccoby, 2007; Smetana, 1997) have asserted that greater precision is needed in defining parental induction and that researchers should consider the 140

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types of explanations or reasons that parents give for different types of events or transgressions. Research indicates that children evaluate domain-appropriate explanations more positively than either domain-inappropriate or undifferentiated explanations, at least as examined in school contexts (Killen, Breton, Ferguson, and Handler, 1994; Nucci, 1984). This suggests that to be effective, parents’ explanations and reasoning should be clearly connected to the domain of the event. Several studies have focused on parent–child interactions in early childhood to better understand the types of reasons parents offer for different types of events. For instance, using naturalistic observations in the home, research has compared mother and child responses to moral as compared to other types of transgressions. An early study (Smetana, 1989b) examined responses to infants and toddlers’ (1- to 3-year-olds’) moral and conventional transgressions with naturalistic home observations occurring in sessions with mothers, either alone or with a familiar peer. Toddlers rarely responded to conventional transgressions; rather, mothers commanded children to stop the offending behavior, stated the rules, or, less frequently, highlighted the disorder their behavior caused. In contrast, moral infractions occurred almost entirely with peers and were only rarely directed towards mothers. Sequential analyses revealed two patterns of responses. In one, mothers intervened in moral transgressions by commanding the child to stop misbehaving or by physically restraining the child. In the other, the child victim first responded with emotional reactions and/or statements of injury or loss, followed by mothers’ elaborating the behavior’s negative consequences for others (“Look what you did, you hurt him”), asking the transgressor to take the victim’s perspective, or delineating whose rights took priority. The latter sequence was considered optimal for developing moral understanding, as it amplifies the child victim’s responses and provides both affective and cognitive messages about why moral transgressions are wrong (Smetana, 1989b, 1997; Smetana & Jambon, 2018). Similar results were obtained in mothers’ reports of their interventions in their 2-year-olds’ moral, prudential, and pragmatic (e.g., pertaining to practical issues) transgressions (Dahl and Campos, 2013). Consistent with Smetana’s (1989b) sequential analyses, initial interventions involved reasoning and physical restraint more for moral than for pragmatic or prudential transgressions, with mothers of older versus younger toddlers employing more reasoning. Moreover, both reasons and emotional responses were domain-specific: Mothers reported being more angry and referenced harm to others more for moral transgressions, they were more afraid and reasoned about child well-being more for prudential violations, and they reasoned about disorder or object damage more for pragmatic than for other events. Nucci and Weber’s (1995) observational study corroborated these responses for prudential events, as they found that mothers’ reasoning in response to prudential violations typically focused on safety or prudence. Building on the findings regarding emotional reactions, Dahl, Sherlock, Campos, and Theunissen (2014) examined whether mothers of 14-month-olds used different vocal tones in response to children’s moral, pragmatic, and prudential transgressions. Responses differed both when mothers responded to their own children’s transgressions as observed in the home and when mothers were asked to respond verbally to video clips depicting another child’s misbehavior. Mothers used an intense, angry (firm-stern) voice more in response to moral than other transgressions, a worried and scared voice in response to prudential transgressions, and a warm and comforting voice when responding to pragmatic (and prudential) transgressions. In a follow-up, Dahl and Tran (2016) used mothers’ vocal tones, as elicited by these video clips, to determine whether 3- and 4-year-olds could guess the type of transgression in which hypothetical protagonists were involved. Preschoolers interpreted mothers’ firm-stern vocalizations as reflecting responses to a moral transgression and their warm, comforting voices as responses to a pragmatic transgression. Furthermore, 18- to 25-month-olds (but not younger toddlers) complied more with mothers’ request not to touch a prohibited object after hearing their mother’s videotaped prerecorded prohibition regarding a moral than a pragmatic violation. These studies provide evidence that both the content of mothers’ reasoning and their emotional tone may facilitate children’s understanding of morality versus other domains of rules. A fruitful direction for 141

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future research would be to directly link variations in mothers’ responses to differences in children’s moral understanding.

Summary Many of the aforementioned studies directly compared adolescents’ evaluations of parents’ use of induction with power assertion and love withdrawal. These studies add to the research discussed earlier, where individual differences in mothers’ discipline practices, including their use of induction, have been observed with young children in laboratory and home settings. The results thus far indicate that inductive discipline following moral transgressions is used more frequently and evaluated more positively than other parental disciplinary practices. In addition, induction is used more for moral than other types of transgressions and is positively associated with different indices of moral development, including greater empathic responding and a greater self-endorsement of moral traits (e.g., moral self ). However, relatively little research on the moral self and moral motivation has considered the role of parenting, and more research is needed on the emergence of and changes in the moral self in childhood and the parenting beliefs and practices that promote its development. Research on parental reasoning following transgressions has moved towards greater specificity in defining the contexts and specific types of explanations that parents give in response to different types of transgressions. This research suggests that parents often provide morally salient explanations (e.g., focusing on others’ welfare or the unfairness caused by the act). However, parents also intervene without explanation to stop moral misbehavior and prevent prudential and moral harm, particularly with young children.

Guilt, Shame, and Psychological Control In the moral development literature, parental guilt induction has been distinguished from love withdrawal and is seen as facilitating the development of empathy for others, greater regret or reparation for causing distress, and, as a consequence, greater prosocial behavior (Hoffman, 1970, 2000). In the parenting literature, however, guilt induction is considered an aspect of psychologically controlling parenting (Barber, 1996) and thus as having negative consequences for children’s social, emotional, and moral development. Rote and Smetana (2017) examined several features of parental guilt induction to determine the conditions in which parental guilt induction is viewed as a positive, effective, and well-intended disciplinary practice. Upper middle-class, mostly European-American 8-, 12-, and 16-year-olds evaluated maternal guilt induction in response to hypothetical moral, personal, or mixeddomain transgressions. Overall, children rated guilt induction as most acceptable, most effective, least disrespectful to the child, and more well-intended (e.g., in teaching children why misbehaviors are wrong, preventing future misbehavior, and making children feel bad about their behavior) when it was applied to moral as compared to other types of transgressions. In turn, maternal guilt induction was rated as least acceptable, least effective, most disrespectful to the child, and as more intended to make children feel bad about themselves when it was used in reference to personal issues. Thus, even though children may experience guilt induction as unpleasant in the short term, children appear to understand its positive role in moral development. Moreover, parental guilt induction in response to moral as compared to the other transgressions also resulted in children’s increased guilt and shame, suggesting that such inductions have their intended effect (e.g., in promoting guilt, and thus, presumably, moral internalization). Notably, however, children’s evaluations of guilt induction became increasingly negative and perceived as less benignly intentioned with age, perhaps because of the importance of autonomy as children move into adolescence. Whereas guilt is generally defined in terms of negative evaluations of one’s behavior, shame involves negative evaluations of one’s self, leading to an inward focus and feelings of worthlessness (Tangney, 1998). In addition to manipulating the domain of the transgression, Rote and Smetana (2017) 142

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varied whether the hypothetical criticism focused on the actors’ behavior or the actor as a person. As expected, they found that the latter produced higher levels of shame, as well as increases in shame (but not guilt) from immediately before the induction. However, for the most part, youth were not more disapproving of inductions that focused on the person versus their behavior. This was surprising, given that other research shows that children demonstrate rudimentary distinctions between guilt and shame as young as the toddler years (Drummond, Hammond, Satlof-Bedrick, Waugh, and Brownell, 2017). Cross-cultural studies of shame are necessary, as the meaning and normativity of parental shaming varies by culture. Fung (1999) described shame as an important mechanism of moral internalization in Chinese culture that stems from Confucian teaching. Chinese parents socialize children to be acutely aware of others’ opinions and to avoid their disapproval; thus, shaming is a way not only to correct the child’s misbehavior but also to connect the child’s behavior to group norms. Shaming is part of the description of Chinese parenting as strict and harsh (see Chao and Tseng, 2002, for an elaboration), and in interviews with Taiwanese parents, Fung (1999) found that parents strongly endorsed shaming as a way of teaching the child right from wrong. Although shaming is frequently used in Chinese families, children do not always view it as a positive parenting practice. Helwig, To, Wang, Liu, and Yang (2014) compared Canadian and rural and urban Chinese 7- to 14-year-olds’ perceptions of parental induction with three psychologically controlling parenting practices: love withdrawal, social comparison shame (e.g., comparing the child to better-behaved peers), and shared shame (how the child’s behavior reflects on the family), each described in response to a hypothetical moral transgression. Consistent with research reviewed previously, children across settings and ages rated parental induction more positively and saw it as promoting a more internalized moral orientation than any of the psychologically controlling practices. Moreover, with age, they increasingly reasoned about induction as focusing the child on the harmful or unfair consequences of moral transgressions. In contrast, older children viewed psychologically controlling parenting as having more negative consequences for their well-being (e.g., in producing negative feelings) than did younger children. Across cultural contexts, the youngest children in the study, as well as the rural Chinese children, also viewed psychologically controlling parenting as more likely to induce behavioral compliance, although more so for both forms of shaming than for love withdrawal. As found for physical and corporal punishment (Gershoff et al., 2010; Lansford et al., 2005), however, the negative effects of psychologically controlling parenting were moderated somewhat by cultural factors. Chinese children, particularly rural ones, viewed shaming as more culturally normative, and the more normative it was seen, the less its negative effects. Whereas these studies focused on parental guilt and shame induction, other studies, particularly by Kochanska and her colleagues, have focused on guilt as a moral developmental outcome. Their research shows that temperamental fearfulness contributes to children’s feelings of guilt (Kochanska, Gross, Lin, and Nichols, 2002) and that guilt associated with transgressions moderates the effects of temperamental variables (e.g., effortful control) on disruptive behavior (including harmful behavior as well as disobedience). That is, among children who are less guilt-prone, individual differences in effortful control predict less disruptive behavior, but among those who are more guilt-prone, no associations with effortful control are found (Kochanska, Barry, Jimenez, Hollatz, and Woodard, 2009). Furthermore, as noted earlier, fearful arousal was found to moderate links between maternal power assertion and conscience, and these measures included the intensity of guilt feelings and extent of reparation described in children’s narratives (Kochanska, 1991).

Summary Much as hypothesized (Hoffman, 2000), parental guilt induction is perceived as a relatively positive and effective parenting practice when directed towards moral transgressions but less so when used 143

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with older adolescents and when directed towards personal behaviors. Parental shaming, which is seen as an important tool for moral socialization among Chinese parents, may be evaluated negatively by Chinese youth, particularly with age and as compared to parental induction. Researchers also have studied the development of guilt, as moderated by temperamental variables.

Parental Discourse, Conflict Management, and Conversations Although there has been extensive research on parents’ disciplinary practices as they bear on children’s moral development, parents and children frequently have morally laden interactions outside of discipline context. Conversations, conflicts, discussions, and reminiscences, discussed in the following sections, all provide children with a wealth of information about parents’ moral expectations, values, and norms. Parental talk rich in explanations, reasoning, and guilt induction also may facilitate the internalization of parental values. Dunn, who has extensively examined family discourse about different moral and social norms, found that morally laden conversations start as early as the second year of life and influence various aspects of children’s understanding (Dunn, 2014; Dunn and Hughes, 2014).

Conflicts and Conflict Management Mothers vary in how constructively they deal with conflicts, and individual differences in several features of mothers’ conflictive interactions with young children appear to facilitate moral development. For instance, Dunn and Munn (1987) examined mothers’ and 2- and 3-year-olds’ conversations about different kinds of family disputes. They found that, more than other types of conflicts, moral disputes elicited mothers’ explanations focusing on the consequences of children’s misbehavior—a finding that was replicated by Dahl and his colleagues (Dahl and Campos, 2013; Dahl, 2016), as discussed earlier. Moreover, moral disputes among 18-month-olds were more likely than other disputes to elicit anger and distress, and these maternal reactions were associated with 36-month-olds’ greater use of justifications for their behavior. Mothers’ perspective taking also appears to be important in facilitating moral development. Mothers who were more able to take young children’s point of view in conflicts, as coded from parents’ conversations with their 33-month-olds, had children who had stronger moral orientations at 6 to 7 years of age, as measured by greater moral and conventional reasoning and greater empathy in their reasoning about hypothetical transgressions (Dunn, Brown, and Maguire, 1995). In a prospective study, Laible and Thompson (2002) identified conflict episodes occurring in the context of home and laboratory observations with mothers and their 30-month-olds. They found that mothers who used more justifications and referred more to emotions in the context of conflicts observed in the laboratory had 3-year-olds who were better able to resist temptation to touch forbidden toys, perhaps because the experimental context was unfamiliar and children did not understand the need to follow arbitrary rules. Similar effects were not found when conflicts were observed in the home, however. Interviews with U.S. middle-class, European-American (Smetana, 1989a) and African-American (Smetana and Gaines, 1999) 10- to 18-year-olds and their parents about their everyday disagreements revealed that conflicts over moral issues were relatively infrequent and occurred primarily over interpersonal or sibling issues. Moral reasoning about conflicts declined with age in both samples. Unlike other conflicts, which typically arose directly between parents and teens, moral conflicts with parents about siblings only arose when parents were asked to adjudicate disagreements or when teens complained about parents’ unequal treatment. A similar study in Hong Kong (Yau and Smetana, 1996) found even less moral reasoning about conflicts than in the United States, although more so among Chinese adolescents in Hong Kong than in Shenzhen, Mainland China (Yau and Smetana, 2003). As moral reasoning often focused on sibling interactions, this finding may be due to the one-child policy, which, at the time, was enforced in Mainland China but not in Hong Kong. Moreover, as in the United States, the latter study showed that the frequency of moral reasoning declined with age, with more moral reasoning in pre than in early, middle, and late adolescence. In all of these studies, adolescent–parent conflicts 144

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were primarily over how much autonomy and personal freedom adolescents should have rather than over moral issues of fairness or rights. Likewise, sibling conflicts were more frequently about invasions of the personal domains than about equality and fairness ( Campione-Barr and Smetana, 2010).

Conversations and Reminiscing Because the intense emotional arousal elicited in disciplinary encounters may inhibit moral internalization or the construction of moral concepts, family conversations about past experiences, including conflicts and transgressions, may be particularly effective in facilitating moral development (Wainryb and Recchia, 2014). Indeed, revisiting moral interactions at a later time may provide children an opportunity to reflect, interpret, process, and co-construct past experiences absent the emotional heat of the original situation. Such reminiscences about the child’s (or others’) behavior can facilitate children’s understanding of motivations, emotions, and behavior (in the past as well as the present), thereby scaffolding children’s adaptive moral functioning. Consistent with this view, Laible and Thompson (2000) examined the content of parents’ discourse and found that mothers who made more frequent reference to emotions and evaluative statements in discussing past misbehavior with their 4-year-olds had children with a more internalized conscience, as indicated by greater mother-reported guilt and more resistance to temptation in a laboratory task. Similar to Dunn and Munn (1987), these researchers also found that mothers who offered more reasons for rules and statements regarding the consequences of children’s behavior in their conversations had children who did more of the same. Laible (2004b) further found that when mothers conversed more about emotions when discussing their 30-month-olds’ past misbehavior, their children expressed more concern over others’ wrongdoing and demonstrated more internalized behavior on a resistance to temptation task six months later. These studies echo findings discussed earlier (e.g., Smetana, 1989b) that indicate parental discourse that references emotions and provides morally salient explanations (e.g., regarding the consequences of moral misbehavior for others’ welfare) promotes young children’s morality. Adding a cross-cultural dimension, Miller and her colleagues (Miller, Wiley, Fung, and Liang, 1997) used ethnographic methods in a sample of 12 middle-class families, 6 each from the United States and 6 from Taipei, Taiwan, to examine parents’ personal storytelling about their 2½ -year-olds’ transgressions. The researchers extracted narrations from videotaped home observations where a family member recounted a past event in which the child committed a moral or social transgression, as identified by the storyteller’s evaluative statements and tone of voice. Chinese families were much more likely than U.S. families to narrate a story immediately after a transgression and to use the event didactically to draw out the transgression’s implications for the present or the future. The lower frequency of moral rule violations in the U.S. sample was seen as part of a deliberate strategy to downplay such events and protect the child’s self-esteem. Further evidence for this conclusion was found in Miller, Fung, Lin, Chen, and Boldt (2012), who conducted home observations with these same families when children were 3, 3½ , and 4 years of age. As expected, personal storytelling persisted as children grew older, and families continued to enact the different interpretive frameworks observed during the children’s toddlerhood: Chinese parents continued to use storytelling as a medium for instilling moral norms and promoting children’s selfimprovement, whereas U.S. parents mitigated transgressions or downplayed their significance as a way of protecting children’s self-esteem. Reminiscing about the past (rather than the present) is considered particularly important in scaffolding moral development. Therefore, Reese, Bird, and Tripp (2007) tested whether similar types of maternal utterances, such as positive or negative talk in conversations about past events, as compared to discussions about current conflicts, uniquely predicted New Zealander 5- and 6-year-olds’ moral self-development. As expected, they found significant links between emotion talk and the moral self, 145

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particularly when conversations focused on negative past events. Reminiscing about the past, however, was not uniquely predictive of the moral self when controlling for children’s language abilities and gender. These studies focused primarily on early childhood, but other researchers have focused on parent– child conversations in middle childhood and adolescence. For instance, analyses of mothers’ conversations with their 7-, 11-, and 16-year-olds about situations where children reported either harming or helping a friend demonstrated how mothers attempted to scaffold children’s moral agency, particularly in the harm contexts (Recchia, Wainryb, Bourne, and Pasupathi, 2014). Conversations with the 7-year-olds emphasized acts and reasons, whereas conversations with 11- and 16-year-olds were equally focused on the facts as well as evaluations, insights, and strategies. Discussions of harmful situations were more complex than those focused on helping; mothers did not condone children’s harmful behavior but rather used various strategies, such as discussing provocation or extenuating circumstances, to help children reconcile their harmful behavior with a positive moral conception of themselves. These findings are compatible with (and extend) Miller et al.’s (2012) conclusion that North American mothers’ moral discourse aims to promote children’s autonomy and self-esteem.

Summary Beyond the discipline context, many types of interactions with parents, including conflicts, conversations, and reminiscences, provide opportunities for moral growth. Moral development can be facilitated when parents manage young children’s conflicts by referencing emotions and providing morally salient explanations. Childhood may be a particularly important period for parental interventions in moral conflicts to have an impact, as everyday conflicts with parents over moral issues arise much less frequently during adolescence. Reminiscences, particularly about situations involving harm (as compared to helping) are thought to be important to moral development because such situations can scaffold children’s understanding of motivations, emotions, and behavior. Cultural differences have been found, however, in what mothers emphasize in their stories about children’s past misbehavior.

Future Directions in Research on Moral Development Despite the abundance of research and the many theoretical refinements discussed in the previous sections, significant gaps in the research on parenting and moral development remain. First, it should be apparent that research focuses primarily on mothering than on parenting more broadly considered. Very few studies include fathers or compare interactions with or effects of mothers versus fathers. Therefore, robust conclusions about the role of parenting in moral development await more research with fathers. In addition, and except when studies are designed to explicitly address cultural, ethnic, or socioeconomic variations, the samples used in research have been rather homogeneously white, middle-class, and North American. This is surprising, given the increased attention to contextual influences in developmental research, the variations in the types of parenting practices considered normative in different groups and cultures, and evidence that evaluations of normativeness often moderate the effects of parenting on moral development. Thus, findings need to be replicated in more socioeconomically, ethnically, and culturally diverse samples, as well as in samples varying in terms of parents’ parenting experiences. More research explicitly including judgments of the normativity of different parenting practices (as well as children’s judgments regarding their fairness or appropriateness) also would greatly expand our knowledge. Additionally, we have devoted very little attention in this chapter to the issue of gender differences. Some of the studies reviewed here did find gender differences that were not discussed in our review. 146

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However, the issue of gender differences (at least in moral reasoning), which was once highly debated (Gilligan, 1982), is now a largely settled issue (Walker, 2006), with few consistent differences evident. Likewise, the evidence for gender differences in the links between parenting and moral development are neither strong nor consistent. It is possible that as more research includes fathers, evidence of interactions between parents’ and children’s gender will emerge, but that issue awaits further investigation. The broader family context also needs to be considered. Research demonstrates the importance of sibling interactions in moral development (Dunn and Hughes, 2014); in addition, research on adolescent–parent relationships has shown that parents parent differently according to children’s ordinal position in the family (Wray-Lake, Crouter, and McHale, 2010). Research on parenting and moral development has paid very little attention to birth order, but doing so may reveal important withinfamily variations. With some notable exceptions (such as Kochanska’s and Dunn’s programmatic research), much of the research examining parenting and different facets of moral development has been cross-sectional. Nevertheless, research implicitly assumes that parenting facilitates moral development. This may be the case, but it is more likely that these are reciprocal, transactional processes, and these need to be examined and explicated in future longitudinal studies. Small variations in early development may be magnified as development proceeds and lead to different developmental pathways. Thus, more research examining such variations and developmental cascades over time would make an important contribution to the literature. Additionally, as we have documented, research increasingly is moving beyond the discipline contexts to consider how conversations and other types of interactions influence children’s moral development. More research of this type is particularly warranted. Furthermore, fundamental theoretical issues remain unresolved: What is it that parents should be trying to foster? Stemming from their different theoretical commitments, programs of research have answered this question in various ways while leaving different questions to be addressed. Studies examining behavioral measures of moral development often have focused on children’s willing compliance with parental directives, as assessed in resistance to temptation tasks where children are asked to avoid touching a desirable toy (for no apparent reason other than that the parent or experimenter says so). Learning to follow parental directives is undeniably important, particularly in early childhood, but compliance with arbitrary, primarily social-conventional norms in these experimental situations does not (at least in our view) offer a sufficient account of moral development. Compliance in and of itself is not a moral “good,” especially without considering the acts compliance dictates. Many of the studies examine compliance regarding behaviors that are primarily nonsocial (e.g., “don’t touch the forbidden object!”), but morality is typically seen as fundamentally interpersonal and involving obligations to treat others equitably and with respect and compassion rather than harmfully. Furthermore, what if parents demand compliance with injunctions to harm or exclude others, act unfairly, or deny others their rights? We doubt that most parents (or scholars) would view compliance, even committed compliance to such requests, as evidence of more mature or internalized morality. Thus, we encourage researchers to expand the types of behavioral situations used to assess children’s moral development to include a range of morally relevant situations. Comparisons of the types of parenting that are effective in different types of behavioral situations could greatly expand our understanding of moral development. Moreover, studies that focus on individual differences, even those examining associations among differences longitudinally, often do not clearly illuminate the developmental emergence of moral capacities and the normative age-related changes in children’s moral reasoning and emotion attributions. On the other hand, other research has excelled at describing normative patterns of moral and social interactions with parents and peers (Turiel, 1983; Smetana, Jambon et al., 2014). Future research could usefully combine these two approaches to identify and illuminate variations around normative pathways, as some studies have done (Ball et al., 2017; Dunn et al., 1995; Jambon and Smetana, 2018; Malti et al., 2013). 147

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In addition, research from the social domain perspective has focused increasingly on how children identify and coordinate moral versus nonmoral concerns in reasoning about complex issues, such as peer exclusion and intergroup relationships (Killen and Rutland, 2011). Our understanding of complex issues may be enhanced by considering how parenting and parental beliefs (among other factors), are associated with the different ways children come to coordinate moral and nonmoral concerns in their judgments. Also, much research has focused on children’s and adolescents’ evaluations of the legitimacy of parental authority, but the bulk of this research has focused on variations in and consequences of judgments of illegitimacy (e.g., over the boundaries of the personal domain). More attention to the antecedents and correlates of legitimacy judgments for moral versus other issues also could prove to be informative. This chapter has considered only a thin slice of contemporary research on moral development (see Killen and Smetana, 2015, for a broader review). Although a great deal of research continues to focus on moral socialization, the current trend in moral development research is towards laboratory experimental studies, particularly on topics such as children’s decisions about resource allocation, the contextual features that influence fair versus unfair allocations, and the role of intentionality and other theory-of-mind abilities in moral evaluations. In addition, neuroscience, behavioral economics, and comparative approaches to moral decision-making have become quite prevalent, and increasingly, these studies have relied on laboratory experiments that are largely decontextualized and involve children interacting around clever but unusual tasks with experimenters. The important insights gained from this research would be enhanced by a greater consideration of moral development “on the ground” (Miller et al., 2012)—for example, as studied in the interpersonal contexts where development actually occurs. Research needs to more fully embrace the complexity of the social world and children’s interactions with parents, other adults, friends, and foes as they co-construct children’s moral development.

Conclusions The research reviewed in this chapter provides a highly consistent and coherent set of recommendations about the types of parenting that promote moral development: Whenever possible, parents ought to provide justifications for their rules and expectations and avoid coercively withdrawing their love or asserting their power (except when absolutely necessary to stop their child from harming self or others). Parents should match their responses to the type (domain) of the transgression, elaborate on their reasons for different types of rules and expectations, and consider the child’s developmental level to select a disciplinary approach that will be most comprehensible to the child and the parent’s goal in childrearing. Parents ought to be responsive and consider the child’s perspective. They also should carefully calibrate their use of force versus gentleness to best fit the child’s temperament, but parents should not be afraid to express their emotional reactions (within reason), as this helps to convey their concern about the child’s behavior. Parents who discuss moral issues, past and present, in everyday conversations will help their children understand and interpret their own behavior and emotions.

Acknowledgments We are grateful to Audun Dahl and Marc Jambon for their insightful comments on this chapter.

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Parenting and Moral Development Hoffman, M. L., and Saltzstein, H. D. (1967). Parent discipline and the child’s moral development. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 5, 45–57. Horn, S. S. (2006). Heterosexual adolescents’ and young adults’ beliefs and attitudes about homosexuality and gay and lesbian peers. Cognitive Development, 21, 420–440. Horn, S. S., Szalacha, L. A., and Drill, K. (2008). Schooling, sexuality, and rights: An investigation of heterosexual students’ social cognition regarding sexual orientation and the rights of gay and lesbian peers in school. Journal of Social Issues, 64, 791–813. Hyde, L. W., Shaw, D. S., and Moilanen, K. L. (2010). Developmental precursors of moral disengagement and the role of moral disengagement in the development of antisocial behavior. Journal of Abnormal Child Psychology, 38, 197–209. Jagers, R., Bingham, K., and Hans, S. (1996). Socialization and social judgments among inner-city African American kindergartners. 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6 PARENTING TO PROMOTE RESILIENCE IN CHILDREN Ann S. Masten and Alyssa R. Palmer

Introduction Parenting has played a central role in resilience science and its applications from the earliest days of research concerned with risk and protective processes for human development (Luthar, Crossman, and Small, 2015; Masten, 2014b; Masten and Cicchetti, 2016). Neglectful, inept, and abusive parenting styles have been studied as sources of risk, trauma, and threats to positive child development, and multiple aspects of parenting, including sensitivity, warmth, monitoring, and consistent discipline, have been examined as influences on positive adaptation to adversity. In addition, intervention research has targeted diverse parenting processes, ranging from responsive caregiving and cognitive stimulation to family routines and school involvement, as a means of mitigating risk and promoting or protecting healthy development for children endangered by a wide range of adverse experiences (Masten and Cicchetti, 2016). In this chapter, we examine the evidence pertaining to parenting in resilience science and its implications for practice and policy to promote and protect human development. First, we define resilience from a developmental systems perspective to provide a conceptual framework for sections that follow. Second, we briefly summarize the historical significance of parenting in the origins of resilience science, drawing on findings from classic studies. Third, we examine the evidence on how parenting functions to protect human development in the context of risk or adversity, organized by salient roles and processes, including nurturing behaviors, attachment relationships, socialization, stress management, and the transmission of protective cultural knowledge and practices. The fourth section examines intervention research that targets parenting as a strategy for promoting resilience, offering compelling evidence to support causal models of parenting roles in resilience, as well as the importance of developmental timing and targeting. The fifth section focuses on contemporary evidence, reviewing key areas of emerging resilience science related to parenting, the neurobiology of parenting roles in resilience, intergenerational transmission processes, and efforts to integrate interventions across systems. The sixth section summarizes practical implications of the science reviewed in this chapter for practice and policy aiming to promote resilience. To conclude, we reflect on progress to date on what we know about parenting in resilience and what we can learn in the future that will advance resilience science and its applications for practice or policy.

Resilience From a Relational Developmental System Perspective Contemporary definitions of resilience in developmental science are grounded in a relational developmental systems framework (Overton, 2013, 2015). Resilience is defined as the capacity of a system 156

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to adapt successfully to challenges that threaten that system in significant ways, posing dangers to survival, development, or well-being (Masten, 2007b, 2011, 2014a, 2014b; Masten and Cicchetti, 2016). The capacity of a person to adapt depends on many interacting systems, including their own neurobiological systems (e.g., immune function, central nervous system), as well as their relationships with other people, how well the family system is functioning, and many other systems in the environment, such as health care, education, and so forth. Interactions across systems and levels shape the course of development and also change the interacting systems in a myriad of ways. As a result, resilience is dynamic—always changing—and the resilience of an individual depends on interactions with many other systems. Additionally, resilience can vary in relation to the nature of the challenges being confronted at a given point in time and in relation to different domains of adaptation. Children are living systems that develop over the life course, and their interactions with other systems will be influenced by developmental timing with respect to their individual development and the development of other important systems in their lives, including their parents. The threats posed by adversity and the capacity for adapting to these challenges also will be affected by developmental timing (Masten, 2015; Masten, Fiat, Labella, and Strack, 2015). Loss of a parent, for example, would pose far greater potential harm to an infant than an adult. Research is surging on the role of developmental timing in risk and resilience research in the animal and human literature, including attention to periods of plasticity in brain development when exposures to positive or negative experiences may have greater or more lasting consequences (Karatsoreos and McEwen, 2013; Masten, 2015; McEwen, 2016; Meaney, 2010). Family systems also develop and change over time in ways that influence the capacity of individual children or parents to adapt to challenges (Goldenberg and Goldenberg, 2013; Henry, Morris, and Harrist, 2015; Kerig, 2019; Masten and Monn, 2015; Walsh, 2016). The capabilities of a family to protect a child or a parent within the family will vary as a function of changing family membership and relationships, the development and health of individual members, the resources and experiences of the family, the supports the family can garner from the environment, and other circumstances that affect the whole family, such as economic capital. Dynamic developmental systems models of resilience in children emphasize the interdependence of resilience across systems, levels, and time (Masten, 2015; Masten and Cicchetti, 2016). The resilience of a child at a given time will depend on adaptive systems within the child, their relationships, family resilience, and other systems connected to the child and family. In addition, this perspective suggests that positive adaptation at one point in time can cascade forward in time in a child or family, as current capabilities build human, social, and economic capital for future challenges (Masten and Cicchetti, 2010; Masten and Monn, 2015). At the same time, disturbances in function in one aspect or level of adaptive function may cascade across systems and time through interactions. Family dysfunction can spill over to dysregulate the biological stress-regulation systems in children, which then could affect future learning or well-being (Shonkoff et al., 2012). Parenting plays a vitally important role in human resilience because parenting serves many functions, both in nurturing and protecting children as they develop and in fostering the development of fundamental adaptive systems that individuals utilize over the life course. Parents nurture human capital, broker social capital, monitor dangers, protect young children from harm, model and teach adaptive strategies, transmit protective cultural knowledge and practices, and in many other ways build the capacity of their children to adapt to challenges and flourish in society (Bornstein, 2015; Masten, 2014b; Masten and Monn, 2015; Walsh, 2016). Research has surged on the role of caregiving in altering brain development, gene expression, and various biological systems of stress regulation or immune function in human as well as nonhuman animal models (Hostinar, Sullivan, and Gunnar, 2014; Karatsoreos and McEwen, 2013; Meaney, 2010; Nelson, Fox, and Zeanah, 2014). General models of parenting and related family processes also delineate multiple roles, including direct effects on children (as a negative or positive influence on a specific outcome), mediating effects 157

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where parents function as conduits of negative or positive experiences, and moderating effects, where parents mitigate or exacerbate threats to a child (Becvar, 2013; Collins, Maccoby, Steinberg, Hetherington, and Bornstein, 2000; Conger et al., 1992; Cummings, 2006; Masten, 2014b; Masten and Shaffer, 2006; Walsh, 2016). Parents, for example, can promote school success by encouraging children to do their homework, mediate the impact of economic hardship on family life through its effects on their parenting behaviors, or buffer the impact of a frightening situation by providing comfort. At the same time, developmental models also recognize that parenting is influenced by myriad interactions with a particular child and the parent’s own context (Belsky and DeHaan, 2011; Bornstein, 2015, 2016; Elder, 1974/1999; Elder, Nguyen, and Caspi, 1985). In a developmental systems model, the function of one system can influence another and the effects of an intervention at one level—such as a family—can cascade to benefit (or harm) other embedded or connected systems, including children. The processes involved in cascading effects across levels in connected systems have been described by developmental systems theorists over the years (Gottlieb, 2007). In the literature on developmental psychopathology and resilience, these processes are described as “multilevel dynamics” (Masten, 2007a, 2007b; Masten and Cicchetti, 2010). Doty, Davis, and Arditti (2017) described a model of cascading resilience that focuses on parenting as a leverage point for changing children and other family members. Given the importance and multifaceted roles ascribed to parenting in resilience theory and research on child development, the resilience of parents and families becomes a key topic for research, intervention, and policy (Masten, 2016a; Masten and Monn, 2015). Similarly, there is growing recognition that communities or governments can support the resilience of families to benefit children, parents, and society (Britto, Engle, and Super, 2013; Huebner et al., 2016; Petersen, Koller, Motti-Stefanidi, and Verma, 2016).

Classic Research on Parenting in Resilience Science Parenting emerged early in the history of resilience science as a topic of central focus, both as a source of risk and as a key protective influence (Masten, 2014b). Parents were implicated in clinical and case studies, as well as early research on children affected by traumatic experiences. World War II had devastating effects on families, with millions of children exposed to danger, separation from parents, loss, and all the challenges that traumatized parents can bring home to families (Masten, Narayan, Silverman, and Osofsky, 2015). During and following the war, numerous clinicians and researchers recognized and began to study and try to mitigate the effects of war trauma on the well-being of children. They consistently observed the risk posed to development by loss of effective parenting, particularly when it persisted without meaningful care from stable caregivers. They also recognized the crucial role of parenting and close relationships in buffering stress and facilitating the recovery of children traumatized by war. A. Freud and her colleague Burlingham opened the Hampstead War Nurseries to help children and their families affected by the war. Freud realized that the setting provided an ideal situation for observational studies of children (Midgley, 2007). Many of the children were separated from families for protection during the bombing known as the Blitz, along with many other British children during the war. Freud realized that these separations, while physically protective, often took an emotional toll on children and their relationships with parents. In their book on War and Children, based on their work in the War Nurseries, Freud and Burlingham (1943) noted that “London children . . . were on the whole much less upset by bombing than by evacuation to the country as a protection against it” (p. 37). They also noted that young children in the care of their own mothers “or a familiar mother substitute” were not particularly affected by exposure to bombing. After the war ended, Freud also treated some of the child survivors of the Terezin concentration camp and published detailed observations about their adjustment (Freud and Dann, 1951). Generally, they showed marked improvements but also lingering effects that were attributed to sensitization or “scarring” by trauma. 158

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Bowlby would later analyze these and similar phenomena in his trilogy on attachment and loss (Bowlby, 1969, 1973, 1980). Shortly after the war, Bowlby was commissioned by the World Health Organization (WHO) to write a report on the mental health of children who were left homeless by the conflict, an assignment that resulted in a report translated into 14 languages (Bowlby, 1951/1966; Bretherton, 1992). To prepare the report, he interviewed a number of clinician-scholars concerned with the impact of separations on child development, including Spitz (1946). This work influenced his ideas about parenting, attachment, and loss and the role of societies in supporting parents. In the WHO report, Bowlby wrote: “If a community values its children, it must cherish their parents” (Bowlby, 1966, p. 84). Three of the individuals who later became leading pioneers in resilience science also were touched by WWII in distinctly different ways: Garmezy was an infantry soldier in Europe; Werner, as a young survivor of the bombing in Europe, was one of many children assisted by humanitarian aid after the war; and Rutter was evacuated across the ocean with his sister to America to stay safe from the bombings in England (Masten, Narayan, et al., 2015). These three were instrumental in shaping the first wave of resilience research in the 1970s, which highlighted the role of good parenting as a compensatory or protective influence against diverse hazards and risks (Masten, 2007b). Garmezy and Rutter met in 1972 at a conference in Bled, Slovenia, and subsequently spent sabbatical time together in London (1975–76) as well as the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences in Palo Alto (1979–80). At the Center, they gathered a group to work on the seminar theme of stress and coping, resulting in a highly influential book, Stress, Coping, and Development in Children (Garmezy and Rutter, 1983). Werner visited this group at the Center and subsequently published, Vulnerable But Invincible: A Study of Resilient Children (Werner and Smith, 1982), presenting major findings on resilience from their longitudinal study of a cohort of children born in 1955 on the Hawaiian island of Kauai. Garmezy wrote the foreword to this volume, noting how well the findings aligned with the conclusions emerging from the seminar. Many early resilience studies underscored risks to child development associated with marital discord and deprivation, while at the same time they highlighted the importance of high-quality caregiving, emotional support, and positive relationships with extended family, mentors, or teachers as predictors of good adjustment despite high levels of adverse life experiences or sociodemographic risk (Masten and Coatsworth, 1998). Garmezy (1983, 1985) and Rutter (1979, 1987) both observed in early reviews of the emerging evidence that the quality of parenting and emotional support from the family was associated with better outcomes among children in diverse situations of risk (Masten, Best, and Garmezy, 1990). Werner (Werner, 1993; Werner and Smith, 1982) emphasized the importance of social bonds with an extended network of “kith and kin” in the Kauai study, in a culture where households and caregiving often included multiple generations. Results of the Project Competence Longitudinal Study initiated by Garmezy in the late 1970s supported the hypothesis that parenting quality is a salient protective factor for children at risk due to high levels of cumulative adversity (Masten and Tellegen, 2012). Subsequent reviews of the literature on resilience have corroborated the importance of effective parenting in childhood for promoting competence in risky environments and its central role in buffering the consequences of stressful life experiences and socioeconomic disadvantage (Luthar, 2006; Luthar et al., 2015; Masten, 2014b; Masten and Cicchetti, 2016). Research on children exposed to war, terror, and disasters has confirmed the early-observed importance of protecting and restoring effective care and parenting during and following exposure to acute and chronic trauma (Masten, Narayan, et al., 2015). Concomitantly, there is a growing body of evidence from prevention science and intervention studies that efforts to improve or strengthen parenting skills lead to improvements in the adjustment or function of their children, just as one would expect if parenting plays a vital role as a promoter or protector of human development (Sandler, Schoenfelder, Wolchik, and MacKinnon, 2011). 159

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The study of parenting and resilience has expanded and improved in many ways over the decades that followed the initial clinical observations and empirical studies, revealing a mixture of consistency, complexities, and controversies. Advances in technology and statistics have opened new possibilities and avenues of study, yielding notable progress along with some enduring controversies in resilience science (Masten, 2014b, 2015; Masten and Cicchetti, 2016). In the sections that follow, we summarize major findings on parenting in relation to resilience in children and youth, highlighting the roles and processes involved in parenting with respect to resilience based on studies of naturally occurring resilience and interventions to promote resilience.

Roles of Parenting in Resilience Science Parenting is a complex undertaking that requires parents, as Bornstein (2015) noted, to “multitask” (p. 56). Moreover, stakeholders in childrearing, including societies, cultures, communities, children, and parents themselves, expect parents to execute a multifaceted set of roles with little or no training for a long period. The many functions involved in parenting children may not be fully appreciated until such time as parents are lost, children are removed from dangerous families, or child welfare agencies attempt to replace, restore, or improve the parenting available to a particular child. Given the many functions parents have in child development, it is not surprising to observe that numerous studies on resilience have implicated the quality of parenting available to children, both generally and with respect to specific roles. In this section, we highlight evidence from resilience research on major ways that parents promote positive outcomes in their children and nurture lifelong resilience.

Nourishing Body and Mind At the most fundamental level of caregiving, parents are expected to nurture the bodies and minds of children, to keep them alive and well in the face of threats, and to support the early developmental tasks of acquiring universal physical and cognitive skills. Broader socialization goals typically assigned to parents by cultures are discussed later, but first a child must survive, grow, and acquire basic human tools of interacting with other people and the environment. Human infants are so helpless that their survival depends on active care for a prolonged period. Caregivers are expected to provide nutrition and basic protection from physical harm to infants and young children in all cultures. Concomitantly, families and cultures or societies are expected to support caregivers in their task of nurturing and protecting children. These roles, observed across human history, were elevated to human rights when they were codified in the Convention on the Rights of the Child. The Millennium Development Goals (for 2000 to 2015) of the United Nations (UN) included the goal of lowering child mortality (under the age of 5) by two-thirds. Remarkable progress has been made in child survival in recent decades worldwide, motivating a shift to broader goals to realize developmental potential (Huebner et al., 2016). The new Sustainable Development Goals for 2030 of the UN reflect this shift. Recognizing the importance of caregivers in fostering many other aspects of human development through their interactions with young children is a more recent global phenomenon. As child survival improved, the goals of many international organizations expanded to raise the bar from surviving to positive development and thriving (Black et al., 2017; Britto et al., 2017; Huebner et al., 2016; Masten, 2014a, 2014c). For children in environments adverse to child development, including millions of children worldwide living in subsistence economies, conflict zones, or other hazardous situations, this broadening of international priorities beyond survival represents a profound shift toward a focus on resilience. In a discussion paper for the National Academy of Medicine Perspectives series, a multidisciplinary group of leading scholars in child development articulated the case for investing in young children 160

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globally to promote peace, justice, and prosperity and to build the human capital of children and societies (Huebner et al., 2016). They argued for a holistic approach to integrate services for young children and their caregivers, coordinating actions to improve the health and nutrition of parents (especially prenatal and maternal health) as well as children, and the quality of parent–child interactions. Protection from violence and support to caregivers are high priorities, along with efforts to improve the capacities of vulnerable families to address the needs of children in contexts of stress and deprivation. There is growing evidence that investing in early childhood serves broad goals for lifelong health and well-being in human development, particularly for disadvantaged and endangered children (Black et al., 2017; Huebner et al., 2016). Successful efforts often combine prenatal care, nutrition, vaccinations, other medical and dental care, and education about the needs of young children for stimulation (Britto et al., 2013, 2017). Evidence supports integrating nutrition and health programs with efforts to support parenting skills of sensitivity and stimulation in their interactions with their young children (Black and Dewey, 2014; Britto et al., 2017). A growing number of humanitarian programs now provide education for parents about the importance of talking with your child, opportunities to play, and the importance of early childhood education, along with teaching about nutrition, sanitation, and health care. They also advocate with governments to provide more parental leave as well as early childhood education for parents and their children.

Emotional Security and Physical Safety: Attachment Processes Virtually every theoretical and empirical study concerned with resilience has suggested that close relationships play a crucial role in resilience over the life span (Luthar et al., 2015; Masten, 2014b; Masten and Cicchetti, 2016). For children, the primary relationships that protect and promote development are parent–child relationships and the family system of caregiving. One of the great 20th-century contributions of developmental science to understanding human behavior and development was the articulation of attachment theory by Bowlby, Ainsworth, Sroufe, and their colleagues (Ainsworth, 1989; Ainsworth, Blehar, Walters, and Wall, 1978; Bowlby, 1969, 2008; Sroufe, 1979, 2005; Sroufe and Waters, 1977). This theory posited that a powerful adaptive system, rooted in mammalian evolution, emerges early in life as children interact with their caregivers. They proposed that infants form a special bond with their primary caregivers as an organized relational system forms in the latter part of the first year of life. This system operates to protect the young child, both physically and emotionally. Once the attachment system organizes in caregiver–infant dyads, then perceived threats by either party in an attachment relationship can trigger attachment behaviors. Infants seek proximity and comfort of attachment figures, and caregivers in an attachment relationship seek proximity and attempt to protect or comfort the child. Yet attachment relationships also promote learning and exploration in this theory. When children feel secure and safe, they will venture to explore the world. Thus, the presence of an attachment relationship functions as a “secure base” for learning. Attachment theorists also argued that responsive and sensitive caregiving led to what they described as “internal working models” of relationships that are carried forward into future relationships with other people (Sroufe, 2005; Thompson, 2013, 2015). Secure attachments in early development were posited to provide a foundation for later relationships, in effect potentiating later supportive relationships with friends, romantic partners, and other people. This theory also suggested that children would not flourish in the absence of a reliable and sensitive caregiver. Although there is extensive debate about what constitutes effective caregiving, there is little debate that neglectful or abusive care or care by continually changing caregivers (as often found in institutional care) is harmful to development (Cicchetti, 2013; Nelson et al., 2014). Studies of caregiving in the resilience literature support basic tenets of attachment theory and more generally the protective effects of a close relationship for children exposed to adversity. 161

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Moreover, the buffering effects of interactions with an attachment figure can be observed at both the behavioral and biological level. Laboratory studies of stress demonstrate that the presence of a caregiver can buffer behavioral and physiological stress reactions to frightening stimuli (Carter and Porges, 2014; Gunnar, Hostinar, Sanchez, Tottenham, and Sullivan, 2015). Proximity to caregivers and even the sound of their voices can elicit a biological response. When children hear or touch their caregivers in stress-eliciting situations, there is an increase in oxytocin (a neuropeptide that plays a role in mammalian pair bonding) and a reduction in cortisol (a stress hormone released by the hypothalamic–pituitary–adrenal axis) compared to controls (Seltzer, Ziegler, and Pollak, 2010). Multivariate studies have shown promotive and protective effects of parenting for children at risk of academic and social problems at school due to cumulative risk or adversity (Alink, Cicchetti, Kim, and Rogosch, 2009; Houston and Grych, 2016; Kim-Cohen, Moffitt, Caspi, and Taylor, 2004). Even in the situation of chronic maltreatment, positive relationships with a caring parent or other committed adult are associated with manifested resilience (Alink et al., 2009; Collishaw et al., 2007; Egeland, Carlson, and Sroufe, 1993; McGloin and Widom, 2001). In families experiencing homelessness, children are more successful in school when they have parents observed to be engaged, warm, sensitive, and encouraging to their children (Masten et al., 2014). In an observational study of parenting in the context of structured parent–child interaction tasks administered while families were residing in emergency shelters, Herbers and colleagues found that sensitive co-regulation by parents was associated with children showing on-task behavior and forecasted children’s subsequent function at school as reported by teachers (Herbers, Cutuli, Supkoff, Narayan, and Masten, 2014). This predictive effect appeared to be mediated by the child’s selfregulation skills, which also were associated with parenting quality. In their studies of Iowa farm families affected by economic hardship, Elder and Conger (2000) observed that warm and supportive parenting fostered resilience in young people during the economic crisis confronting many farm families in the 1980s. Moreover, successful youth typically were embedded in a network of social connections with intergenerational family members and people in their communities, facilitated by their parents, who often were engaged in educational, civic, and religious organizations. Research on children in war and disaster corroborates the protective influences of both physical proximity to attachment figures and close relationships with parents, although there are some interesting nuances in the findings (Masten, Narayan, et al., 2015). Research continues to corroborate the findings of classic studies that separation from caregivers is associated with worse reactions to mass trauma experiences than observed when families are not separated; consequently, restoring proximity to primary caregivers is now considered a top priority in disaster response (Federal Emergency Management Agency, 2013). Moderating effects of parenting beyond the issue of separation also have been documented in the literature on children in war and disaster (Masten, Narayan, et al., 2015). The function of caregivers can be undermined by trauma, with parents developing symptoms of depression or post-traumatic stress. Mental health problems in parents exposed to war and conflict predict worse adjustment in their children. Yet caregivers can maintain effective parenting, and evidence also suggests that when they do, children are buffered to some degree from the devastating effects of mass trauma experiences. For example, in a study of Israeli and Palestinian youth exposed to political conflict, the quality of parenting (including praise and discipline) moderated the outcome of post-traumatic stress symptoms (Dubow et al., 2012). Studies of natural and technological disasters also illustrate the key role of parents in mediating or moderating child adaptation (Masten, Narayan, et al., 2015). Positive relationships of parent and child showed protective effects for young children exposed to an earthquake (Proctor et al., 2007) and adolescents who experienced a tsunami in Sri Lanka (Wickrama and Kaspar, 2007). In their review of parenting roles related to children’s mental health in the aftermath of disaster, Cobham, McDermott, 162

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Haslam, and Sanders (2016) concluded that positive psychological adaptation in children was facilitated by supportive parent–child relationships, encouragement of emotional expression, and positive reframing (Cobham et al., 2016). However, as noted earlier, there are hints of complexity in the disaster literature. For example, in the study by Proctor and colleagues (2007), at very high levels of child exposure, the protective effects of parenting were not as strong. Moreover, in a study of children’s post-disaster functioning after a flood in Poland, investigators found that maternal overprotectiveness was related to worse post-traumatic symptoms in the children (Bokszczanin, 2008). These results suggest that there may be nonlinear patterns of association among parenting behavior, adversity, and child outcomes. Curvilinear patterns would be congruent with other findings in the parenting literature indicating that “more” of a particular parenting behavior does not always correspond to “better” parenting or outcomes for children (Bornstein and Manian, 2013). Intervention experiments in the war recovery literature also confirm the role of caregivers. Dybdahl (2001), in a rare experimental study of parenting, implemented an intervention with Bosnian families exposed to war. The intervention aimed to boost maternal warmth and support to young children ages 5 and 6 years along with providing medical care; the control group received only the medical care. The treatment group showed better maternal mental health and child physical health. Randomized controlled trials to test interventions that target parenting and parent–child relationships provide the most compelling evidence that parenting matters in resilience. Many of the most successful prevention trials in the developmental literature have targeted parenting among children exposed to risky environments, deprivation, or adverse life experiences. These are discussed in the section on intervention.

Stress Management and Inoculation Parents are expected to protect their children from danger, but this does not mean preventing all exposures to adversity and stress. Adaptive systems, including the systems that protect children as they navigate through life, require experience to develop. The immune system requires exposure to challenges, including vaccinations, to develop protective antibodies and adaptive functionality (Abbas, Lichtman, and Pillai, 2016). Although parents must protect children from dangerous pathogens, children need some exposure to dirt and biological challenges for their immune systems to optimize for a particular environment. Children are vaccinated to stimulate the immune system with a milder form of a dangerous pathogen so the immune system acquires adaptive antibodies to a specific danger. Timing also matters, in that exposures early in development can have markedly different effects than later exposures. Growing up on a farm exposed to microorganisms connected to animals and dirt is protective for asthma and some allergies, whereas adult exposures could cause serious allergic reactions (Guerra and Martinez, 2008; Okada, Kuhn, Feillet, and Bach, 2010; von Mutius and Radon, 2008). Similarly, children need experience managing adversity to develop effective adaptive skills at multiple levels, neurobiological to social (Masten and Cicchetti, 2016). Parents can and often deliberately do provide children with exposures to manageable challenges that help them learn conscious skills for managing the expectable challenges of life, including situations that produce stress, fear, anxiety, anger, disappointment, frustration, and other unpleasant reactions to threats and challenges. At the same time, at an unconscious level, the neurobiological systems that regulate these reactions to threats are also changing in adaptive ways, most particularly the hypothalamic–pituitary–adrenal system that regulates stress (Blair and Raver, 2016; Hostinar et al., 2014; Lupien, McEwen, Gunnar, and Heim, 2009). Animal models of this system indicate that repeated exposures to moderately stressful experiences can have salutary effects on future adaptation to stressors (Parker and Maestripieri, 2011). 163

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Clearly, overwhelming stress is harmful to development in multiple ways, including healthy brain development (Blair and Raver, 2016; Lupien et al., 2009). However, preventing any exposure to mild or moderate stressors would also compromise development, just in different ways. There is growing recognition that parents can be overprotective, so that the capacity of their children to manage psychosocial as well as physical adversities is compromised. An important function of parenting may be to provide developmentally, contextually, and child-personalized “doses” of exposure to stress to facilitate coping skill development (Skinner and Zimmer-Gembeck, 2007, 2016; Zimmer-Gembeck and Skinner, 2016). Contemporary concerns in the media about “helicopter parents” express the idea of risk in overdoing protection as a parent. The resilience literature suggests that parents often strive to prepare their children for the adversities expected in their environment. For example, parents of children who will likely face discrimination on the basis of ethnicity attempt to prepare their children through teaching them how to handle specific situations and also by instilling ethnic pride, discussed further later. Parents of children who live in chronic conflict zones as well as disaster-prone areas also train their children for safety, preparing family emergency plans, for example, or “go bags” (Masten, Narayan, et al., 2015).

Socialization Parents are expected to socialize their young children for life in society and the contexts in which they will grow up (Bornstein, 2015). Many processes are involved in socialization, including direct teaching; modeling desired behavior; discipline; maintaining family rules, roles, and routines; monitoring; and social regulation. Socializing children in the context of adversity, particularly the enduring hardships associated with poverty, discrimination, family or neighborhood violence, and political conflict, poses enormous challenges for parents. Yet many parents in these difficult situations manage to rear their children effectively for success in school, work, community life, and rearing their own children later in life. In the context of family life, parents establish and maintain rules and routines that serve to support well-being and socialization in the family system as a whole and facilitate family adaptation to adversities (Fiese, 2006; Masten, 2014b; Pratt, 1976; Walsh, 2013). Routines around the daily-life maintenance functions of eating, sleeping, health care, home management, and so forth, as well as routines of religious and other cultural practices, are posited to maintain the cohesion and stability of the family as a system and support individual child development. Fiese (2006) studied the complex rules and roles embedded in family mealtime routines, and evidence supports the importance of regular mealtimes for both child competence and marital happiness. Ferretti and Bub (2014) explored the role of family routines in a Head Start population of preschoolers where children from families with consistent routines had improved self-regulation and increased cognitive abilities. Acute and chronic disruptions of families by divorce, illness, death, homelessness, war, disaster, or other adversities take a toll on these routines. Restoring routines of family life, or establishing new routines when that is not feasible, is viewed as a critically important recovery process in disparate literatures, ranging from family therapy (Masten, 2016b; Walsh, 2016) to war recovery (Masten, Narayan, et al., 2015). In refugee camps for survivors of war and disaster, humanitarian activities often are directed at restoring family routines as well as opportunities to engage in other childhood routines, such as play or school (Masten, Narayan, et al., 2015). Another striking example is provided by the work of Boss (2006) to elucidate strategies for promoting resilience in situations of what she termed “ambiguous loss.” Ambiguous loss refers to situations where a loved person is gone without the closure provided by certainty about what happened. Examples include disappearances of planes or ships, disasters where bodies cannot be recovered (such as 9/11), and missing-in-action soldiers. One of the resilience factors Boss delineated in these situations is the reconstruction of family rituals and routines. 164

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In addition to their roles in maintaining family systems, parents serve as external regulators of arousal, affect, and behavior in individual children until such time as children can regulate themselves (Beeghly and Tronick, 2011; Masten, 2014b; Thompson, 2015; Tronick and Beeghly, 2011). Parents soothe upset children, stimulate laughter, set limits on aggression, and help children to verbalize frustration instead of throwing a tantrum. Sensitive co-regulation helps children modulate affect and stress. Over time, many such interactions between parent and child are believed to scaffold the development of a child’s capacity for self-regulation. Tronick and Beeghly (2011) described how infants learn from many brief interactions involving an emotional disturbance and then the reestablishment of equilibrium via parentally scaffolded affect regulation and problem-solving. This process subsequently shapes the dyadic parent–child relationship. Dyadic synchrony in which children and caregivers are affectively and behaviorally in tune with each other facilitates the development of social skills and emotion regulation, particularly for those at risk. Parent–child relationships that are more “rigid” in their interactions can compromise the development of self-regulation and may contribute to the development of psychopathology (MacPhee, Lunkenheimer, and Riggs, 2015). Morris and colleagues (Morris, Silk, Steinberg, Myers, and Robinson, 2007) proposed that three additional processes are also involved in parental influence on child regulation: observational learning from parents, parent coaching and reactions, and the emotional climate in the family. Evidence has accumulated to support and expand their model (Morris, Criss, Silk, and Houltberg, 2017). Parents play a role in socializing children around the experience of particular emotions and their appropriate expression. Positive parenting practices and positive emotional environments support resilient outcomes, including more positive child affect, more prosocial skills, fewer externalizing issues, and higher social-emotional competence overall (Brophy-Herb et al., 2011; Labella, Narayan, and Masten, 2016; McCoy and Raver, 2011; Perlman, Cowan, Gewirtz, Haskett, and Stokes, 2012). Positive and supportive environments may be particularly important for families facing adversity due to the stress-engendered risks for higher negative affect, lower positive emotion socialization, reductions in self-regulation, and mental health problems, such as depression (Brophy-Herb et al., 2011; England and Sim, 2009; Zalewski et al., 2012). Patterns of parenting related to warmth and structure have been examined for decades in the concept of parenting styles, inspired by Baumrind on patterns of interaction between parents and their children (Baumrind, 1966, 1971; Maccoby and Martin, 1983; Steinberg, 2001). Authoritative parenting styles, characterized by a combination of high warmth, structure, and expectations for children, often have been associated with competence and resilience of children in families facing adversity (Masten and Coatsworth, 1998). However, work on parenting styles highlights the importance of context for defining “authoritative parenting” and the differential significance of parenting style (e.g., firmness versus warmth) for different aspects of child functioning. Parents may shift their behavior in reaction to situations of life-threatening danger. In such circumstances, parents may exhibit high levels of strictness, monitoring, or control usually associated with authoritarian rather than authoritative style (DuMont, Ehrhard-Dietzel, and Kirkland, 2012). Yet their warmth and sensitivity remain, along with high expectations for the success of their children. Numerous studies suggest that parents can mitigate risks for antisocial and drug-related problems through monitoring their children and knowing their whereabouts and friends, especially when parents have a positive relationship with their children (Dishion and McMahon, 1998; Hardaway, SterrettHong, Larkby, and Cornelius, 2016; Stattin and Kerr, 2000). A study of African-American girls and their mothers provided evidence that a strong mother–daughter relationship can moderate the influence of negative peer norms and reduce risky sexual activity in adolescents (Emerson, Donenberg, and Wilson, 2012). Additionally, strong parent–child relationships can protect children from the negative outcomes associated with exposure to community violence (Gorman-Smith, Henry, and Tolan, 2004; Hardaway, McLoyd, and Wood, 2012; Labella and Masten, 2017). Interventions, such as The Strong 165

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African-American Families Program (SAAF; Brody et al., 2006), have successfully targeted monitoring as a strategy to reduce risky behaviors and promote resilience among youth, in this case combined with clear communication of expectations and ethnic socialization. In the successful SAAF prevention trial, ethnic socialization was included as a target because evidence indicated that racism could contribute to substance use (Brody et al., 2006) and also because research on naturally occurring resilience among disadvantaged African-American children suggested that their parents prepared them to handle the challenges of racism in American society (Hill and Tyson, 2008; McLoyd, 1998). Parents also can promote positive ethnic identity, which is associated broadly with competence in development and shows protective effects in some studies (Rivas-Drake et al., 2014). Positive ethnic identity shows protective effects for urban adolescent males of African-American or Latino heritage (Williams, Aiyer, Durkee, and Tolan, 2014). Research on acculturation processes among immigrant youth also indicates that positive ethnic identity has protective effects on psychological well-being and adjustment (Motti-Stefanidi, 2015; Umaña-Taylor et al., 2014). Burt, Simons, and Gibbons (2012) suggested that parents can promote resilience for children who know they will face ethnic discrimination by reinforcing a positive identity and teaching their children about bias, what to expect, and how to respond. It is important to note, however, that although parental socialization around ethnic pride is promotive, it is possible that attuning children to biases could have negative consequences (Dunbar, Leerkes, Coard, Supple, and Calkins, 2017).

Transmitting Cultural Beliefs and Practices That Enhance Resilience Parents transmit many ideas, rituals, and practices to their children from their cultural heritages that could contribute to resilience, including values, family routines, and religious or spiritual traditions (Bornstein, 2012; Harkness and Super, 2012; Legare and Harris, 2016; Masten, 2014b). The influences of culture on resilience were neglected for a long period in the early history of resilience science (Luthar, 2006; Masten, 2014b). However, that neglect is giving way as scholars begin to focus on the ways that culture can influence resilience (Masten and Cicchetti, 2016; Ungar, Ghazinour, and Richter, 2013; Wachs and Rahman, 2013). Parents model and also actively teach their children about the cultural beliefs and practices of their ethnic or religious heritage (Harkness and Super, 2012; National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, 2016). These ideas and practices include concepts of spirituality, family, and community; ways of celebrating, mourning, and childrearing; and self-regulation practices such as prayer or meditation. Cultural beliefs and practices can provide a sense of continuity, coherence, connectedness, hope, positive identity, cultural identity, and meaning in life (Cabrera and the SRCD Ethnic and Racial Issues Committee, 2013; Crawford, Wright, and Masten, 2006; Kağitçibaşi, 2012; Motti-Stefanidi, 2014, 2015). The roles of cultural beliefs and practices for resilience have gained increasing attention in research on children and families in difficult situations of political conflict, poverty, and migration. PanterBrick and colleagues studied resilience in Afghanistan, observing the importance of Afghan values of faith, family unity, service, effort, morals, and honor for surviving the prolonged years of turmoil and danger in that country (Eggerman and Panter-Brick, 2010; Panter-Brick, Goodman, Tol, and Eggerman, 2011). Investigators affiliated with the Resilience Research Center in Halifax elucidated diverse cultural beliefs and practices associated with resilience in countries around the world (Ungar, 2012). For example, parents in Yoruba and Nigeria—an area where food availability often fluctuates—promote the ability to delay gratification, creativity, and proper etiquette by teaching specific culturally appropriate interactions around food (Cabrera and Leyendecker, 2017). A number of studies have implicated a sense of family orientation or obligation, or “familism,” as a protective influence against risky behavior (Cabrera and Leyendecker, 2017; Cabrera et al., 2013). 166

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Some studies of adaptation and development of immigrant youth have revealed an “immigrant paradox” where the first generation appears to be healthier or more successful than later generations (García Coll and Marks, 2012). Although this phenomenon does not occur consistently (MottiStefanidi, 2014), one of the suggested explanations for the resilience of the first generation is that protective cultural traditions and practices carried into a new country and cultural context may be “lost” over time as successive generations acculturate (García Coll and Marks, 2012; Marks, Ejesi, and García Coll, 2014). The idea that cultural beliefs and practices can serve promotive and protective roles does not mean that all cultural practices are promotive and protective (Crawford et al., 2006; Masten, 2014b). In some cultures, parents may transmit practices that promote risk or interfere with resilience of individuals, families, or communities. Some cultural practices can hinder cognitive development (e.g. never talking to children), favor one gender over another (e.g., forbidding girls to go to school), engender violence, (e.g., condoning rape or domestic violence), or impair health (e.g., genital mutilation or sexual practices that spread HIV). Nonetheless, many cultural traditions, particularly the ceremonies and rituals for coping with loss, tragedy, and other vicissitudes of life, have endured because they provide comfort, guidance, or hope, facilitating coping with adversity. Moreover, even when cultural practices or beliefs do not support adaption or recovery from trauma, interventions designed to promote resilience must take cultural perspectives and differences into account.

Intervention Research on Parenting for Resilience Interventions to promote resilience often have focused on parenting. This is not surprising, given the centrality of parenting in resilience theory and research. Experimental intervention studies provide a powerful test of the causal models central to resilience theory (Masten, 2007b, 2014b). Multiple aspects of parenting have been targeted directly or indirectly by interventions intended to help children by protecting or improving the parenting available to them (Doty et al., 2017; Sandler et al., 2011; Toth, Gravener-Davis, Guild, and Cicchetti, 2013). Some of these interventions are designed to promote or protect parenting in families at risk from particular adversities, such as maltreatment, bereavement, or divorce. Some focus on parenting in situations known to pose general risks for children, such as foster care, migration, or natural disasters. Still others target specific outcomes in the children or youth, such as reducing antisocial behavior, substance abuse, or promoting school readiness. Resilience frameworks for intervention suggest that there are three basic strategies to improve adaptation of individuals whose development is threatened by adversity or disadvantage, focusing on risk, resources, or adaptive systems (Masten, 2011, 2014b). Parenting interventions can be considered from this perspective as well, depending on the target for change. Parent-focused interventions could attempt to prevent risks or reduce stress experienced by parents that can undermine parenting, boost resources that can support or enhance parenting, bolster or mobilize adaptive systems involving parents, or some combination of the three basic approaches. In this section, we highlight research on interventions that illustrate one or more these approaches to promoting resilience in children by influencing the parenting they receive.

Risk-Focused Strategies to Address Conditions that Harm or Interfere with Parenting Parents who are overwhelmed by current adversity (e.g., substance abuse, illness, a mental health crisis, violence in the home, violence in the community) may not be able to fulfill the duties and expectations of parents in their family or culture. Extended family, friends, religious communities, and neighbors may step in informally to assist. However, parents in these situations can be isolated, 167

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particularly in low-income families headed by a single parent. Communities in the United States and other countries have developed interventions to support parents struggling to care for their children. These include services that provide caregiving respite to parents, such as crisis nurseries, and emergency social services for parent mental health care. Although there are many examples of efforts to address risks to parenting, one of the best studied is the threat of parental depression. The threat of maternal depression, and postpartum depression in particular, to parenting and consequently to children has been recognized for years. Maternal depression is viewed as an indicator of multiple risks because it is correlated with many other risk factors (Wachs and Rahman, 2013). Threats related to maternal depression include reduced breastfeeding, impaired responsiveness, lower maternal warmth, harsher and less positive parenting, neglect, and child maltreatment. As evidence mounted on depression as a risk factor for parenting and child development, it received increasing attention (England and Sim, 2009; Goodman and Gotlib, 1999; Goodman et al., 2011). Younger children are particularly vulnerable to the effects of maternal depression (Weinberg and Tronick, 1998), which is alarming given that the Centers for Disease Control estimates that one in nine mothers is at risk for postpartum depression (Ko, Rockhill, Tong, Morrow, and Farr, 2017). Interventions to treat parental depression lower the risk of harm to their children (Compas et al., 2011; Cuijpers, Weitz, Karyotaki, Garber, and Andersson, 2015). There also is evidence that maternal depression can be effectively treated in low- and middle-income countries with low-cost interventions (Wachs and Rahman, 2013). This is particularly noteworthy, given that mothers in poverty and social disadvantage experience high rates of depression. With mounting evidence on maternal depression as a threat to child development in addition to its risks for mothers, there is an increasing effort to screen for and treat depression among pregnant and postpartum women (O’Connor, Rossom, Henninger, Groom, and Burda, 2016). A consensus study under the auspices of the U.S. National Academies (England and Sim, 2009) recommended that the problem of depression in parents be viewed as a priority for the nation and that research be expanded to improve the evidence on the effects of depression in parents and strategies for effective screening, treatment, and prevention. The report called for more integrated intervention and treatment approaches that focus not just on depressive symptoms but also parenting skills, comorbid issues such as trauma or substance use, and current experiences of risk and adversity. These integrative interventions are recommended because evidence indicates that treating maternal depression, even with a successful reduction or remission of symptoms, does not necessarily translate to better parenting outcomes.

Interventions to Boost Resources and Skills for Parenting Efforts to improve the resources and skills of parents to enhance their parenting have taken many forms. These often include parent education efforts, for example, aiming to teach parents how to discipline or monitor their children more effectively, or the importance of reading and talking to children for their development. Humanitarian efforts in low- and middle-income countries often provide parents with information and training on methods to stimulate the development of their children as well as methods to keep them healthy (Engle et al., 2011; Yousafzai, Yakoob, and Bhutta, 2013). Landmark intervention studies to promote child development through nutritional supplementation and stimulation have shown that nutrition and stimulation have enduring independent and complementary effects (Walker, Chang, Powell, and Grantham-McGregor, 2005). Similar federally funded programs exist in the United States in an attempt to bolster resources for at-risk families, and ultimately improve parenting as well as child functioning. There are food supplement programs (e.g., SNAP, WIC, the National School Breakfast and Lunch Program) and housing supports (e.g., Tenant-Based Rental Assistance, Project-Based Rental Assistance, Housing Choice Voucher Program) that help families find and maintain homes. Temporary Assistance for Needy 168

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Families (TANF) also provides a variety of family services, such as giving monetary supplements, providing free childcare, educating parents, providing job training, and supplying transportation assistance (National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, 2016). In addition to providing for families’ basic needs, national public health initiatives have historically played a substantial role in boosting parent knowledge—and thus parenting and child outcomes— through public education campaigns and programs. Public education campaigns, for example, to encourage child passenger safety, safe sleeping positions for infants (“Back to Sleep”), and eliminating smoking or drinking during pregnancy, historically have been successful. Their success is attributed to messages that target straightforward behavioral change, consistently reinforced and presented to the public through multiple media outlets and other trusted sources. Other private and public organizations (e.g., ZERO TO THREE, Centers for Disease Control) have attempted this same educational approach with success in increasing positive parenting behaviors. For example, the “Period of Purple Crying Program” educated parents about normal developmental crying periods and observed subsequent reductions in shaken baby syndrome and maltreatment (National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, 2016). In addition to national public service campaigns, numerous efforts have been made to improve supports to parents to facilitate successful child outcomes. For example, school engagement by parents is consistently related to school readiness and functioning of children. Parent involvement in homework, their facilitations of learning opportunities, and how often they have conversations with children about school are related to higher academic achievement (Fantuzzo et al., 2013). Many interventions target these outcomes by providing parents with learning activities and games to participate in at home. Other interventions aim to foster parent–teacher relationships through regular meetings, conversations about behavioral management methods, and education about learning opportunities at home and at school (National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, 2016).

Interventions to Improve or Mobilize Adaptive Systems That Involve Parenting Interventions also target the quality of parent–child interactions, attachment relationships, and family systems in an effort to change the most salient protective processes related to parenting that are implicated in the resilience literature. These interventions implicitly or explicitly represent tests of theory or hypotheses on the protective influence of the change target. One of the most fundamental interventions to boost parenting available to children is restoring or replacing a family for a child who has lost effective caregiving due to death, illness, incarceration, institutionalization, or separation. Foster care, adoption, and many other child welfare systems were developed to address these needs. International adoption of institutionalized children has shown success as an intervention to restore family-based care to children, particularly when children are adopted at young ages (Rutter, Sonuga-Barke, and Castle, 2010; van IJzendoorn et al., 2011). Clinical case studies also illustrate the power of adoption by a loving and well-matched family to facilitate resilience (Masten and O’Connor, 1989). Research also supports the advantage of foster care over institutional care. In a compelling demonstration of the relative benefits of foster care compared to the institutional care in Romania at the time, the Bucharest Early Intervention Project showed that children placed in foster homes with trained caregivers had better development in multiple domains, including cognitive function, brain development, and biological stress response systems (Nelson et al., 2014; McLaughlin et al., 2015). Some effects were dependent on age, suggesting sensitive periods in early development where responsive caregiving is particularly impactful. Research also has demonstrated that the quality of foster parenting matters. Experiments to improve the quality of parenting by foster parents have successfully tested models of change where the 169

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intervention improves parenting with beneficial effects on children. Fisher, Van Ryzin, and Gunnar (2011) showed that training foster parents resulted in better parenting and also normalized biological stress-regulation patterns in foster children. Dozier and colleagues developed and tested the Attachment and Biobehavioral Catch-Up (ABC) Intervention, demonstrating that foster parents benefitted from training on ways to nurture and regulate their children (Dozier et al., 2006; Dozier, Peloso, Lewis, Laurenceau, and Levine, 2008). The ABC intervention developed by Dozier is grounded in attachment theory, with the goal of improving the relationship of vulnerable infants and toddlers with their caregivers (Dozier and Bernard, 2017). This intervention focuses on improving parenting sensitivity as a strategy for improving the quality of parent–child attachment and child regulatory capabilities associated with sensitive caregiving at both a biological and behavioral level. Typically, the intervention involves ten sessions of home visiting designed to provide in vivo sensitivity training for parents. Results from multiple studies support the ABC model of change and its efficacy, which supports attachment theory suggesting that sensitive parenting and secure attachment are protective factors for resilience. Other relational interventions designed to enhance attachment relationships and the quality of parent–child interactions for families at risk include Child-Parent Psychotherapy (CPP, including variations for infants and toddler-age children; Lieberman and Van Horn, 2011) and Parent–Child Interaction Therapy (PCIT; Funderburk and Eyberg, 2011). CPP and PCIT have shown efficacy in randomized controlled trials in families at risk for child maltreatment (Chaffin et al., 2004; Thomas and Zimmer-Gembeck, 2011; Toth and Gravener, 2012). These interventions focus on improving sensitivity and other aspects of parenting theoretically related to the development of attachment security in young children. Many parenting interventions designed to prevent behavior problems in children have focused on improving parent management skills, based on behavioral theories of change and social learning theory. Patterson, Forgatch, and their colleagues developed the Oregon Model of Parent Management Training (PMTO) intervention which has shown efficacy in randomized controlled trials (RCTs) designed to change parenting behavior to improve outcomes among children at risk for behavior problems, particularly in the externalizing domain (Forgatch and Gewirtz, 2017; Patterson, Forgatch, and DeGarmo, 2010). This method of intervention, focused on parenting skills (increasing problemsolving abilities, positive involvement, and skill encouragement while decreasing inept/coercive discipline), has shown impressive growing and spreading effects over time, with benefits observed in multiple members of the family and multiple domains of outcomes (Patterson et al., 2010). These results align with a cascading resilience model described earlier (Doty et al., 2017). The Incredible Years program was designed to improve parenting among younger children, based on models and methods similar to PMTO (Leijten, Raaijmakers, Orobio de Castro, van den Ban, and Matthys, 2017; Webster-Stratton, 1987). This program has shown effectiveness for changing parenting and reducing child behavior problems in clinical treatment studies as well as prevention research (Leijten et al., 2017; Sandler et al., 2011). In a prevention study of families with children enrolled in Head Start, parents randomly assigned to the Incredible Years program (8 to 12 group sessions) showed significant effects on parenting and child behavior after one year compared to a no-intervention control group (Reid, Webster-Stratton, and Beauchaine, 2001). Meta-analysis of this program in Europe concluded that the program improves parent use of praise and reduces some negative parenting behaviors, with beneficial effects on conduct and attentional problems in children (Leijten et al., 2017). Interventions have also focused on changing processes in the family system as a strategy for promoting resilience in children (Sandler, Ingram, Wolchik, Tein, and Winslow, 2015; Walsh, 2016). There is a long history of family-focused intervention in the family therapy field, although there are few randomized controlled trials testing their specific effects on family function or parenting to enhance resilience of children and youth (Goldenberg and Goldenberg, 2013; Masten and Monn, 2015). These 170

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programs often target family communication, emotional climate, control, identity, cohesion, and routines, as well as specific parenting skills (Henry et al., 2015; Walsh, 2016). Fiese (2006), as noted earlier, emphasized the importance of family routines and rituals for child development. She observed that a number of family interventions, such as the Nurse-Family Partnership (discussed later) include a focus on restoring or establishing family routines. Maintenance and restoration of family routines also have been implicated in theory, research, and practice on families adapting well to the adversities that disrupt family life, including war and disaster (Masten, Narayan, et al., 2015).

Interventions That Combine Strategies to Alter Risk, Resources, and Protective Processes Many interventions involving parents that are designed to promote child resilience incorporate multiple strategies and targets for change. These include many of the interventions noted earlier: humanitarian programs in low-income countries that target stimulation along with health, home visiting programs for high-risk or vulnerable families, programs for families experiencing death or bereavement, and interventions to prevent conduct disorders and substance abuse. Home visiting programs are popular and effective (Howard and Brooks-Gunn, 2009; Sandler et al., 2011). The best-known of well-validated programs is the Nurse-Family Partnership (Olds, 2006). In this program, trained nurses visit first-time mothers during pregnancy through the first two years of the child’s life to provide support and education. This intervention not only focuses on physical health but also provides parent skill training and information, as well as access to a variety of community resources including parent social support. Another example is provided by the New Beginnings program, which has shown efficacy over long-term follow-ups of the families that participated in this intervention for divorce (Sandler et al., 2015; Sigal, Wolchik, Tein, and Sandler, 2012; Wolchik et al., 2002). It was designed to help families with 9- to 12-year-old children where the parents were divorcing. The randomized preventive intervention compared parent-only group intervention, a parent group combined with a child group intervention, and a control group limited to education on divorce. Results show lasting effects of the parent group, which focused on improving parent–child relationships, discipline strategies, engaging fathers, and reducing interparent conflict. Positive effects of the parent and parent-plus-child conditions were sustained over time and presented clear evidence that the effects of the intervention were mediated by improvements in parent–child relationships and discipline in the families. A final example illustrates a combined approach and a resilience perspective informed by cultural sensitivity. Familias Unidas is a multilevel family-centered intervention designed to prevent problems and promote resilience of youth in Hispanic families (Coatsworth, Pantin, and Szapocznik, 2002; Pantin et al., 2003). The goal of the program is to enhance parenting skills and knowledge, reduce risks, and boost protective systems in the families of young people at risk for substance abuse and other risky behavior problems. The intervention was grounded in a socioecological model of development that was guided by a multiple-level and multiple-domain approach, as well as efforts to change interactions in multiple systems of family, school, and peer interactions. The intervention also was informed by research on acculturation in these families. Research by the original group and other investigators support this program’s efficacy (Molleda et al., 2016; Perrino et al., 2014; Sandler et al., 2011). The growing body of intervention research focused on parenting to enhance resilience of children in high-risk families or situations offers compelling support for the mediating and moderating roles of parenting for child resilience. These studies also underscore the importance of developmental timing and targeting. Results of these successful interventions, particularly in randomized controlled trials that show change in the targeted process, have translational implications for practice and policy. 171

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Emerging Research on Parenting in Resilience Research on resilience in human development continues to expand rapidly (Masten and Cicchetti, 2016). Many advances in resilience science broadly are affecting research more specifically focused on parenting. In this section, we highlight exciting areas of emerging research that promise to advance theory and understanding about the potential roles of parenting in resilience and further inform applications of this knowledge to efforts to promote positive development in children threated by adversity.

The Neurobiology of Resilience Research on the neuroscience and biology of resilience has expanded dramatically along with advances in technologies for studying neurobiological processes (Karatsoreos and McEwen, 2013; Kim-Cohen and Turkewitz, 2012; Masten and Cicchetti, 2016). These advances include research on the neurobiological processes underlying adaptive systems, such as caregiving; how processes experienced prenatally or postnatally interact with individual contexts to alter neurobiological functions; and the moderating role of individual differences measured at a biological level, such as genes or neuroendocrine function. The effects of parenting often are central in this work. Meaney and his colleagues demonstrated the power of parenting behaviors in an animal model to alter development and gene expression (Meaney, 2010). Similarly, research with primates by Suomi (2006, 2011) demonstrated at behavioral and biological levels how good caregiving could buffer stress responses in developing monkeys. Cross-fostering studies are particularly compelling demonstrations of gene–experience interactions, showing how “foster” mothers could alter the development of genetically sensitive mammalian pups or monkey infants. Research also expanded on the biological processes underlying the observed buffering of stress by a caregiver that was initially observed at a behavioral level. Increasing evidence in animal models and humans has delineated the moderating effect of a caregiver on stress and immune function at a biological level (Hostinar et al., 2014). Concomitantly, research on the “biochemistry of love” has shown how oxytocin and vasopressin influence social affiliation and attachment behavior in animals and humans (Carter and Porges, 2014; Feldman, 2019). Work on gene–environment interaction and on epigenetics has illuminated some of the potential processes by which the mediating and moderating influences of parents on children observed at a behavioral level may occur (Masten and Cicchetti, 2016). This body of research is burgeoning but still in its early stages, with many inconsistencies in methods and findings. Nonetheless, it is clear that genetic variation and changes in gene expression are implicated in risk and resilience of parents and their children as individuals and in the consequences of their interactions. Brody and colleagues have shown, for example, moderating effects of their preventive interventions for African-American families on genetic risk for problem behaviors in adolescents (Brody, Beach, Philibert, Chen, and Murry, 2009; Brody, Chen, and Beach, 2013). Variations in sensitivity to experience indexed at the genetic level hold keen interest in research on risk and resilience (Belsky and van IJzendoorn, 2015; Karatsoreos and McEwen, 2013). Epigenetic research is particularly exciting because gene expression, including measurable short or long-lasting changes in methylation and RNA, could be targets for intervention. Such changes are also intriguing because they hold the possibility for intergenerational transmission (Roth, 2013; Szyf and Bick, 2013). Altering gene expression theoretically could account for moderating effects of parenting on development, which could have cascading consequences on near-term and lifelong adaptation of their children and future generations. Another growing area of resilience research combines observations of parent–child behavioral interactions with simultaneous assessments of biological functioning. The goal is to elucidate the 172

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processes in which parental biological and behavioral co-regulation influences the development of child self-regulation. For example, in a group of low-income parents and their children, Morris and collogues (Cui, Morris, Harrist, Larzelere, and Criss, 2015) found that within-dyad and between-dyad positive affect was associated with more adaptive adolescent physiological regulation. Parasympathetic physiological regulation is best understood in the context of social interactions, and is theorized to be essential for the development of adaptive social engagement and emotion regulation. Better physiological regulation is often related to more positive child outcomes and emotion regulation abilities. More consistent positive behavioral synchrony between parents and children has also been related to adaptive parental parasympathetic physiological regulation and ultimately more adaptive parenting behaviors in at-risk groups (Giuliano, Skowron, and Berkman, 2015; Skowron, Cipriano-Essel, Benjamin, Pincus, and Van Ryzin, 2013). These examples provide just a small sample of the expanding research on biobehavioral processes involved in parenting and resilience. We anticipate rapid growth in studies linking biological changes and processes to the elucidation of how parenting matters for child development.

Cultural and Societal Contributions to Parenting Resilience Research on resilience also is rapidly expanding to consider how the resilience of children is influenced by culture, community, and society (Masten, 2014a, Ungar, 2012; Ungar et al., 2013; Vindevogel, 2017; Wachs and Rahman, 2013). Many of these processes are mediated by parenting because parents are conduits of culture and make choices that influence the exposure of children to diverse people, religion, or media, as well as the contexts in which children grow up. The Resilience Research Center in Halifax has played a leading role in expanding research on resilience to more diverse cultural contexts (Theron, Liebenberg, and Ungar, 2015; Ungar, 2012; Ungar et al., 2013). Until recently, there were relatively few studies of resilience in low- and middle-income countries, other than studies of disasters and war. This group sponsored international research networks and conferences on resilience that served to diversify research and also developed the resilience research “workforce” focused on studying the range of resilience processes in very different cultures and situations. Similar efforts by humanitarian organizations, including UNICEF and the World Bank, have added to the growing body of research on “what works” to promote resilience in different cultures and regions (Britto et al. 2013; Huebner et al., 2016; Lundberg and Wuermli, 2012). A new pattern of research is emerging in which scientists collaborate with humanitarian agencies on the ground to implement important research on resilience that would not be feasible without the trust and frontline experience of these agencies in communities. An example is provided by recent work of Dajani, Panter-Brick, and colleagues (Dajani, Hadfield, van Uum, Greff, & Panter-Brick, 2018) to study Syrian refugees in Jordan, where the researchers teamed with Mercy Corps. In her studies of former child soldiers, Betancourt also collaborated with humanitarian nongovernmental agencies, both local and international (Betancourt, McBain, Newnham, and Brennan, 2013). Research on positive development of ethnic minority and immigrant youth is also growing rapidly, bringing greater attention to resilience in the context of ethnic and cultural diversity (Cabrera and Leyendecker, 2017; Masten, 2014b; Masten, Liebkind, and Hernandez, 2012). The Society for Research in Child Development sponsored an international conference in Prague on this theme, resulting in a volume published in 2017, edited by Cabrera and Leyendecker, with a multiple-chapter section focused on parenting. We anticipate that studies of resilience in diverse cultures and minority children and families will continue to expand, enriching and refining the methods, knowledge, and applications concerned with the roles of parents in promoting positive development. 173

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Integrating and Coordinating Evidence and Interventions Across Systems Another growing edge of resilience models and applications is focused on integrating theory, research, knowledge, and actions across system levels and sectors that influence development and resilience (Masten, 2014a; Masten and Monn, 2015). This direction of theory and practice is an expectable outgrowth of conceptualizing development and intervention from a systems perspective, recognizing the interdependence of individuals, families, communities, and societies, and the many systems operating within and across socioecological contexts. This trend is evident in humanitarian efforts to promote child survival and well-being (Britto et al., 2013; Huebner et al., 2016) as well as a resurgence of interventions that adopt a two-generation approach (Chase-Lansale and Brooks-Gunn, 2014; Shonkoff and Fisher, 2013). The concept of resilience is surging in multiple disciplines, yet central disciplines reflecting systems closely linked to children and their parents are not well integrated, either conceptually or empirically. The lack of and need for integration in theory and research on individual child resilience and family resilience was highlighted in a special issue of the journal, Family Relations (Henry et al., 2015; Masten and Monn, 2015). Similarly, the need to integrate ideas and findings on community resilience and family or individual resilience has been noted, particularly in the literature focused on disaster response (Aldrich and Meyer, 2014; Masten, Narayan, et al., 2015; Walsh, 2016). The cascading resilience model articulated by Doty and colleagues (2017) calls for integrated theory and research to delineate processes that connect individual, family, and community systems, focusing on changes in parent–child relationships and parenting as key levers for generating positive cascades.

Implications of Resilience Research for Practice and Policy The overview in this chapter describing theory and evidence on parenting with respect to resilience underscores the salience of parents in promotive and protective processes for child development consistently found in this literature. The literature also corroborates early observations by pioneers in resilience science that multiple aspects of parenting are central to child resilience in multiple ways. Those pioneers were well aware that children and parents cannot wait for all of the evidence to be gathered and distilled for applications to help children and their caregivers (Masten, 2014b). Parents, clinicians, and policymakers often are called on to act in the best interests of children and their future with incomplete evidence, particularly in the context of ongoing or expected threats. Thus, it is important to discuss the implications of the reviewed evidence by addressing the following question: What are the implications of these findings for stakeholders in child resilience, particularly parents, families, communities, and societies? Given the extraordinary diversity and range of developmental resilience science, discussing all the implications for particular constituents and situations would be impossible. Thus, we highlight takehome messages with broad applicability across diverse children, families, cultures, and societies. A list of ten conclusions based on evidence we have summarized in this chapter about parenting and resilience is presented in Table 6.1, with corresponding recommendations and illustrative examples. These recommendations align with many other efforts to summarize the implications of resilience science for practice and policy (Bernard, 2004; Cicchetti, Rappaport, Sandler, and Weissberg, 2000; Fernandez, Schwartz, Chun, and Dickson, 2013; Hawley, 2013; Luthar et al., 2015; Masten, 2011, 2014b; Masten and Powell, 2003; National Academies, 2016; Newman, 2004; Peters, Leadbeater, and McMahon, 2005; Sanders, Kirby, Tellegen, and Day, 2014; Yates and Masten, 2004). Given that resilience science is always changing, our conclusions and recommendations will undoubtedly need to be updated and improved on the basis of ongoing and future research. These broad recommendations also do not delineate developmentally strategic timing and targeting, which are important for the implementation of any of these recommendations and, indeed, any interventions intended to alter the course of development. 174

Table 6.1 Broad Take-Home Messages on Parenting to Promote Resilience in Child Development Conclusion

Recommendation

Practical examples

Child resilience depends on Support resilience of parents parents and families, who depend and families on other ecological systems

Parental leave; emergency services for families in crisis; earned income tax credits for families with children; health care for families; family advocates; community groups that support families

Attachment bonds with stable and responsive caregivers provide emotional security essential for learning, socialization, and stress regulation in child development

Foster secure attachment relationships; ensure that every child has a secure bond with at least one consistent, caring, and responsive parent figure

Restore a primary caregiver when parents are lost; invest in evidence-based programs to improve and sustain the quality of attachment in challenging times, including foster and adoptive parents; support positive parent–child interactions for parents in special situations (e.g., incarcerated, deployed, or divorcing)

Children with parents who stimulate and nurture brain development and learning later have more tools to overcome adversity

Educate parents about supporting brain development, language, cognition, and learning

Public health messages for mass and social media, mobile devices, pediatrician offices, and schools; professional development programs on brain development (e.g., for educators, health care providers, first responders); museum exhibits and library programs; give books to families

Skilled parents foster children’s self-regulation and coping skills in multiple ways

Educate parents on modeling, co-regulation, and how to scaffold self-regulation and coping skills in child development

Easy access to early childhood and family education programs and efficacious parenting programs to promote parent skills and prevent problems

Family stability and routines foster child resilience

Foster family stability and knowledge about routines

Expand affordable housing; end homelessness in families; educate parents, teachers, health care providers, and first responders about supporting/restoring family routines

Engaged parents can foster the synergy of systems that support family and child resilience

Support bidirectional engagement of parents in education, health, and community systems

View and treat parents as partners in school and community programs designed to enhance the positive development of children; tailor services and treatments to family needs and culture; enhance workforce training in trauma, culture, and parent engagement

Many cultural belief systems, rituals, and practices transmitted by parents and families support resilience in their children

Support transmission and practice of protective cultural practices; restore cultural traditions harmed by trauma

Provide opportunities for learning, celebrating, and sharing cultural traditions that convey emotional security, hope, meaning, coherence, identity, comfort, and social support to parents and children

Child maltreatment and family violence pose grave risks and undermine adaptive systems for child development

Prevent or mitigate exposure of children to maltreatment and family violence

Provide respite care and evidence-based treatments for families at risk for violence; train teachers and first responders to recognize and refer families at risk

Illness, depression, and stress of pregnant mothers and caregivers undermine family and child resilience

Support the health and wellbeing of pregnant mothers and caregivers

Provide access to free or low-cost screening and treatment for prenatal and postpartum depression and crisis intervention for parents; provide routine “well caregiver” as well as “well baby” health care visits (Continued)

Ann S. Masten and Alyssa R. Palmer Table 6.1 (Continued) Conclusion

Recommendation

Practical examples

Parents can prepare their children to weather expected storms and adapt to the unexpected challenges of life

Educate parents on emergency response, ways to promote resilience in particular contexts, and how to provide their children with diverse, manageable challenges to hone their flexibility, adaptability, confidence, and coping skills

Train parents as first responders; post family emergency planning templates and supply lists for “go bags;” prepare families for normative child transitions (e.g., starting school, leaving home); disseminate findings on effective, developmentally strategic ways for parents to foster resilience in young people facing marginalization, discrimination, divorce, bereavement, natural disasters, and other common life adversities; provide opportunities for families to challenge children in safe spaces

Developmental Timing and Targeting Resilience research and frameworks for action that flowed from this research emphasize the importance of developmental perspectives for efforts to promote resilience (Cicchetti, 2010, 2013a; Masten, 1994; 2011, 2014b). Clearly, interventions and policy focused on processes to promote resilience through parents must be mindful of developmental variation in processes that shape parenting and child development. Parenting an infant and a teenager are very different tasks. The roles and responsibilities of parents change dramatically as children develop and also as the family develops. The nature of “effective parenting” will vary across the course of development, as will individual differences in children, parents, and contexts. Resilience theory and research also suggest that there are windows of opportunity when conditions converge for change in developing systems (Masten, 2014a, 2014b). These windows may reflect periods of high normative plasticity in systems of human development (such as periods of high brain plasticity discussed earlier) or periods of system instability triggered by normative transitions or disruptive adversities (e.g., death or illness of a parent). Several windows of opportunity with leverage for change through parenting have been suggested in this chapter: infancy, when it is crucial to provide sensitive and consistent caregiving; early childhood, when children rapidly acquire self-regulation skills crucial for school success and transition into primary school; early adolescence, when pubertal change and social transitions are altering patterns of interaction in youth, their families, schools, and peer system; and late adolescence, when many youth begin to function more independently and live away from parents. Each of these transitional windows is characterized by multiple changes at multiple levels, including biological, neural, relational, and contextual. Because unstable systems are more “vulnerable” or amenable to change or transformation, these windows of flux pose both challenges and opportunities for growth (Dahl and Spear, 2004; Masten, 2014b). Cascade models from the literature on competence and resilience underscore the crucial relevance of timing, particularly when cascading changes are linked to periods of high plasticity (Doty et al., 2017; Masten and Cicchetti, 2010, 2016; Masten et al., 2005). Some cascades, both in conceptual and empirical literature, are likely to occur in particular windows of development. For example, Patterson and colleagues (Patterson, Reid, and Dishion, 1992; Patterson et al., 2010) hypothesized that the interplay of parenting issues and child noncompliance in early childhood at home would spill over to school as children went to school, subsequently disrupting learning and relationships with teachers and peers. As a result, early behavior problems would spread to school and other domains of behavior, engendering dual failures in academic and social adjustment. Their longitudinal empirical studies of 176

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families corroborated these ideas, and their intervention studies aimed at increasing parenting skills (described earlier) verified cascading effects of interrupting these processes to promote better outcomes in children by intervening to improve parenting (Patterson et al., 2010). The evidence on high returns of early investments in quality parenting and childcare for disadvantaged children documented by economists and other studies of longitudinal prevention can be viewed as support for well-timed and targeted interventions, cascading effects, and the importance of caregiving for resilience (Huebner et al., 2016; Masten, 2014b). The cascading resilience model of Doty and colleagues (2017) extends cascade models from the literature to integrate pathways linking biology, behavior, family, and community processes of resilience. They discuss leverage points that can be targeted in parenting interventions to initiate positive cascades in development. Resilience research additionally indicates that strategies for promoting resilience that involve parents would vary by period of development because the nature of threats, resources, and developmental tasks varies by development, for both children and their parents. For an unborn or very young child, parents, and the family system represent the central developmental context. Thus, efforts to promote resilience during pregnancy and early childhood focus on the parent and family system. Risk reduction strategies during early development include prenatal care, education on the dangers to children of prenatal smoking or drinking, crisis nurseries for parental respite to prevent child maltreatment, and services to reduce maternal stress from domestic violence. Asset-focused strategies include public programs to support maternal and infant health care and nutrition, provide income supports (e.g., tax credits) or material supplies (e.g., diapers, toys, books) for infants, and access to free or low-cost childcare or housing. Asset-oriented efforts also include provision of an advocate and “navigator” to help parents connect to resources, schools, or supports for their children. Interventions directed at promotive or protective parenting and family processes often focus on supporting communication, family routines, age-appropriate monitoring, and cultural traditions. Process-focused strategies aim to bolster the quality of parenting and the attachment bond of parent and child, helping parents to provide stimulating and sensitive care, as well as age-appropriate monitoring, engagement, and discipline. As indicated earlier, early childhood programs often include multiple strategies. Home visiting programs, for example, typically combine efforts to reduce risk, boost resources, and facilitate the quality of parent–child interactions. Programs for parents and families of older children include some of these early childhood strategies, but they also shift to reflect changing development tasks of childhood and adolescence. Parent education provided by communities, schools, and health care settings often focus on school readiness and then school success; consistent discipline; monitoring of child activities outside the home; and reducing the risk of substance use, victimization by bullying, gang involvement, truancy, and other problems that often emerge in the transition to adolescence among children exposed to high cumulative risk. Risk reduction strategies include parent education and awareness campaigns about identifying risks and preventing antisocial peer pressure or gang involvement. There remains much to learn about promoting resilience in human development, particularly from randomized controlled trials to test models of change. By understanding the model of change, communities will be able to promote child resilience, intervention efforts, and studies of system dynamics and leverage points for triggering change. Nonetheless, there is a considerable body of literature to guide practice and policy aiming to support the capacity of children and their families for resilience. There is good reason to believe that resilience can be promoted in many different ways, including multiple strategies focused on parenting. Optimizing strategies will depend on tailoring with respect to goals, developmental timing, the nature of threats and resources, individual and cultural variations affecting children and families, and the function of many systems interconnected to children through parents. 177

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Conclusions This chapter highlights advances in resilience science pertaining to parenting and the implications of that knowledge for applications. Parenting has played a central role in research on resilience in children from its inception. There is progress and also much work ahead to understand the complex roles of parenting in the development and manifestation of human resilience. Over the decades, the meaning of resilience in research shifted in concert with the emergence of developmental systems theory as the prevailing theoretical framework for the study of human development (Masten, 2014a). In early reviews on resilience, effective parenting or a close relationship with a caring parent was described as a protective factor associated with better outcomes among children at risk for diverse reasons. Contemporary views on resilience emphasize the dynamic nature of human development emerging from many interactions over time across many levels of embedded systems. From this perspective, a child’s resilience is dynamic, developing and changing over time as a result of the ongoing interplay of the context with the organism at many levels. The capacity for adaptation to adversity develops and changes. Relationships and a host of individual adaptive skills, including language, problem-solving, and social skills, emerge in a child from these interactions. Parents play critical roles in the formation and change of these relationships and skills through their roles in caregiving and family functions, interactions that shape individual adaptive competencies of children, exposure of children to challenges, and many other aspects of child– environment interactions that build resilience. The resilience of a child at any given time will depend on the development and current function of complex adaptive systems in the child, interactions of the child with parent and family and other aspects of the environment, and the nature of challenges impinging on these systems. Thus, the resilience of a child will be distributed across interacting systems that involve parents in many ways, as well as the systems interacting with parents. Although the role of parenting in child resilience is viewed from a more dynamic, systems perspective, many of the roles identified early in resilience theory and research continue to be corroborated by contemporary studies. These include sensitive and consistent caregiving, emotional security, and socialization for competence in the family culture and society. Nonetheless, knowledge about these roles has increased with the expanding literature. Moreover, there are many more studies of resilience in low- and middle-income countries, including intervention studies. Evidence also has increased on parenting in the context of poverty, racism, war, disaster, migration, and many other challenging situations, particularly in regard to studies outside of North America and Western Europe. Research also suggests that there are windows of opportunity for intervening to promote resilience related to developmental plasticity, transitions, and adversity itself. In some of these windows, particularly during childhood and adolescence, it appears that change can be leveraged effectively through parents with developmentally and culturally attuned strategies. There is increasing attention to strategies for triggering positive cascades and integrating strategies for change across system levels. Clearly, more knowledge is needed on tailoring and timing interventions strategically. In addition, however, it is now possible to study resilience processes in ways that were impossible in the past. Resilience research has benefitted from advances in research methods for studying genetics, brain function, biological stress systems, social interaction, and culture, as well as statistical techniques for studying growth and change over time and multiple levels of analysis. These advances spurred research on how adverse experiences “get under the skin” and, concomitantly, how parents may prevent, mitigate, compensate for, or counteract these processes. Strategies for studying parent–child interaction have improved at multiple levels of analysis, leading to advances in understanding how parental coregulation contributes to resilience among high-risk children. Methods for studying developmental cascades and intraindividual growth in longitudinal research also contribute to advances in resilience and roles of parenting in these processes. Prevention science matured, providing powerful tests of

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hypotheses about the causal role of parenting in mitigating risks and promoting or protecting positive child development. As a result of expanding research and more sophisticated designs, knowledge on parenting for resilience has grown and matured. Research continues, but there is a body of consistent knowledge to inform practice and policy aiming to promote resilience in children and families. As a working guide, we distilled the evidence on parenting in resilience into a set of ten general conclusions with recommendations and examples for practitioners and policymakers to consider. They are intentionally broad because any intervention will need to be tailored for goals, context, culture, and, of course, development. In the future, research on resilience promises to provide a deeper understanding of processes linking parents to resilience of children. Exciting research is underway on many fronts, including the biology of resilience and how it may be transmitted across generations through parenting as well as genetic transmission; cultural processes that support the resilience of parents, family, and children; the nonlinear relation of stress to resilience and how parents regulate exposure to foster resilience; and many other intriguing lines of research with implications for parents, practice, and policy. Parents and children will face many challenges in the years ahead due to global threats of natural disaster, terror, and political conflict, along with enduring adversities of poverty, inequality, and family violence (Masten, 2014a). Parents will play a central role in preparing families for these challenges and helping their children to navigate through and recover from the inevitable adversities of life. They need knowledge and support to enhance their own resilience as parents and foster resilience in their families because the future of children and societies depends on their success.

Acknowledgments Preparation of this chapter was supported by the Irving B. Harris Professorship (ASM) and a graduate fellowship award from the University of Minnesota (ARP).

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7 LANGUAGE AND PLAY IN PARENT–CHILD INTERACTIONS Catherine S. Tamis-LeMonda, Yana A. Kuchirko, Kelly Escobar, and Marc H. Bornstein Introduction Parents are children’s first teachers, and the home environment is children’s first classroom. Before children begin formal schooling, they spend most of their waking hours at home, in unstructured interactions with parents. A substantial portion of children’s “everyday lessons” revolves around learning how to use language to communicate with other people and learning what can be done with the objects around them. Children’s everyday practice with words and objects makes the first years of life a time of astounding growth in language and play skills—two major hallmarks of early development. It is thus fitting to consider the role of parents in the foundational domains of language and play. Parents are the primary source of young children’s language experiences. They talk about what they and others are doing, ask questions to encourage children to talk about what is happening, and respond to children’s actions and vocalizations with timely, topic-relevant statements. Parents modify their language and actions when communicating with their young children by using a special register of speech that is accompanied by exaggerated actions and gestures to make topics of talk salient (Tamis-LeMonda and Bornstein, 1991;1993). Parents also shape children’s play experiences, sometimes intentionally and oftentimes serendipitously. They structure children’s environments to make playtime safe. They provide children with materials for play, including toys and common household items (consider the fun toddlers have playing with remote controls and cell phones). They demonstrate how things work through their own engagement with objects and help children manipulate and play with objects through hands-on assistance and verbal guidance. These play interactions provide an ideal setting for children to learn words and develop conversational skills. Beyond the role of parents, there exist important theoretical reasons to examine language and play together. Historically, developmental scholars have considered the two domains to be meaningfully related, although debates on the precise nature of those associations abound. Piaget (2013) and Vygotsky (1962, 1978) noted that language and play similarly depend on a capacity for symbolic representation: Both forms of expression require children to use symbols to represent objects, actions, and events. Language and play also share important communicative functions. As children vocalize and play, they elicit meaningful feedback from parents and other adults (Bates, Benigni, Camaioni, and Volterra, 1979; Werner and Kaplan, 1963). Empirically, two lines of evidence highlight developmental connections between language and play. First, there are striking parallels in the timing of language and play skills: Both progress from basic to more advanced forms in lock-step unison (Gillespie and Zittoun, 2010; McCune, 1995). For

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instance, children transition from using single words in language and single acts in pretense (around the start of the second year) to combining words and stringing actions (toward the end of the second year) (Bornstein and Hendricks, 2012; McCune, 2008; Shore, O’Connell, and Bates, 1984). Second, at an individual level, children’s skills in symbolic play relate to their skills in language. A meta-analysis of language–play associations—across 31 correlational studies comprising over 6,000 children—revealed medium effect sizes regardless of study design (concurrent, longitudinal) or measures of language (receptive or expressive) (Quinn, 2016). Associations were most pronounced prior to 3 years of age, which aligns with Piaget’s claim that language–play relations are confined to the early period of transition to symbolic functioning. Finally, symbolic play is an important context for language exchanges and learning, which supports later academic and socioemotional outcomes (Hirsh-Pasek, Golinkoff, Singer, and Berk, 2009). In light of the developmental importance of children’s language and play, and their interconnections in the first years of life, we consider parenting in these two critical domains. We begin by reviewing parents’ role in children’s early language development and the features of child-directed speech that promote language learning. We then turn to parenting in play. We examine how parent–child play interactions support children’s exploratory, nonsymbolic, and symbolic play skills through children’s second year of life, and review evidence for cross-domain associations between parent–child play and children’s language development. We focus specifically on object play, which provides children with opportunities to engage in joint attention with parents, learn language, and use their imaginations in pretense. Finally, we examine how cultural contexts shape parent–child language and play interactions and end with pedagogical implications and future research directions.

Parenting in Language Most children acquire language primarily through interactions with their parents (Golinkoff, Can, Soderstrom, and Hirsh-Pasek, 2015; Hirsh-Pasek et al., 2015). As children process the speech directed to them by their parents, they extract phonological, semantic, and grammatical rules about word sounds, word meanings, and how words combine into sentences (that you “wash your hair,” but don’t “hair your wash”). Several properties of child-directed speech and action are especially conducive to infant language learning: (1) parental contingent responsiveness—the temporal alignment of language inputs with children’s vocalizations and actions—facilitates infants’ connection of words to objects and events; (2) the didactic content of parental speech promotes infant word growth; and (3) the physical cues parents use to mark the referents of speech. In the sections that follow, we describe these features of parent language input and how parents developmentally scaffold word learning in children by modifying their speech to accommodate children’s changing skills.

Child-Directed Speech and Action Parent speech to infants and toddlers is special. Mothers, fathers, and other adults across many cultures intuitively modify the prosody, content, and form of their language when addressing infants (Fernald, 2000; Golinkoff et al., 2015; Kitamura, Thanavishuth, Burnham, and Luksaneeyanawin, 2001; Thiessen, Hill, and Saffran, 2005). Child-directed speech is characterized by higher and more variable pitch and intonation, shorter utterances, longer pauses, limited vocabulary, vowel alterations, and frequent repetitions compared to adult-directed speech (e.g., Fernald et al., 1989; Ma, Golinkoff, Houston, and Hirsh-Pasek, 2011). Additionally, when adults talk with infants and young children, they almost always refer to concrete objects and people in the here-and-now (e.g., Phillips, 1973; Snow et al., 1976) and tend to use phrases that contain many simple labels, descriptors, and questions (TamisLeMonda, Baumwell, and Cristofaro, 2012). 190

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Parents adjust the prosody and content of child-directed speech to be developmentally appropriate for their children’s developmental level. When speaking to infants and toddlers, parents modify the amplitude of their speech to highlight specific words in a sentence, such as the names of objects. For example, labels are likely to be the loudest word in the sentence compared to nonlabels (Messer, 1981) and are perceptually prominent in the speech stream—that is, they are likely to be positioned in utterance-initial or utterance-final position (Golinkoff and Alioto, 1995; Seidl and Johnson, 2006). Parent speech to infants and toddlers contains shorter and simpler sentences, fewer subordinate clauses, and higher repetition and redundancy (Longhurst and Stepanich, 1975; Phillips, 1973), thereby simplifying the language learning task. Repetition in child-directed speech supports early vocabulary development by providing multiple instances of novel words for processing word meaning, and is shown to be a key ingredient to the language experiences of even preverbal infants. Repetitions in maternal speech to 7-month-old infants uniquely contributes to children’s vocabulary at age 2 years above children’s own speech segmentation skills (Newman, Rowe, and Ratner, 2016). As children grow in vocabulary and grammar, parents increase the quantity (total number of words, or word “tokens”) and diversity (number of different words, or word “types”) of their language. Amount and diversity of parent language to children relate to children’s vocabulary in both middleclass and lower-socioeconomic status (SES) families (Bornstein, Haynes, and Painter, 1998; HoffGinsberg, 1991; Hoff and Naigles, 2002; Rowe, 2012; Shimpi, Fedewa, and Hans, 2012). Both mothers and fathers engage in child-directed speech. Mothers and fathers were videorecorded on separate occasions while playing with their 2-year-olds, and both parents modified their speech in line with the complexity of their toddlers’ language. The number of words, diversity of words, and grammatical complexity of parent utterances matched the level of their toddlers’ language skills (Tamis-LeMonda et al., 2012). Fathers likewise modify the prosodic features of their speech when speaking to their infants. A study of fathers and their infants ranging from 10 days to 14 months of age found that across six different languages (French, Italian, German, Japanese, British English, and American English), fathers used a simplified speech register, higher pitch, and adjusted their language in direct response to their infants’ communicative skills (Fernald et al., 1989). Mothers in bilingual families display the same speech modifications as do monolingual mothers. For example, mothers living in Belgium (where both Dutch and French are spoken) modified their speech to infants in each of their two languages across infancy to toddlerhood—that is, when talking to preverbal 5-month-olds and verbal 20-month-olds (De Houwer and Bornstein, 2016). Mothers generally used a single language (either Dutch or French) at 5 months, although two mothers used both languages at this age, presumably in response to language developments in their children. By 20 months, the mothers who spoke with two languages reported switching to one language. By 53 months, a quarter of mothers added a second language, and another quarter switched languages completely (e.g., spoke only French at 5 months, but only Dutch by 53 months). Thus, mothers changed their distribution of language use across two languages as children grew first in one and then in two languages. Even deaf mothers modify their sign language to their infants in very much the way hearing mothers use child-directed speech (Erting, Thumann-Prezioso, and Benedict, 2000). Children as young as 4 years of age also systematically adjust their speech when speaking to infants (Weppelman, Bostow, Schiffer, Elbert-Perez, and Newman, 2003). Cross-cultural research has confirmed that child-directed speech may be intuitive and present in communities across the globe (Broesch and Bryant, 2015, 2017; Kitamura et al., 2001). Adults from WEIRD (Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic; Henrich, Heine, and Norenzayan, 2010; Marklund, Marklund, Lacerda, and Schwarz, 2015) cultures (such as the United States and countries in Europe and Asia) and adults from traditional, nonindustrialized communities (such as Fijians, Kenyans, the Marathi in India, Native American Comanche, and the Nivkh) produce similar features of speech when talking to young children (e.g., Blount and Padgug, 1976; Broesch and Bryant, 2015, 2017; Ferguson, 1964; Grieser and Kuhl, 1988; Kelkar, 1964). 191

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For example, Swedish-speaking adults tend to use longer pauses with children and respond more quickly when speaking to children than when speaking to adults, regardless of children’s vocabulary size (Marklund et al., 2015). Mothers in Fiji and Kenya use higher and more variable pitch frequencies when speaking to children than when speaking to adults, similar to the child-directed speech of North American mothers (even when controlling for education; Broesch and Bryant, 2015). However, the prevalence and specific features of child-directed speech vary across cultural communities and are more pronounced in some cultures than in others. Some communities lack child-directed speech, and adults show little accommodation to the communicative needs of infants and young toddlers (e.g., Ochs, 1982; Ochs and Schieffelin, 1984; Schieffelin and Ochs, 1979; Pye, 1986). Adults also modify their actions when interacting with infants, by producing exaggerated, repeated movements referred to as “motionese” or infant-directed action (Brand, Baldwin, and Ashburn, 2002; Brand, Shallcross, Sabatos, and Massie, 2007; Koterba and Iverson, 2009). Middle-class, EuropeanAmerican mothers interact with their infants in ways that are qualitatively distinct from their interactions with familiar adults. When asked to demonstrate how to play with an unfamiliar object (e.g., a neon green “twisty” that could form shapes and be taken apart and put back together), mothers’ infant-directed action was more enthusiastic, repetitive, simpler, and included a greater range of motions than did adult-directed action (Brand et al., 2002). Additionally, mothers exhibit longer pauses between child-directed actions compared to adult-directed actions, and they coordinate their exaggerated actions with their modified speech during demonstrations (Meyer, Hard, Brand, McGarvey, and Baldwin, 2011). The signing of caregivers to infants likewise involves slow and highly repetitive and exaggerated movements (Masataka, 1992), suggesting that child-directed actions are not restricted to the hearing population. Why might child-directed speech facilitate word learning? First, the prosodic contours of childdirected speech function to elicit infant attention. From birth, infants prefer and respond more to child-directed speech than to adult-directed speech by mothers and even strangers (Fernald, 2000). Regardless of speaker, babies prefer adults who use infant-directed speech and attend more to those adults than those using adult-directed speech (Schachner and Hannon, 2011). Thus, child-directed speech serves as a cue for selection of social partners. Child-directed speech also provides cues about the emotional signals of adult speakers, thereby creating rich, informative contexts for babies to bind speech to emotional states and learn new words (Saint-Georges et al., 2013). Second, the exaggerated prosody of child-directed speech provides acoustic cues to the grammatical and syntactical boundaries of language input, thereby aiding infants’ segmentation of the speech stream (Fernald, 2004; Soderstrom, 2007; Soderstrom, Blossom, Foygel, and Morgan, 2008). For example, infants discriminate speech sounds embedded in multisyllabic sequences better in streams of childdirected speech than in streams of adult-directed speech (D’Odorico and Jacob, 2006). Within the first few months of life, infants neurologically process child-directed speech differently than other auditory stimuli. Electroencephalogram (EEG) activity resulting from hearing child-directed speech is greatest in the temporal regions (Naoi et al., 2012) and frontal lobes (Saito et al., 2007), and child-directed speech elicits increased neural activity in brain regions involved in attention (Zangl and Mills, 2007). Infants’ heightened attention to child-directed speech relative to adult-directed speech, coupled with the cues provided by prosody features, increases the likelihood that babies will learn the words directed to them. Similarly, motionese maintains infant attention and highlights the structure and meaning of actions. Infants looked longer when their primary caregivers moved a novel object with either high amplitude or high repetition or both—the two parameters on which infant-directed action differs from adultdirected action (Brand et al., 2002)—than when caregivers moved the object with low amplitude and low repetition (Koterba and Iverson, 2009). Beyond eliciting attention, motionese may make actions easier for infants to parse by stressing subactions within the motion (Brand et al., 2009; Brand, Hollenbeck, and Kominsky, 2013). Infants learn to imitate adults more quickly when taught new actions characterized by motionese than when exposed to adult-directed action (Williamson and Brand, 2014). 192

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Responsiveness Infants’ interest in the objects and people of everyday life is expressed through their spontaneous actions—looks, vocalizations, facial expressions, manual actions, and body movements. Parents and other adults often respond to these infant behaviors with prompt, contingent, and appropriate in-kind behaviors, such as by looking at and pointing to a cat while naming it. Indeed, “contingent responsiveness” is an essential characteristic of infant–parent social interactions and is observed across contexts and cultures (Bornstein, Tamis-LeMonda, Hahn, and Haynes, 2008; Lohaus, Keller, Ball, Elben, and Voelker, 2001; Tamis-LeMonda, Kuchirko, and Tafuro, 2013). Parental contingent responsiveness fosters language development throughout the first years of life (Tamis-LeMonda, Kuchirko, and Song, 2014). Before infants produce conventional words, they benefit from parental responses to their vocalizations. For instance, mothers who are responsive to their infants’ babbles have babies whose babbles mirror the phonological structure of their mothers’ verbal input (Goldstein and Schwade, 2008). By the time infants are 2 years old, they increasingly understand and produce words and simple phrases and benefit from verbal input that is temporally and conceptually connected to their actions (Tamis-LeMonda, Cristofaro, Rodriguez, and Bornstein, 2006). Mothers’ contingent responsiveness to infants’ and toddlers’ vocalizations, social bids, object exploration and play, and emotional expressions predicts infant vocabulary size (Tamis-LeMonda, Bornstein, Kahana-Kalman, Baumwell, and Cyphers, 1998), the pragmatic diversity of toddlers’ communications (Beckwith and Cohen, 1989), and the timing of language milestones (Nicely, Tamis-LeMonda, and Bornstein, 1999; Tamis-LeMonda et al., 1998; Tamis-LeMonda, Bornstein, and Baumwell, 2001). Moreover, the effects of responsiveness on language development are consistent across samples and large in magnitude. In one study, infants of high-responsive mothers (90th percentile) at 9 and 13 months achieved language milestones, such as first words, vocabulary spurt, and combinatorial speech, four to six months earlier than did infants of low-responsive mothers (10th percentile) (TamisLeMonda et al., 1998, 2001). Although much research in this area is correlational and prevents causal inferences, associations between parent responsiveness and children’s language development is not merely explained by genetic heritability or unobserved characteristics of parents and infants. Parental responsiveness predicts language skills of adopted children (Stams, Juffer, and van IJzendoorn, 2002), predicts infant learning in experimental laboratory manipulations (Goldstein, King, and West, 2003), and promotes children’s language and cognitive skills in interventions that target responsiveness (e.g., Mendelsohn et al., 2005, 2011). Further, parental responsiveness to infants’ vocalizations helps infants learn about conversational turn-taking—the timely back and forth that characterizes social interactions. Turn-taking is fundamental to the structure of conversations and an important first lesson in pragmatics (namely, the understanding that “a person expects a reply when they pause in their talk”). Mothers promote turn-taking by responding to infants’ vocalizations with language within two or three seconds and pausing their speech when infants are off-task (Tamis-LeMonda et al., 2013). Infants adjust the timing of their vocalizations to follow their mothers’ language inputs as early as 5 months (Bornstein, Putnick, Cote, Haynes, and Suwalsky, 2015), and toddlers grow in their responsiveness to mothers’ language and gestures across the second year of life (Kuchirko, Tafuro, and Tamis-LeMonda, in press). Infants ages 14 and 24 months who are high on responsiveness to their mothers’ communications also have mothers who are high on responsiveness to their infants (Kuchirko et al., in press).

The Informational Content of Social Input Beyond temporal features of infant-directed speech, the “content” of input matters. Specifically, the didactic (information laden) and embodied (multimodal) features of infant-directed speech support word learning (Tamis-LeMonda et al., 2013). 193

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Didactic language is child-directed speech that is “referential”—statements that contain information about referents through descriptions, labels, and questions (“That’s a spoon” and “What color is the spoon?,” “The rabbit’s hopping” and “Where is he going?”). When parents respond to their infants’ exploratory or communicative actions, the likelihood of didactic (or referential) language is high, and this type of speech contains a diversity of nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs. The lexically rich nature of referential language can be contrasted with regulatory commands—language that directs or prohibits infant actions, typically with many pronouns (e.g., “Do it,” “Sit there,” “Stop that”). During play and booksharing with infants, mothers’ increase referential language following infant vocalizations and/or object exploration but decrease regulatory language in the presence of these actions (Tamis-LeMonda et al., 2013). Thus, infants’ actions serendipitously evoke language from mothers that is responsive and rich. As might be expected, mothers’ referential, but not regulatory, language predicts infants’ productive vocabulary (Tamis-LeMonda, Song, Leavell, Kahana-Kalman, and Yoshikawa, 2012). The diversity of parental language to infants (i.e., the use of different word types and different communicative functions) relates to children’s vocabulary size, rate of vocabulary growth, and communicative diversity in early language development (e.g., Hart and Risley, 1995; Hoff, 2003, 2006; Huttenlocher, Haight, Bryk, Seltzer, and Lyons, 1991; Tamis-LeMonda, et al., 2012a). Further, lexically diverse language input supports efficient processing of new information in monolingual and bilingual infants alike, regardless of language. For instance, a composite measure of infant vocabulary relates to infant processing speed in both Spanish and English (Marchman, Fernald, and Hurtado, 2010; Weisleder and Fernald, 2013). Embodied input refers to the multimodal coordination of parents’ language with physical cues to meaning, as seen, for example, when a mother simultaneously labels, looks at, and touches or points to objects (Tamis-LeMonda et al., 2013; Yu, Smith, and Pereira, 2008). Infant language learning is enhanced through the constellation of nonverbal behaviors parents produce during social interactions, with one key action being gestures (Goldin-Meadow, 2006, 2009). When mothers label a novel toy, they often point to the toy or move the toy in synchrony with their verbal label, which helps infants connect the word to its referent (Gogate, Bahrick, and Watson, 2000). For example, a mother might point to a toy and ask, “What is that?,” “A teddy bear?,” which signals clearly to the infant the topic of her talk. Embodied verbal input supports infant word learning (e.g., Matatyaho and Gogate, 2008; Rowe and Goldin-Meadow, 2009; Tamis-LeMonda et al., 2012) through effects on infant attention. Multimodal information eases infants’ task at mapping words to the world because infants attend to and exploit contextual and other cues to decipher the meaning of unfamiliar words (Yu, Ballard, and Aslin, 2005). Infants perceive the synchronization of actions and words to be a unitary experience that “belong together” (Rader and Zukow-Goldring, 2010). Additionally, mothers are more likely to coordinate their gestural and manual actions with didactic language than with regulatory language as they respond to infants’ exploratory or communicative actions, (Tamis-LeMonda et al., 2013). As indicated, didactic language is high in lexical diversity (i.e., the number of different words mothers produce) and fosters infants’ vocabulary growth more than other lexically sparse language inputs (Song, Spier, and Tamis-Lemonda, 2014).

Developmental Scaffolding Parent–child interactions change across developmental time (Bornstein, 2013). Parents continually modify what they respond to and how they respond as their infants and toddlers gain new skills. Parents also adjust how quickly they respond to children depending on infant vocabulary size. For instance, mothers of 18-month-olds with relatively large vocabularies on the MacArthur Communicative Development Inventory (MCDI) display shorter pauses and quicker responses than do mothers of toddlers who have average or small vocabularies (Marklund et al., 2015). Moreover, mothers respond 194

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to their 1-year-olds with simple labels and descriptions but include more questions in their verbal exchanges a year later as infants grow in their language skills (Bornstein et al., 2008). Mothers are also more likely to respond when their 2-year-olds use new words than when their toddlers produce words they had been saying for some time (Masur, 1997). Mothers increase their referential responses to infant vocalizations and decrease their responses to infant gestures between the infant ages of 14 and 24 months (Tamis-LeMonda et al., 2013). Finally, mothers of crawling infants respond differently to the social bids of their 13-month-olds than do mothers of walking infants, largely because crawling infants bid from stationary positions, whereas walking infants are able to carry objects to mothers for sharing (Karasik, Tamis-LeMonda, and Adolph, 2011, 2014). Infants who carry objects to their mother for play provide salient cues about what they want, and mothers attune to these social bids accordingly. Collectively, these studies indicate that parents respond in developmentally appropriate ways as infants gain new skills. Why might parents’ attunement to child developmental level matter for language learning? Most centrally, as infants acquire new language skills, they attend to and require different cues for learning new words (Hollich, Hirsh Pasek, and Golinkoff, 2000). Child-directed speech is therefore likely to operate nonlinearly across development; the features of language that benefit learning change as children’s learning progresses (Bohannon and Hirsh-Pasek, 1984). During the earliest period of word learning, infants primarily learn words that align with objects that are salient and coincide with their perspective, whereas more advanced word learners are able to consider another person’s perspective (for example, where the person is looking) to infer word meaning. Therefore, novice infants require more frequent word repetitions and multiple cues to learn words than do infants who are more advanced in their lexicons and understanding of social cues to reference (Hollich et al., 2000). In line with the changing nature of language learning, the quantity and quality of parent language input changes in its importance across the first three years. For novice word learners (i.e., in the first two years of life), the amount of caregiver language input is very important for language development, as infants require repetition and lots of input to build a lexicon and discern the phonological, semantic, and morphosyntactic features of language. As toddlers develop language skills, the lexical diversity of parent language input becomes increasingly critical for propelling vocabulary gains (Rowe, 2012). For example, repeatedly labeling the word “cup” will support word learning in an infant who does not yet know the word “cup,” but may not be necessary to an infant who is quite familiar with the word “cup.” In contrast, infants with more advanced lexical skills are able to participate in simple conversations and will benefit from being asked simple questions (e.g., “What is that?”) and hearing new words tagged to those they already know (e.g., “shiny cup”). As such, parents scaffold children’s language development by providing developmentally appropriate language inputs that help children understand communicative intentions (Bornstein, 2013).

Summary Parent speech to children contains several features that facilitate language learning. Child-directed speech and action are characterized by redundancy, simplicity, and exaggerated forms that promote infant word learning by eliciting infant attention and helping babies parse actions and sounds into meaningful units. Parental responsiveness aids referent mapping by presenting language that is temporally and conceptually connected to the objects and events that are most salient and of greatest interest to infants. The didactic content of parental input promotes growth in vocabulary because of its rich lexical content. The embodied multimodal feature of parent input elicits infant attention and establishes the referents of talk by accompanying language with physical cues, such as gestures and touch. Finally, developmental attunement in child-directed speech and action provides infants and young children with the specific supports needed to learn new words and grammatical structures as children grow in their language competencies. 195

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Parenting in Play Parent–child play is a primary context for learning. In particular, children’s play with objects has received much attention. Children’s object play shows notable developmental changes, and parents attune to those changes by modifying their play behaviors, just as they do for language. Further, social interactions around object play provide children with rich opportunities to learn language. As children play with objects, parents often describe the features of objects and ongoing or possible actions, which facilitate children’s vocabulary growth. Next, we describe developmental changes in children’s object play, how parents adjust their own play behaviors in line with those changes, and the ways that social interactions during object play promote language learning in children.

Developments in Children’s Object Play Play with objects provides a valuable window on development. Over the course of the first two years, children show notable changes in their interactions with objects. Early on, infants explore and discover the unique features of single objects; with age, they combine objects in logical ways (such as by placing a shape in a shape sorter); and they eventually use objects in elaborate pretend scenarios. These progressions in object play are categorized into three general types: exploratory play, nonsymbolic play, and symbolic play, with symbolic play considered the most advanced due to its representational demands (Piaget, Inhelder, and Häfliger, 1977; Tamis-LeMonda and Bornstein, 1991).

Exploration The earliest forms of object play appear toward the middle of the first year as infants gain control over their manual actions. From around 4 to 5 months of age to approximately 9 months of age, children’s play is predominantly characterized by sensorimotor manipulation. Infants’ mouth, finger, manipulate, rub, bang, and rotate objects to discover their features. These exploratory actions produce rich perceptual information about the size, texture, shape, and forms of objects that feed into learning. For instance, infants’ object exploration relates to their understanding that objects are three-dimensional and have backsides (Soska, Adolph, and Johnson, 2010). As infants develop fine motor skills, they explore objects in new ways to discover what can be done with those objects. Infants adjust their manual actions to accommodate the specific features of objects, such as object texture and shape (Fontenelle, Kahrs, Neal, Newton, and Lockman, 2007). Infants are skilled at detecting objects’ overt affordances: They finger textured surfaces more than smooth ones and bang hard objects more than soft ones (Bushnell and Boudreau, 1993; Gibson and Walker, 1984; Lockman and McHale, 1989; Palmer, 1989; Ruff, 1984). Between the ages of 6 and 12 months, infants decrease in their mouthing of objects and increase in their fingering and other fine motor actions (Ruff, 1984).

Nonsymbolic Play Toward the end of the first year, children engage in nonsymbolic play (Ruff, 1984). Infants’ actions are aimed at extracting the unique functions of objects, such as pressing buttons or turning dials on busy-boxes. Infants’ first direct nonsymbolic activities to single objects (e.g., squeezing a foam ball) but shortly incorporate object combinations. Initially random juxtapositions of objects develop into appropriate and logical combinations. For instance, a triangle might be placed on top of a nesting block but later be inserted into its appropriate spot on a shape sorter (Bornstein and Tamis-LeMonda, 2006; Damast, Tamis-LeMonda, and Bornstein, 1996).

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Symbolic Play Around the start of the second year, children produce brief bouts of symbolic play, in which they project “a supposed situation onto an actual one, in the spirit of fun rather than for survival” (Lillard, 1993, p. 349). Over the course of the next few months, bouts of symbolic play grow in complexity and length. Children string actions together to tell a story (such as feeding a doll and then putting the doll to sleep) and creatively substitute certain objects for others (such as using a stick rather than a spoon to pretend to stir in a teacup). These symbolic bouts are important to the development of creativity and divergent thinking (Bruner, 1978). According to Bruner, children’s abilities to pretend in play and combine actions and objects in novel ways are fundamental to tool use.

Parents’ Role in Children’s Object Play Parent–child play is seen in animals and humans. Observations of young animals at play with parents point to the evolutionary significance of play (e.g., Fossey, 1983; Goodall, 1986). In humans, parent– child play is a common, important context for learning and development. Parent–infant play might be especially important early in development when babies are insufficiently mature to engage in and benefit from play with peers (MacDonald, 1993; Power, 2000). This is a reason that most studies of parent–child play interactions focus on infancy or toddlerhood. In the sections that follow, we examine parent support of children’s exploratory, nonsymbolic, and symbolic play and the functions that these types of play might serve.

Parents’ Exploratory, Nonsymbolic, and Symbolic Play Parent play closely tracks developmental changes in children’s play, and therefore encourages children to practice and extend skills in their repertoire. Prior to independent locomotion, infants depend on adults to access objects. Parents create opportunities for learning by introducing new toys and objects and repositioning infants so that they might more readily reach and manipulate them (Bornstein and Tamis-LeMonda, 1990). As infants progress to nonsymbolic play, parents demonstrate how objects work and might be combined, by pressing buttons, nesting blocks, and the like, and then offering objects to their infants to encourage similar actions. In doing so, parents engage in “infant-directed action,” as was seen for language, by exaggerating their actions as they play with their infants (Brand et al., 2002). In essence, parents make obvious to infants the affordances that objects offer. As children advance in their symbolic play skills, parents increasingly support children’s engagement in and embellishment of pretend scenarios (Bretherton, 1984; Damast et al., 1996). Mothers also use pretend play to model a “right” way to do things, for example, by demonstrating how to pour tea with a pretend teapot. Mothers of 2-year-olds initiate and sustain pretend play by modeling behaviors and then prompt child play, for example, by pretending to talk on a toy telephone and then handing the phone to her child. If the child accepts the bid, coaching follows: “Daddy wants to talk. Say hello,” (Dale, 1989). Conversely, parents correct pretend actions when infants violate would-be reality, for example, protesting (seriously or playfully) when children drink tea from a teapot instead of a cup (Howes, 1992). Finally, mothers’ symbolic play behaviors become more prevalent with child age: Mothers are more likely to initiate symbolic play than nonsymbolic play with their 21-montholds than compared to 13-month-olds (Dunn and Wooding, 1977; Haight and Miller, 1993; TamisLeMonda and Bornstein, 1991).

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Relations Between Parent Play and Children’s Play Do mothers’ exploratory, nonsymbolic, and symbolic play behaviors facilitate advanced play in children? To investigate this possibility, researchers compare children’s behaviors during solitary play to their behaviors during play with parents, and sometimes investigate changes in parent and child play across age. Comparisons of children’s solitary and interactive play indicate that play with mother is more sophisticated, complex, diverse, frequent, and sustained than is solitary play (e.g., Bornstein et al., 1998; Dunn and Wooding, 1977; Fiese, 1990; Haight and Miller, 1992; O’Connell and Bretherton, 1984; Slade, 1987). Children engage in more symbolic play of greater complexity after witnessing a social partner perform those actions (Bretherton, O’Connell, Shore, and Bates, 1984). For instance, mothers’ play with their 13-month-old children relates to children’s level of play during solitary play based on codes of children’s exploratory, nonsymbolic, and symbolic play (Vibbert and Bornstein, 1989). Moreover, there is high specificity in child–mother play sophistication at an individual level. At child ages of 13 and 20 months, mothers’ nonsymbolic play relates positively to toddlers’ nonsymbolic play, but not symbolic play, and mothers’ symbolic play relates positively to toddlers’ symbolic play, but not nonsymbolic play (Tamis-LeMonda and Bornstein, 1991). Over age, the play of individual mothers and toddlers changes in parallel: Between 13 and 20 months, mothers who increase play at particular levels have toddlers who also increase at those levels. Age-related alignment in mother and child play is also seen in the real-time unfolding of play: Mothers prompt nonsymbolic play following instances of infant nonsymbolic play and prompt symbolic play following instances of infant symbolic play (Damast et al., 1996).

Parent–Child Play and Children’s Language Development Play interactions between children and parents provide a valuable platform for learning language, thus extending benefits beyond child play per se. Most centrally, object play represents the quintessential example of a “triadic” or “triangular” social interaction, in which parent and child jointly attend to an activity through mutual gaze to the object and to one another (Tomasello, 1999; Tomasello, Carpenter, Call, Behne, and Moll, 2005). Children’s object play and visual attention to objects during play elicit verbally contingent information and feedback from mothers about the events and activities of children’s actions, such as declarative information about what objects are and their characteristics (“blue truck”; “soft bunny”). As noted previously, child-directed speech in response to toddler object play is lexically diverse, providing infants with opportunities to expand their vocabularies (Tamis-LeMonda et al., 2013). Furthermore, language quality during symbolic play in particular may support language learning. Symbolic play is characterized by more language, more diverse language, and unique forms of reciprocal interaction and language (such as mental state terms on the part of parents) to negotiate symbolic transformations (“Let’s pretend we’re cooking breakfast. What yummy eggs!”) (Fekonja, Umek, and Kranjc, 2005; McCune-Nicolich, 1981; Pellegrini, 2009). During symbolic play, parents use language and gestures to share familiar routines and mutually negotiate play situations, which facilitates children’s learning of new words (Adamson, Bakeman, Deckner, and Nelson, 2014; HirshPasek et al., 2015). For instance, during doll play (which tends to elicit high symbolic play), parents produced the most and longest utterances, labeled objects more, used a greater variety of words, and asked more questions compared to play with vehicles and shape sorters (which pull for nonsymbolic play) (O’Brien and Nagle, 1987). Similarly, experimental comparisons of different types of object play show that during symbolic play (compared to nonsymbolic play) mothers produce more childdirected speech to establish a shared understanding about what objects stand for and more frequently use questions to engage infants in conversations (Quinn, 2016). Symbolic play also results in more 198

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frequent and longer joint attention episodes and greater gesture use by parents and infants. Consequently, mothers’ language during symbolic play predicts children’s language development between 18 and 24 months (Quinn, 2016), and the quality of interactions between parents and 2-year-olds during free play predicts child language growth better than the quantity of language input to 3-year-olds (Hirsh-Pasek et al., 2015). Notably, the specific objects or content of play interactions does not explain the rich language seen during symbolic play. When mothers and their 18-month-olds were randomly assigned to two conditions—a pretend snack and a reality condition in which they ate real food—mothers spoke more to, looked at, and smiled at infants more frequently during the pretend episode (Lillard and Witherington, 2004). The same patterns were seen for pretend play around grooming relative to real grooming in 15- to 24-month-olds (Nishida and Lillard, 2007). The high-quality language inputs children experience during object play interactions in turn promote children’s language development. In a series of longitudinal studies, relations between parent–child play and language development were examined (Bornstein, Vibbert, Tal, and O’Donnell, 1992; Tamis-LeMonda and Bornstein, 1991, 1993; Tamis-LeMonda et al., 1998, 2001). Mothers and infants were visited in their homes when the children were 9, 13, and 20 months old and provided with toys for play. Mothers’ who contingently responded to their infants’ play and communicative initiatives had infants who achieved language milestones, such as first words, vocabulary spurt, and combinatorial speech, sooner in development. Some longitudinal relations between language use during mother–child play and children’s language development also emerged. As children enter preschool, play continues to be a central activity of children, and teachers can help guide children’s play to facilitate learning. Preschool children from low-income backgrounds who experienced guided play improved their vocabularies more so than did children who learned through traditional teaching practices (Han, Moore, Vukelich, and Buell, 2010). Specifically, children assigned to a group in which guided play was incorporated into book reading learned significantly more words than did those who engaged in book reading only.

Summary Children’s engagement with objects changes over the first three years of life. Early on, infants explore objects by mouthing, fingering, and rotating them to discover object features. Closer to the end of their first year, children engage in nonsymbolic play in which they use objects in concrete, functional ways—pressing buttons on toy phones or sorting and aligning cups. In the second year of life, children advance to symbolic play in which they pretend to feed a dolly as if she were a real child, or talk into a block as if it were a phone. Parents attune to children’s changes in play by introducing new objects for play, demonstrating actions that can be performed on toys, and co-constructing stories in children’s pretend play. Parents’ adjust their language to children in line with children’s development: they provide contingent, lexically rich language as infants explore objects in the first year, and increase their grammatical complexity, questions, and use of mental state words as infants engage in symbolic play in the second and third years of life.

Cultural Considerations in Language and Play Parents everywhere are key participants in children’s learning. Regardless of the cultural beliefs and practices of one’s community or where one lives, parent’s speech to children is the “raw data” from which children learn language and build knowledge about the world. Similarly, parents everywhere structure children’s physical environments and engage in behaviors that facilitate children’s playful discovery and learning—ranging from providing children with access to objects for play to plopping down on the floor to participate in a “pretend birthday party.” Nonetheless, parents from different 199

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cultural communities vary in their beliefs about the meaning and value of language and play in development and their encouragement and participation in language and play interactions with children. Consideration of cultural context is therefore vital to understanding parents’ role in these two critical developmental domains.

Cultural Considerations: Language Which features of parent–child language interactions does sociocultural context influence? Parents’ views, socialization goals, passed-on traditions and practices, and larger socioeconomic and political contexts influence how much and how parents talk and respond to their infants, what they talk about and respond to, and why they talk (Bornstein, 2013; Bornstein and Lansford, 2012; Tamis-LeMonda and Song, 2012). These cultural variations reflect the extent to which parents accommodate to their children’s language skills and needs. High accommodation indicates a child-centered orientation to communication, and relatively low accommodation indicates a situation-centered orientation (Ochs and Schieffelin, 1984).

Cultural Differences in Child-Directed Speech and Parent Responsiveness Parents from different cultural communities vary in their views and practices around infants’ participation in everyday social interactions and the extent to which they adjust their communicative behaviors when interacting with infants. In many communities, parents bend over backwards, so to speak, to engage infants in everyday conversations. In the United States and across many WEIRD countries, infants are treated as conversational “equals.” Parents simplify their speech in response to infants’ limited cognitive and language skills to inculcate infants into reciprocal turn-taking in social interactions (Solomon, 2011). In other communities, parents do not deem it necessary or appropriate to talk to infants. For instance, Kaluli (Papua New Guinea) and Samoan caregivers rarely engage in child-directed speech because they believe that infants do not yet understand language. Instead, when interacting with infants and other members of the community, mothers become “ventriloquists” for babies, talking on behalf of infants when interacting with interlocutors, using high-pitched voice but refraining from modifying their grammar and lexicon. In Western Samoa, infants are raised communally by parents and extended family members and are “talked about” but rarely “talked to.” Although caregivers occasionally vocalized to infants, they rarely engaged them in the types of reciprocal, dyadic interactions typical of European-American families (Ochs, 1982; Schieffelin and Ochs, 1986). Variation among parents in child-directed speech might also stem from broader cultural values about desired child behaviors. European-American and Canadian families commonly encourage their prelinguistic infants to vocalize, suggesting that they place high value on infants’ expressions (Tamis-LeMonda and Song, 2012). In contrast, Gusii people of Kenya do not encourage their babies to vocalize because they believe that doing so might socialize infants to grow up selfish and disobedient (LeVine et al., 1994). Japanese mothers likewise discourage their infants from vocalizing frequently, considering it to be impolite and undesirable. Instead, Japanese mothers believe that infants should blend into the environment and not call attention to themselves (Minami and McCabe, 1995; Markus and Kitayama, 2003). Parents from different cultural communities also diverge in their patterns of contingent responsiveness, perhaps due to the infant behaviors they consider to be important and salient. Cross-cultural comparisons show that mothers from Berlin and Los Angeles respond to infant nondistress vocalizations and gaze more often than do mothers from Beijing, Delhi, and the Nso of Cameroon (Kärtner et al., 2008). In contrast, Nso mothers respond more often to infant touch than do mothers from other cultures. In a study of New York City mothers, Mexican immigrant mothers were most likely to respond to their 14-month-olds’ gestures than were Dominican and African-American mothers, 200

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indicating Mexican mothers’ strong emphasis on nonverbal actions (including gestures) as a mode of communication (Tamis-Lemonda et al., 2012, 2013).

Cultural Differences in the Content of Parental Speech Across cultural communities, parents also differ in what they talk about with their infants and toddlers, suggesting that language may serve different purposes for different groups. Broadly speaking, parent speech to children can be categorized along two primary functions: (1) to teach infants “about the world” (a referential function) and (2) to teach infants “how to act in the world” (a regulatory function) (Tamis-LeMonda and Song, 2012). Parents across communities differ substantially in their relative emphases on these two language functions. For example, middle-income EuropeanAmerican parents frequently use referential language with their infants and toddlers as a way to instill knowledge in children and expand vocabularies, thereby teaching children about the world. During everyday interactions, parents label and describe objects infants are interested in (Bornstein and Tamis-LeMonda, 1990), repeat novel words, expand on infants’ babbles (Masur, Flynn, and Eichorst, 2005), and encourage their infants to produce words or phrases (Tamis-LeMonda et al., 2012). In contrast, parents in other communities emphasize regulatory speech over referential speech when interacting with their young children. For instance, parents in Botswana often use regulatory language in the form of short commands to keep their infants and children safe (e.g., “Stop that” and “Don’t touch the dog”) (Geiger and Alant, 2005). Similarly, U.S. Mexican and Dominican immigrant mothers are more likely to rely on regulatory language when communicating with infants compared to third-generation U.S. African-American mothers. The emphasis on regulatory language aligns with the Latino emphasis on regulating infants’ behavior to promote respeto, a cultural value of obedience and proper demeanor.

Cultural Considerations: Play Cultures differ with respect to parents’ views around child play, which can affect the frequency of their play engagements with children and the nature of those engagements (Bornstein, 2007).

Parent Participation in Play In many WEIRD cultures, parents actively encourage children’s play through modeling and scaffolding and believe that play provides educational benefits to children (Farver and Howes, 1993; Teti, Bond, and Gibbs, 1988; Turkheimer, Bakeman, and Adamson, 1989; Zukow, 1986). Within European and U.S. communities, it is common for parents to actively participate in play, especially with young children (e.g., Haight and Miller, 1992). Parents’ participation in play may be due to parents’ sense of responsibility for their children’s learning and their related belief that play is a valuable context for teaching children new skills (Rogoff et al., 1993). A comparison of parenting across 12 cultures found that middle-class mothers in the United States engaged in play with their children most frequently (Whiting and Edwards, 1988). However, parent direct participation in play with children is far from universal. In many “traditional cultures,” including Mexico, Guatemala, and Indonesia, parents consider the purpose of play to be amusement and do not believe that it is important for them to play with their children (Farver and Howes, 1993; Farver and Wimbarti, 1995; Power, 2000; Rogoff, Mosier, Mistry, and Goncu, 1993). Rather, play is viewed solely as a child’s activity, and children engage in play primarily with peers and siblings. In hunting-and-gathering and agricultural village cultures, children are the principal playmates of one another, even in early development (Edwards and Whiting, 1993; Goncu, Mistry, and Mosier, 1991). 201

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The Nature of Play Cultural forces also guide how parents play with their children. For instance, the common “Western” model of triadic object play (as reviewed previously) is one in which the parent and infant or toddler attend jointly to an object of play while alternating gaze between the object and one another’s faces. However, this form of interaction does not reflect the triadic interactions of traditional cultures. One study compared interactions between mothers and toddlers in U.S. middle-income families and Ni-Van caregivers from Vanuatu, a non-Western indigenous community. Caregivers were equally responsive to their children’s object play across the two cultural communities. However, U.S. caregivers showed higher levels of visual triadic engagement, whereas Ni-Van caregivers showed higher levels of physical triadic engagement—in which they shared touch of an object with toddlers in the absence of visual attention to one another’s faces (Little, Carver, and Legare, 2016). Findings such as these illustrate how cultural practices around sharing attention can differ from the dominant view represented in the developmental science literature. Cultural ideologies pertaining to individualism and collectivism may also inform the nature of parent–child object play. U.S. and Japanese mothers differ in the types of object play activities they encourage in their toddlers. U.S. mothers encourage independent play with objects, whereas Japanese mothers emphasize the importance of interpersonal connectedness in toddler play. For example, Japanese mothers are more likely to engage their children in symbolic play that incorporates important “others” (e.g., such as feeding a doll a bottle or serving mother tea), whereas U.S. mothers are more likely to engage children in nonsymbolic, functionally oriented play with toys (e.g., such as nesting shapes in shape sorters), perhaps reflecting the value they placed on “independent discovery” in learning. These differences are seen even though both groups of mothers and toddlers were presented with identical toys (Tamis-LeMonda, Bornstein, Cyphers, Toda, and Ogino, 1992). Finally, cultural views about the importance of academics can affect how parents play with children. In cultures where academic success is a high priority, such as China, parent–child play is infused with child-centered teaching opportunities (Pang and Wong, 2002). Asian-American parents place high emphasis on the importance of children getting an academic head start and tend to buy more typically educational toys and engage in more preacademic activities than European-American parents. In turn, European-American children have been reported to spend more time in free play than their Asian counterparts, who spend more time at home preparing for academics (Parmar, Harkness, and Super, 2004, 2008).

Caveats on Cultural Differences Although cultural differences in parent–child language and play interactions were highlighted, children from all cultures become competent users of language in their local communities, and children everywhere spend much of their waking hours in play during the early years. And, as noted previously, parents everywhere provide their children with learning opportunities in domains of language and play, even if they simply allow children to be nearby to overhear conversations or ensure that their children are safe as they play with siblings and peers. For the most part, although cultural differences exist in many core features of parenting, cross-cultural similarities abound. As one example, mothers from all communities display contiguity, contingency, and embodiment in their responses to infant behaviors, even if they differentially attune to different behaviors in their infants. Notably, differences in average levels of parental behaviors do not imply differences in associations between parenting and infant learning and development. The benefits of parents’ lexical diversity, responsiveness, multimodal input, and so forth have been documented across families from different cultural communities and socioeconomic strata (e.g., Bornstein and Tamis-LeMonda, 1989, 1997; Bornstein, Tamis-LeMonda, and Haynes, 1999; Hsu and Lavelli, 2005; Rodriguez and Tamis-LeMonda, 202

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2011; Tamis-LeMonda et al., 2001; Weisleder and Fernald, 2013). And parents’ engagement in play with children scaffolds children in play, regardless of cultural setting, supporting Vygotsky’s (1978) writings on ways that adults can promote learning within children’s zone of proximal development. Finally, within-cultural variation often surpasses between-cultural variation, and general statements about cultural tendencies mask the huge individual differences that exist within a given community. For instance, low-income African-American mothers in the United States vary in how much they consider play to be a context for learning. Some mothers consider play to offer a range of developmental benefits, whereas others consider play to be less important than academic-focused activities such as reading (Fogle and Mendez, 2006). Variation among parents in their views around play might influence how often they encourage play at home and whether and how often they participate in play with their young children (LaForett and Mendez, 2016).

Pedagogical Applications In the United States, psychological research on the importance of language and play in learning and development, and the role of parents in supporting their young children, has been put to practical use through educational initiatives, parenting programs, and various interventions with young infants and children from low-income households.

Language Programs and Interventions Children’s early language environments are core to learning and development and springboards to academic success. By the time children say their first words, significant disparities exist between children growing up in poverty and their middle-class peers in the quality and quantity of language input they hear from their parents. In their seminal study, Hart and Risley (1995) estimated that by the time they reached 3 years of age, children from high-SES homes would hear 30 million more words than children from low-SES homes. It is well known that intervening early can be valuable to children from disadvantaged families (e.g., Heckman, and Masterov, 2007), and interest continues to grow among researchers and practitioners on ways to best promote language development and school readiness starting in the early years. Parent-directed approaches to intervention are the most logical format for intervening early, because parental language input most often lies at the heart of the word gap (Leffel and Suskind, 2013). A meta-analysis of 18 parent-directed language interventions found positive effects on children’s expressive and receptive language skills (Roberts and Kaiser, 2011). Notably, these interventions were effective even with relatively moderate training, underscoring the cost-effectiveness of relatively straightforward interventions, as long as they occur early. Interventions have likewise been designed to promote parent responsiveness. When caregivers interact with their children in warm and responsive ways and actively engage in a back-and-forth communicative style, children are highly likely to learn new words. One intervention that capitalizes on this parenting style is the Play and Learning Strategies (PALS) program (Landry, Smith, Swank, and Guttentag, 2008). PALS uses a video training strategy in which parents are visited in their homes and shown videos that illustrate responsive strategies for promoting language, social, and cognitive development. Parents are videorecorded interacting with their infants and toddlers while a coach watches and provides live feedback. At the end of such sessions, coaches review the footage with parents and discuss which PALS strategies worked in parents’ interactions. The PALS implementation study, with a targeted sample of parents from low-income neighborhoods in Texas, produced gains in parents’ responsive language stimulation skills, and consequently children improved on their vocabulary and language complexity. Although results from home visitation programs are promising, the strategies are often too costly to serve larger numbers of low-income families. For this reason, interventions implemented through 203

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regular pediatric visits might be cost-effective in reaching a large portion of low-income families. Nearly all families visit the pediatrician frequently for regular well-care visits throughout their infant’s first year of life, creating frequent opportunities for interventions at no additional time-cost to families. The Video Interaction Project (VIP; Mendelsohn et al., 2005, 2011) exemplifies a program that uses the pediatric visit platform for early intervention. This program takes place from birth through age 3 and consists of fifteen 30- to 45-minute sessions with child development specialists on days of primary care visits. Specialists sit down with families and deliver a curriculum that is specifically focused on enhancing and infusing language interactions during daily activities, such as reading and play. Much like PALS, mothers are videorecorded interacting with their infants during brief five- to ten-minute segments, and then videos are reviewed with the specialist, who reinforces positive interactions and points to times when opportunities for interaction might have been missed. Mothers can then take home their video and are also sent home with developmentally appropriate learning materials to use during their everyday interactions with infants. Last, messages are reinforced through pamphlets written in plain language specific to each visit, with the specialist’s notes about what each mother can do to enhance language. The VIP intervention has had remarkable success. One study showed that when VIP begins in infancy, parent–infant interactions were already enhanced by 6 months. Moreover, higher dosage of VIP was associated with greater effects on parents’ language interactions, including shared reading, teaching, and responsiveness (Mendelsohn et al., 2011). The lessons learned from language interventions with disadvantaged populations are applicable to families of all socioeconomic statuses or nationalities. One program developed for low-income families in Wales, the Incredible Years Parent-Toddler Programme (IYPTP; Webster-Stratton, 2008), taught parents strategies to scaffold children’s early language development. A randomized control study of the program found that six months after parent participation in group discussion and role play around key parenting principles, parents more actively initiated conversations with their toddlers than control families (Gridley, Hutchings, and Baker-Henningham, 2015). Finally, interventions using the LENA (i.e., Language Environment Analysis) technology are also on the rise. LENA is a small device that can be worn by children to record how much speech is directed to them at home over extended periods. The device produces home language environment reports (including number of words adults used and number of conversational turns between adult and child) that are easy to interpret. A study with low-income families in south Chicago found that parents who received detailed feedback about their language inputs to their children based on LENA recordings became more aware of the effects of their language use for children’s school readiness and increased the number of interactions and diversity of their language input to children (Suskind et al., 2015). Similarly, an intervention in Korea used LENA recordings to provide middle-to-upper-income parents with feedback about their verbal interactions with their infants and toddlers (Pae et al., 2016). Notably, even in this more advantaged sample, there were still parents who engaged in fewer than average (compared to U.S. norms) language interactions with their children, and these parents benefited the most from detailed feedback. That is, parents in the treatment group who received LENA feedback reports, compared to control parents who did not, increased their use of words and conversational turns (a measure of responsiveness) when categorized as having below-average language use, but not when categorized as average or above-average language use. Thus, the effects of promoting rich and plentiful language interactions among high-SES families can also be effective for subsamples of parents who engage in low child-directed speech, highlighting the universal importance of supporting language-rich interactions between parents and infants.

Play Programs and Interventions Several intervention programs geared toward enhancing children’s cognitive and academic potential have included play as an important element. During the 1960s, concerns that children from lower 204

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socioeconomic backgrounds were at risk for poor academic achievement spurred the establishment of programs such as Head Start, and some years later led to the establishment of home-based intervention programs that included play (e.g., Andrews et al., 1982). Parent–child play intervention programs have also been encouraged for high-risk infants (Field, 1983; Scarr-Salapatek and Williams, 1973), including in the treatment of children who exhibit problematic or disruptive behavior (Guerney, 1991). One of the earliest success stories was seen in the Verbal Interaction Project’s Mother-Child Home Program, which was designed around mother–child joint play and began when children were 2 years of age (Levenstein, 1970). A caseworker, known as a “Toy Demonstrator,” visited participants’ homes twice a week for two years, brought toys and books for the child, and modeled activities meant to foster maternal verbal play with children. The IQ scores of participant children were higher than those of nonparticipants at follow-up assessments, and the advantage persisted through eighth grade (Levenstein and O’Hara, 1993). Moreover, mothers’ interaction styles with their young adolescents continued to reflect the techniques encouraged by the Toy Demonstrators. Today, several play interventions and programs have been developed to foster children’s development in areas such as language. For instance, one invention designed to promote playful language between parents and toddlers (Christakis, Zimmerman, and Garrison, 2007) had positive benefits for vocabulary. In the treatment condition, parents were given a set of toy blocks along with explicit encouragement of how to use playful language during play at home. The control group did not receive block sets or instructions on how to play and were assumed to carry on with their daily routines. Toddlers in the intervention group displayed greater vocabulary growth than children in the control group. Play has also been used to foster preschool children’s learning in the classroom. In Tools of the Mind, a Vygostkian-based curriculum, researchers incorporated play in a randomized trial with 3- and 4-year-olds to foster cognitive, emotional, and social outcomes. Teachers and students were randomly assigned to either a control or treatment condition: the control group received a preestablished literacy curriculum, whereas the treatment group received the Tools of the Mind intervention. Children who received the intervention had better social and language skills, suggesting that a curriculum with a strong emphasis on play can enhance learning and development in pre-K children (Barnett et al., 2008). The abundance of evidence on the benefits of play for children’s learning counteracts the false dichotomy between “learning versus play” that often pervades education circles. Developmental scientists recognize that it is through play that children learn, and they seek to spread this message to parents and educators. In fact, there is growing emphasis on “guided play” as a promising approach for teaching children foundational skills in early childhood curricula (Weisberg, HirshPasek, Golinkoff, Kittredge, and Klahr, 2016). In guided play, children are encouraged to express their autonomy and curiosity through initiation of playful activities, and adults then respond by scaffolding children’s play and learning. In this guided play approach, children’s spontaneous attention and engagement with objects and activities is met with structured feedback from parents or teachers, thereby creating an optimal context for learning. Evaluations of guided play curricula indicate impressive benefits for children’s learning (Alfieri, Brooks, Aldrich, and Tenenbaum, 2011; Fisher, Hirsh-Pasek, Newcombe, and Golinkoff, 2013) and indicate that guided play can be effectively incorporated into ongoing curricula. Teachers can present the guided play materials in a game-like fashion (Morris, Croker, Zimmerman, Gill, and Romig, 2013) or offer children the opportunity to express self-direction in a structured setting (Neuman and Roskos, 1992). Curricula that build on the strong knowledge base on the role of play in development will continue to yield many success stories, as seen in the Tools of the Mind (Bodrova and Leong, 2015), Montessori (Lillard, 2013), and guided play (Weisberg et al., 2016). Children have a lot to learn, without sacrificing their time to play. 205

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Conclusions Language and play interactions are vital to learning and development and are critical springboards for children’s school readiness and lifelong success. Across the first years of life, infants and toddlers show rapid gains in these interconnected domains, and parents are key participants in these developments. Parents support children’s language and play through child-directed speech and action, responsiveness to children’s communications and play initiations, scaffolding of children to higher play levels, and incorporation of rich language into everyday play interactions. As children advance in their language and play skills, parents respond with a wider variety of words, increasingly complex grammatical structures, more sophisticated forms of play, and greater encouragement of children’s language and play. Notably, variations among parents in language inputs and play with children are substantial and reliably predict individual differences in children’s learning within and across developmental domains. Although parents’ interactions with children differ substantially across cultural communities, parents everywhere shape children’s language and play experiences through what they do and how they structure their children’s everyday activities. Consequently, a growing number of intervention and educational programs aim to arm parents with the tools necessary to support their children’s learning and development in these key developmental domains. Some interventions focus exclusively on language, others exclusively on play, and some incorporate elements of both, for instance, by teaching parents how to recognize play as a context for rich social interactions. As developmental science continues to break new ground on parents’ role in children’s language and play, we will make enormous strides toward ensuring that all children become skilled members of their communities while having some fun along the way.

Acknowledgments We thank the children and parents who have participated in our studies over the years and helped us discover the ways that children learn through the rich play and language interactions they share with parents. We acknowledge support from the LEGO Foundation, which continues to advance our research on the science of everyday play.

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Infant Behavior and Development, 22(4), 557–568. Nishida, T. K., and Lillard, A. S. (2007). The informative value of emotional expressions: “Social referencing” in mother: Child pretense. Developmental Science, 10(2), 205–212. O’Brien, M., and Nagle, K. J. (1987). Parents’ speech to toddlers: The effect of play context. Journal of Child Language, 14(2), 269–279. Ochs, E. (1982). Talking to children in Western Samoa. Language in Society, 11(1), 77–104. Ochs, E., and Schieffelin, B. B. (1984). Language acquisition and socialization: Three developmental stories and their implications. In R. A. Shweder and R. A. LeVine (Eds.), Culture theory (pp. 276–320). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. O'Connell, B., & Bretherton, I. (1984). Toddler's play, alone and with mother: The role of maternal guidance. In I. Bretherton's (Ed.), Symbolic play: The development of social undersatnding (pp. 337-368). Orlando, FL: Academic Press. Pae, S., Yoon, H., Seol, A., Gilkerson, J., Richards, J. 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8 HOW PARENTS CAN MAXIMIZE CHILDREN’S COGNITIVE ABILITIES Karin Sternberg, Wendy M. Williams, and Robert J. Sternberg

Introduction I took a good deal o’ pains with his eddication, sir; let him run in the streets when he was very young, and shift for hisself. It’s the only way to make a boy sharp, sir. —Charles Dickens, The Pickwick Papers, 1836

If children grew up according to early indications, we should have nothing but geniuses. —Goethe

Too often we give children answers to remember rather than problems to solve. —Roger Lewin

When I was a kid my parents moved a lot . . . but I always found them. —Rodney Dangerfield

When asked, most parents state that they seek to maximize their children’s abilities, whether cognitive, social, emotional, or physical. But how, precisely, can parents accomplish this goal? What actions should be a part of their daily routine? The information parents receive about exactly how to maximize their children’s abilities takes many forms and comes from many sources: pediatricians and other medical experts; family members and friends; television shows, books, and magazines; and teachers and other parents. The quality of this information varies widely, and in fact some or even much of what parents hear (and do) may work against the best interests of their children, as the quote from a Dickens classic well illustrates. In this chapter we present 12 lessons for parents who wish to maximize their children’s cognitive potential. These lessons are based on rigorous empirical evidence from a range of disciplines and are designed to be placed into immediate practical use. The science behind the lessons is intriguing, but it is not necessary to become mired in facts and figures to benefit from the lessons we present: each one can be put into use today to help children make the most of their abilities. Our goal is to cut through the misinformation and disinformation and to equip parents with meaningful tools useful in rearing competent and successful children. We argue in this chapter that there are, in fact, many things parents can do to foster cognitive competence in their children. Consider one example. It is well known that achievement test scores in the United States lag behind those in other countries. However, our educational failings are not due to lack of cognitive competence or underlying genetic deficit. If our children are not 214

Maximizing Children’s Cognitive Abilities Table 8.1 Twelve Lessons for Parents for Maximizing Their Children’s Cognitive Abilities Lesson 1: Lesson 2: Lesson 3: Lesson 4:

Recognize what can and cannot be changed in your children. Aim to meaningfully challenge your children, not bore them and not overwhelm them. Teach children that the main limitation on what they can do is what they tell themselves they cannot do. It is more important that children learn what questions to ask, and how to ask them, than they learn what the answers to questions are. Lesson 5: Help children find what really excites them, remembering that it may not be what really excites you, or what you wish would really excite them. Lesson 6: Encourage children to take sensible intellectual risks. Lesson 7: Teach children to take responsibility for themselves—both for their successes and for their failures. Lesson 8: Teach children how to delay gratification—to be able to wait for rewards. Lesson 9: Teach children to put themselves in another’s place. Lesson 10: It is not the amount of money you spend on your child that matters, but rather the quality of your interactions with your child and the nature of your child’s experiences. Lesson 11: Help children understand themselves and others. Lesson 12: Integrate digital devices into your child’s life in a reasonable way.

performing, it is because we are not teaching them adequately. Indeed, much of what students get in school is review, and review of review. There has been a “dumbing down” of American textbooks at all levels (Hayes, 1996): the typical texts for a third-grader in the early 1950s would today be used for sixth-graders. (These findings lend credence to the statements many parents make to their children regarding how much more difficult school was when the parents were young.) The books students read in 12th grade are on average only at a 5.2 grade level, and summer readings for college freshmen are on average written at a 7.3 grade level (Renaissance Learning, 2015). Small wonder our children are lagging behind. As parents, we may or may not have the power to effect changes in schools. Without question, however, we have the power to effect changes in the home. This chapter describes how we can effect meaningful change to encourage and enhance the cognitive development of our children. Our goal is that, after reading this chapter, the reader will have mastered a number of strategies and can start implementing immediately to improve the cognitive competence of children. Each lesson makes just one point, illustrated through examples. It is easy to be overwhelmed by a book of strategies, or to understand the strategies but not how to implement them. This is why we present our strategies along with clear take-home messages. First, we describe what not to do, and, second, we describe what to do and how to do it. To provide an overview of all the strategies at the outset, the 12 lessons are summarized in Table 8.1.

Lesson 1: Can You Change Your Children? Recognize what can and cannot be changed in your children. What not to do: View your child as if composed of modeling clay that you can shape into anything you wish. Decide what your child will become and accomplish and expect your child to fulfill your vision. What to do: Watch carefully as your child attempts to acquire new skills and meets new experiences. Be alert for signs of interest and/or talent in a given area or pursuit, and then encourage your child to pursue these skills and explore these areas. Ensure that your child is broadly exposed to many skill areas so that you can identify the full range of her or his interests and natural gifts (even if they do not overlap with yours!). How much of what children become can parents influence? The nature versus nurture question is a subject of heated and timely debate, particularly as it relates to childrearing. Adding fuel to this 215

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already-rich fire was Harris’s (1996) book, The Nurture Assumption, which chronicled the evidence for the omnipresent role of genes and peers—as opposed to parents—as the most critical forces in shaping children’s development. Harris’s book set off a media frenzy, leading to cover stories in major weeklies and top stories on television news magazine shows. The cover of Newsweek even asked, “Do Parents Matter?” Thus, today’s parents have seen a phase transition from an emphasis by leading scholars primarily on the role of environmentalism to an emphasis increasingly on the role of genetics. It is an old question, and much of the debate is, in fact, an old recipe served on a new platter. Consider that, in 1930, John Watson made the extraordinary claim that, with control over the environment, he could make any infant into anything he wished: Give me a dozen infants, well-formed, and my own specified world to bring them up in and I’ll guarantee to take any one at random and train him to become any type of specialist I might select—doctor, lawyer, artist, merchant-chief, and, yes, even into beggar-man and thief, regardless of his penchants, tendencies, abilities, vocations, and race of his ancestors. (Watson, 1930, p. 104) Today, most people, psychologists included, would tend to dismiss his claim. Any of us who has tried to shape our children—even down to the level of trying to get them to practice music for a few more minutes per day or to spend just a few minutes more on homework—has seen how hard it can be to effect even small changes, much less large ones. It is understandable that from the practical perspective of daily parenthood we scoff at Watson’s claim of the unlimited malleability of human potential. The emphasis today tends to be on the importance of the genetic control of behavior. Studies reviewed by Plomin (1988) and Plomin et al. (1997) for example, suggest that at least half and probably more of the variance in general cognitive ability as measured by IQ is due to genetic factors, with the importance of such factors increasing (rather, than, as one might expect, decreasing) with age. Bouchard (1997; Bouchard and McGue, 1981) estimated heritability as somewhat higher. The heritability of more specific abilities, such as verbal and spatial abilities, appears to be somewhat lower than that of general intelligence as measured by conventional tests. So much, it would appear, for John Watson. But then again, maybe not. First of all, Watson himself, despite his strong environmentalism, subscribed to the importance of biology; he believed that innate biological tendencies made some things considerably more difficult to effect than others. Watson was surely sophisticated about the importance of biology in the origins of learned behavior; he himself did not believe that “all behavior is learned.” In fact, Watson believed that all behavior is based initially on congenitally given, unconditioned responses, consisting of fear, rage, and love. He regarded these as “emotional reactions” (Watson, 1919, pp. 198–202). In the same volume, Chapters 3 and 4, respectively, are titled “The receptors and their stimuli,” and “Neuro-physiological basis of action.” There is much here about the power of biology in shaping outcomes—Watson was actually well trained in the physiology of the day. He wrote: “Human action as a whole can be divided into hereditary modes of response (emotional and instinctive) and acquired modes of response (habit)” and “instinctive positive reaction tendencies displayed by the child soon become overlaid with the organized habits of the adult” (p. 194). Thus, it is clear that Watson himself, often cited as the ultimate environmentalist, was a firm believer in the balance between the forces of biology and environment in shaping behavior and child development. The relative importance of biology and genetics, however, is often misunderstood; people confuse what are actually genetic influences with the ultimate control of genetics over human destiny. It is a myth that, just because a phenomenon is partially genetically based, it is not amenable to environmental interventions. Consider height. The heritability of height (that is, the extent to which individual 216

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differences among people are due to genetic factors) is well over 90%. Yet average heights in Japan have risen close to four inches in one generation. The seeming contradiction, as Ceci (1991, 1996) noted, is due to the fact that heritability is based on variance (the relative positions of individuals when ranked on an attribute), whereas the impact of the rearing environment is documented not by changes in variation but by changes in the mean or average. Thus, everyone can become taller in a second generation (due to better nutrition, for example), but their heights relative to one another can still be the same as were their mothers’, thus retaining the high heritability of height: taller mothers (relative to their peers) still have taller children (relative to their peers). To take a more extreme example, consider phenylketonuria (PKU), a hereditary disease that results in an inability of the body to metabolize an amino acid, phenylalanine. Susceptibility to this disease is 100% heritable. In the past, sufferers of this disease always became severely mentally retarded and suffered other ghastly symptoms as well. Today, because we understand the nature of the disease, symptoms can be almost wholly eradicated if phenylalanine is eliminated from the diet of the child immediately at birth. Thus, a disease that is wholly hereditary can be controlled environmentally, although it has been shown that some cognitive deficits linger throughout the lives of PKU individuals despite dietary intervention (see, for example, Christ, Huijbregts, de Sonneville, and White, 2010). The point is that the existence of a genetic contribution to intelligence does not prevent parents from intervening in their children’s cognitive growth or environmental forces in general from having powerful effects (Grigorenko, 2000; Grigorenko and Sternberg, 2001; Sternberg and Grigorenko, 2001). Children can be helped to achieve cognitive competence, regardless of the role of genetics. However, genetic influences are real. Thus, parents should not view their children as lumps of clay that parents can form into any shape they wish. Rather, parents should work with and not against children’s natural gifts, interests, and tendencies to discover children’s ultimate potential. Any child can learn and practice and become more proficient in virtually any endeavor, but the room for real and meaningful achievement is greatest when this practice is built on underlying genetic potential. Sampling broadly across a range of interests will help parents determine where their children’s talents lie.

Lesson 2: Meaningfully Challenge Your Children Aim to meaningfully challenge your children, not bore them and not overwhelm them. What not to do: (1) Keep your children working to learn new and complex things, even if they seem not to understand them. Assume that your children will rise to the occasion and master tough material with enough sustained practice. (2) Be careful not to challenge your children too much—stay within the limits of their understanding so they do not become frustrated. What to do: Strike a balance by challenging your children meaningfully with tasks that are just beyond their reach and on which they succeed some but not all of the time. Psychologists who study the development of children’s thinking and reasoning have long been fascinated by the question of how to maximize this development. One concept that has proved useful is the zone of proximal development, described by Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky (1978). The zone of proximal development refers to the gap between what children can accomplish independently and what they can accomplish when they are interacting with others who are more competent. The word proximal means that the assistance provided is just beyond the child’s current level of competence. This assistance complements and builds on the child’s existing abilities rather than directly teaching the child new behaviors. The idea is that the child must learn by stretching herself or himself with the guidance of an adult. The medieval and modern European practices of apprenticeship—in which a child learns a trade working closely under the guidance and supervision of a skilled adult—show how old and enduring is the notion of the zone of proximal development, even if it was not always labeled as such. 217

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When challenging children within their zone of proximal development, you will need to give them some assistance to accomplish the task at hand. This assistance is called scaffolding. It is important not to give them too much assistance so that they are not challenged enough; it is equally important not to give them too little assistance so that they feel as though they are set up for failure. Imagine that you are going to the pool with your young child with the goal of trying to teach her or him to swim. What activities you do with your child in the water and how much assistance you give depend on your child’s temperament, knowledge, and skill level. No two children are alike. That is, the scaffolds you provide need to be adjusted. If you have a child who is very uncomfortable in the water, you first may wish to hold the child in your arms and spend time with the child in the water so that the child becomes more comfortable in the new environment. If you have a child who is more daring, you may already give the child a pool noodle so that the child can become familiar with the water and also practice some leg movements in the water. Because learning is a social activity, do not forget that not only adults, but also older and more experienced children, can provide necessary assistance. Children can learn much from their older siblings and friends. They naturally look at what others do and observe older peers. In groups of mixed-aged children, you often can see the younger children looking at their older peers and imitating whatever they do—how they sit on the side waiting until it is their turn on the trampoline or how they line up for the school bus. The lesson for parents to remember is that inundating children with challenges not coupled with meaningful assistance, and overwhelming them in the process, does little to aid cognitive development. In fact, the repeated frustration and ongoing lack of understanding created by such a situation may do more harm than good. Nor is avoiding opportunities to challenge children and making things easy for them the answer or solving problems for them while they watch passively. Feuerstein (1980; Feuerstein, Klein, and Tannenbaum, 1991) used the term mediated learning experience to contrast with the term direct learning experience. Direct learning experience, the teaching of facts, may be important, but it is less important than mediated learning experience, in which adults interpret the environment alongside the child. Thus, a child viewing an exhibit at a planetarium alone or alongside an adult who quietly views the same exhibit is not learning in the same way as a child who has the exhibit actively interpreted and explained by an adult. Effective parents challenge their children, but within limits. They do not overly inundate and frustrate their children with tough tasks that are well beyond the children’s grasp. Effective parents also do not protect their children from all frustration by keeping tasks simple and perfectly achievable—they understand that children need challenges and the meaningful assistance of parents in meeting these challenges.

Lesson 3: Do Not Let Children Give Up Too Easily Teach children that the main limitation on what they can do is what they tell themselves they can’t do. What not to do: Tell your children they do not have the ability to do certain kinds of things, or the personality to do other kinds of things, or the motivation to complete something they might start. What to do: Tell your children they have the ability to meet pretty much any challenge life might offer. What they need to decide is how hard they are willing to work to meet these challenges. Much—arguably, most—of what we cannot do in life, we cannot do because we tell ourselves we cannot (often because others have told us in the past that we cannot and because we believed them). One of the best-known studies in psychology was conducted by Rosenthal and Jacobson (1968). The investigators told teachers that psychological testing revealed that some of the students in their classes were going to bloom during the next year and others were not. In fact, the children identified as potential “bloomers” were chosen at random. At the end of the year, the children identified 218

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as having exceptional prospects for blooming that year did, in fact, perform better than the rest. This effect is sometimes called the “Pygmalion” effect, after Eliza Doolittle (of My Fair Lady fame), who discovered that she could do pretty much what she set her mind to do. The author of the play on which this musical was based, George Bernard Shaw, named his work after the ancient mythological king Pygmalion who was able to bring statues to life. Some investigators have argued over details of the methodology of the Rosenthal and Jacobson experiments (see Snow, 1969 for a partial refutation of original findings), but few would argue with Rosenthal and Jacobson’s conclusion that just setting up an expectation is often enough to make it come true. Children can do pretty much what they make up their minds to do, within natural limitations. However, there are natural limitations, rendering some things easier to achieve than others, and, in fact, rendering some things impossible to achieve for some children. Very few 12-year-olds have the capacity to bench-press 300 pounds with a set of weights, regardless of motivation and practice (skeletal limitations are real). Similarly, people do not have the capacity to swim from New York to London, nor the capacity to multiply two 30-digit numbers in their heads without using paper (save the rare savant or mental calculator who has devised a trick method for doing such calculations). But within the limitations of a given child’s capacity, the main thing holding that child back is her or his set of beliefs regarding the limitations on what she or he can do. As an example of the role of perceptions of ability in subsequent achievement, consider girls’ and boys’ SAT math scores as a function of the students’ attitudes about their competence in math. Girls and boys tend to have different perceptions about their abilities, with girls believing they are less capable and boys believing they are more capable. Research has shown that students who believe they are quite capable do better than predicted by their ability level, but students who believe they are not capable do less well than predicted by their ability level. In general, children with negative thoughts about their ability become distracted from learning, lose track of the details of their tasks, and sometimes become immobilized from further learning (Brown, Bransford, Ferrara, and Campione, 1983). These children then wind up getting less and less practice in the areas in which they need practice the most. A program of research by Steele and Aronson (1995) also looked at the issue of students’ beliefs about their own competence. Before giving a tough math test to a group of girls and boys, he had the test-taker tell one-half of the students that girls and boys perform equivalently on the test. The other half of the test-takers were given no information related to gender. Steele showed that girls’ performance was substantially higher on the same test when they were told beforehand that girls perform the same as boys, compared to when girls were given no information about gender-related performance. Steele explains the jump in girls’ performance by saying that girls hold negative stereotypes about their mathematical ability. These stereotypes depress girls’ performance on difficult math tests (only performance on difficult tests was assessed). But when girls are told that past research has shown that on the particular test they are taking, girls perform the same as boys, then girls do not suffer from their negative stereotype, and their performance shoots up (Steele and Aronson, 1995). In this situation, Steele and Aronson believe that because the girls are told that girls do as well as boys, they are not hindered by their negative stereotypes. Researchers have also looked at the role of perceived competence and control in students’ preference for taking on a challenge (Boggiano, Main, and Katz, 1988). They investigated whether students’ perceptions of their academic competence and their beliefs in their level of personal control over school-related performance affected the students’ intrinsic interest and preference for challenge in an evaluative setting. Students with higher perceptions of their academic competence and personal control had more intrinsic interest in schoolwork and more preference for challenging school activities. When given an evaluative, controlling directive (such as “your last three answers are not correct—try another sample problem and let me check your work before you go on to chapter three”), students 219

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who had high perceptions of their own academic competence and control preferred a greater challenge than did students who had lower perceptions of their academic competence and control. No difference between the groups of students in terms of preference for challenge was evident when no controlling directive was presented. Thus, students’ belief in their academic competence is important, as is their belief in their ability to control their school performance. Consider a personal example that serves to illustrate the effects of perceptions of competence in one’s daily life. One of the authors of this chapter, like some of the children in the Rosenthal and Jacobson research, was labeled an ordinary learner in elementary school due to low scores on standardized tests of intelligence. The result was that his teachers had low expectations for him during the first three grades of school. Being the type of student who wished to please his teachers, he performed at the roughly average level they expected. They were happy because their expectations were confirmed, and the student was happy because the teachers were happy. In sum, everyone was happy. Things might have gone on this way indefinitely were it not for the child’s fourth-grade teacher. For whatever reason, she believed that he could perform at a higher level than the level at which he was currently performing, and at a level higher than the tests predicted he could achieve. In response to the higher expectations of the teacher, he performed at a higher level, and to his own surprise, he became an “A” student, and remained so thereafter. But he could only become an “A” student when he told himself he could, as a result of a teacher who expected nothing less. Had it not been for that teacher, his whole life would almost certainly have been very different. There is a fascinating footnote to this lesson, one related by the psychologist, Seymour Sarason (as told in Sternberg, Wagner, Williams, and Horvath, 1995). Early in his career, Sarason regularly visited institutions for the so-called feeble-minded. On one of his visits, he learned that the “feeble-minded” residents had eluded an elaborate security system and had broken out of the building. Once the residents were rounded up, Sarason proceeded with his task, which among other things involved administering the Porteus Maze to test these individuals. Their scores were predictably quite low, which is not surprising when one remembers that low scores on tests of intelligence and reasoning were in part responsible for these people being housed in such institutions in the first place. But when it came to eluding the security system and gaining freedom, the residents displayed capabilities no one thought they possessed. Thus, once again, experience shows that people often are capable of far more than they themselves, or others, would predict.

Lesson 4: Teach How to Ask Questions It is more important that children learn what questions to ask, and how to ask them, than that they learn what the answers to questions are. Schools, and most parents as well, tend to make what we believe is a serious pedagogical mistake: they emphasize the answering of questions, rather than the asking of them. The good student is perceived as the one who usually furnishes the right answers, preferably rapidly. The expert in a field thus becomes the extension of the expert student—the one who knows a lot of information and can recite it from memory at will. Many cognitive and educational psychologists are returning to the thinking of John Dewey (1933), who realized that how we think is often more important than what we think. We need to stress more the teaching of how to ask questions, and how to ask the right questions (good, thought-provoking, and interesting ones), and to stress less the simple retrieval of the correct answers to whatever questions we might pose. What not to do: Encourage children to view you or their teacher as the one who should ask the questions and the child as the one to answer them. Perpetuate the belief that the roles of parent and of teacher are ones of teaching children the “facts.” 220

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What to do: Realize—and make sure children realize—that what matters most is not the “facts” a child knows, but rather the child’s ability to find and use those facts. Help children learn not only how to answer questions but also how to ask them and how to formulate the right questions. Children are natural question-askers. They have to be, to learn to adapt to a complex and changing environment. But whether children continue to ask questions—and, especially, to ask good questions—depends in large part on how we, as adults, respond to their questions (Sternberg, 1994). Those who have read Dickens’s Oliver Twist may remember that in Victorian England, children’s questions were not tolerated—in fact, children were supposed to be “seen and not heard.” The rare child with the gall to ask “Please Sir, may I have some more?” at the dinner table was viewed as insolent and in need of strict discipline. Today, many parents share another view of children’s question-asking. They recognize that the ability to ask good questions and to know how to ask them is an essential part of intelligence, and arguably, the most important part (Arlin, 1990; Getzels and Csikszentmihalyi, 1976; Sternberg, 1985a, 1997, 1999). It is an ability we as parents can either foster or stifle. (It is worthwhile to remember, however, that in our era, as always, different religions and cultures have varying tolerances toward children’s question-asking.) Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky (1978) proposed that a primary means by which we develop our intelligence is through internalization. We incorporate into ourselves what we absorb as a result of the process of being exposed to and learning from the environment. The parent as teacher helps the child make sense of the environment by providing guidance to the child in how to interpret it. As discussed earlier, Feuerstein (1980; Feuerstein et al., 1991) called this guidance mediated learning experience and contrasted this kind of learning with direct learning experience. Direct learning experience is what happens when a parent or teacher teaches us a fact. It is important in learning, but less important than mediated learning experience, which is the learning children do through adult interpretation of what goes on around the child. Feuerstein suggested that children who show deficient intellectual skills are often those who have been exposed to insufficient mediation of their learning experiences. On this view, it is not enough just to take the child to a museum or to see interesting sights. What is important is the mediation of the experience for the child by the parent or teacher. When children seek such mediation through asking questions, we as parents and teachers have several different characteristic ways of responding. We believe that how teachers respond to children’s questions is important because various types of responses are differentially helpful to children in developing their intelligence. We proposed a seven-level model of parent–child interaction in the questioning process (Sternberg, 1994). The basic idea is that parents (and other mediators) who respond at higher levels better foster their children’s intellectual development. We briefly review this model to show how the way you handle a child’s question can either place the child on the road to intellectual fulfillment or derail the child. Consider an example of a question a child might pose while visiting Holland (see Sternberg, 1994), or after seeing a documentary about Holland on television, or after reading a book about Holland. The question is one that occurred to one of us during a trip to Holland: Why are people in Holland so tall? Now consider various ways you, as a parent, might respond to this question, or any question your child might ask you. Children will ask you many thousands of questions as they grow up, and you should ask yourself which of these levels best characterizes your typical way of responding. The higher the level, the more you are doing to enhance your child’s intellectual development. Notice that it is easily in your power to raise the level at which you respond. It requires no special abilities on your part, just an affirming attitude toward your child and her or his questions.

Level 1: Rejection of Questions Typical responses of this kind are “Don’t ask so many questions!,” “Don’t bother me!,” “Don’t ask stupid questions!,” and “Be quiet!” When parents respond at this level, the basic message to the child is to shut up. Questions are seen as inappropriate or as irritations. Children should learn to “be seen 221

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and not heard” and to keep their place. The result of consistent punishment for question-asking, of course, is that children learn not to ask questions, and hence, not to learn. All of us probably would like to believe that only other people respond to children’s questions at such a low and even offensive level. Perhaps we’ve heard parents on the bus or subway treat children like this, but we never would. Yet it would be the unusual parent indeed who does not occasionally lapse into Level-1 behavior, if only from exhaustion from answering questions or from doing other things. Our children then pay a price for our exhaustion.

Level 2: Restatement of Questions as Responses Typical responses at this level would be “Because they are Dutch, and Dutch people are very tall.” or “Because they grow a lot.” At this level, we answer our children’s questions, but in a wholly empty way. Our response is nothing more than a restatement of the original question. We state redundantly that people from Holland are tall because they are Dutch, or because the Dutch grow a lot. Or we say that a person acts the way he does “because he’s human,” or acts crazy “because he is insane,” or that some people come up with good solutions “because they are high in intelligence.” Often we are not even aware we are restating a question because we have a high-falutin’ but empty word that hides our ignorance. How many neurotic people do you know? And just what does it explain about a person when we label her or him as “neurotic”?

Level 3: Admission of Ignorance or Providing Direct Responses Typical responses at this level are “I don’t know” or “Because . . .” followed by a reasonable answer (say, about nutrition or genetics). At this level, we either say we do not know or give a response based on what we do know. Children are given the opportunity to learn something new, or to realize that their parents do not know everything. Such answers are quite reasonable in certain situations, but do not represent the maximum we can do for our children. (By the way, answering as though you know the answer when you do not is not a response on any of these levels. It is extremely unwise, because it gives children the wrong information and teaches them to pretend to knowledge they don’t really have.) When parents answer at this level, they can do so either with or without “reinforcement.” This means that we either can reward kids for asking the question or not reward them. Examples of rewards would be “That’s a good question” or “I’m glad you asked that” or “That’s a really interesting question.” Such a response rewards question-asking and thereby is likely to increase its frequency. And by increasing its frequency, we foster further opportunities for children to learn.

Level 4: Encouragement to Seek Response Through Authority Typical responses at this level are “I’ll look it up in the encyclopedia when we get home” or “Why don’t you look it up in the encyclopedia when we get home?” At Level 4, the question-answering process does not just end with an answer or admission of ignorance. Children are taught that information not possessed can and often should be sought out. Notice, though, the difference in these two responses. In the first, the parent takes responsibility for seeking the information. Children thereby learn that information can be sought, but also that there is someone else to do it for them. Thus, the learning that will ultimately be accomplished is passive learning. In the second response, children are given the responsibility. In this way, children are asked to take responsibility for learning and, hence, to learn as well as to learn how to learn. This is called active learning. As you can probably guess, active learning is better than passive learning. Through active learning, children develop their own information-seeking skills rather than becoming dependent on others. 222

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Level 5: Consideration of Alternative Explanations Here, the parent says she or he does not know, but suggests that the child explore some possibilities. Ideally, the child and parent generate possibilities together, such as: people in Holland might be tall because of the food, the weather, genetics, hormone injections, killing of short children, wearing of elevator shoes, and so on. The child thereby comes to realize that even seemingly simple questions can invite hypothesis formulation and testing.

Level 6: Consideration of Explanations Plus Means of Evaluating the Explanations Here, parents not only encourage alternative explanations, as in Level 5, but also discuss ways of evaluating the validity of the alternative explanations. A typical response at this level would be “How might we go about deciding which of these explanations is correct?” For example, if genetics were responsible for the high average height of the Dutch, what might we expect to observe? How might we discern whether food or weather is responsible? How can we quickly rule out the possibility that the Dutch kill short children? Children can learn via the responses of their mediators not only how to generate alternative hypotheses, as in Level 5, but also how to test them.

Level 7: Consideration of Explanations, Plus Means of Evaluating Them, Plus Follow-Through in Evaluations In Level 7, a typical response might be: “Let’s try getting some of the information we need to decide among these explanations.” Here, the mediator actually encourages the child to perform the experiments by gathering information that could distinguish among the alternative explanations. The child learns not only how to think but also how to act on her or his thoughts. Although it may not be possible to test every explanation of a phenomenon, it will often be possible to test several of them. For example, the child can observe whether taller Dutch parents also tend to have taller children, whether there are reports of missing short children, and so forth. Note how, as we move up the levels, we go from rejecting children’s questions, at one extreme, to encouraging hypothesis formation and testing, at the other. We go from no learning, to passive rote learning, to analytic and creative learning. The higher our level of response, the more we communicate an interest in children’s questions. We probably do not have the time or resources always to respond to children’s questions in a Level-7 way. Nor are higher levels of response equally appropriate for children of all ages—responses need to be developmentally appropriate to be maximally useful. But in general and as children grow up, the more we use the higher levels, the more we encourage our children to develop their cognitive skills. Note that we are not advocating rearing children who are little more than “empty-headed” questioners who have acquired the socially acceptable veneer of smartness by asking smart-sounding questions but who do not possess the reservoir of basic knowledge needed to survive in today’s world. Children need to learn how to ask questions, and they need also to learn basic facts and information and how to reason effectively with them. Good question-asking skills are an essential foundation of this developmental equation.

Lesson 5: Help Children Find Their Interests Help children find what really excites them, remembering that it may not be what really excites you or what you wish would really excite them. People who truly excel in a pursuit in life, whether vocational or avocational, are almost always people who genuinely love what they do. Certainly, the most creative people are intrinsically motivated in 223

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their work, meaning that they do their work for internal reasons rather than external ones—because they like it, for self-expression, and for relaxation, and not because they have to do it (Amabile, 1983, 1996; Collins and Amabile, 1999). How many people have you met who followed a career path for the money or prestige, and who, whether or not they attained these goals, loathe what they do? How many do not hate it but are bored silly? For sure, they are not the people doing the work that makes a difference in their field. Likewise, when students are intrinsically motivated, not only do they learn more but they are also happier (Froiland, Oros, Smith, and Hirchert, 2012). What not to do: Work with your children to find things you always hoped they would love to do. What to do: Work with your children to find things they really love to do. Helping children find what they really love to do is not always easy. On the contrary, it is often hard and frustrating work, for both parents and children. Yet unless we are willing to face the frustration now, our children will have to face it later, perhaps for the rest of their lives. Historically, children often did not have the luxury of choosing how they wished to spend their lives and of doing tasks they enjoyed in pursuit of making a living. The greater economic opportunities of the modern era have allowed us all more choices regarding how we spend our lives. Children today may decide to join a family business or pursue another vocation. The fact that one’s parent is a physician does not mean that this is one’s only alternative. Our colleges and graduate and professional schools are open to a broader segment of the population today than they were in the pre–World War II era, when wealth and family connections were more salient determiners of who had access to such institutions and who did not (Calvin, 2000). With the growth of the middle class in North America came the growth of leisure time and the increasing access to the luxury of how to spend our lives (Flynn, 2007). Our children are deeply fortunate to have the benefit of such choices; it is up to every parent to help her or his children make the most of this opportunity. We have met any number of college students who, when asked why they are doing what they are doing, reply that they are doing it because it is what their parents want them to do. For example, they might be pre-medical because their father is a doctor, or because their father always wanted to have a doctor in the family. And after all, who’s paying? Children who go into a field because their parents want them to may become good at what they do, but they almost certainly will not become great. Even those of us who preach this message need to remember it when it comes to our own families. For example, the son of one of the authors decided at one point that he wished to play the piano. His father was delighted, because he himself was a piano player. His son, therefore, was following in his own footsteps. The son ended up practicing less than regularly and eventually quit. The father was disappointed, to say the least. A few months later, the son indicated he would like to play the trumpet. The father, disgusted after the son had quit the piano, said he would not even consider the possibility. After all, he had seen what had happened with the piano lessons. But later, he realized that his reluctance had less to do with the fact that the son had quit piano than it had to do with the fact that the father could not imagine a child of his playing the trumpet. It just did not fit his image of his child. Fortunately, the father also realized that his feelings had a lot to do with his image of the son, but nothing to do with what was best for the son. The son started trumpet lessons and enjoyed them for several years. The point of this story, and many others like it, is simple. We need to find what is right for our children, not for our image of what we had hoped they would be. There will be frustrations as we try things that do not work, but the ultimate reward will be their finding the right things that do work. Although we have emphasized the importance of finding the right activities to do, it is equally important to find the right place to do them. For example, the large majority of people who come to Cornell or Yale are happy to be there. But we cannot even count the number of students and faculty we have met at these schools who would have been happier elsewhere. For example, Yale and Cornell are excellent places for students who are independent, who seek high levels of intellectual challenge, and who can cope with an environment where they will probably not be the biggest fish in what 224

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might be viewed as a very large pond. A student who needs to be a big fish in a small pond, or who is not up to the intellectual challenge, or who cannot work independently would probably be much happier elsewhere. Similarly, Cornell and Yale are great places for faculty who want to balance teaching and research. But faculty who prefer to teach most of the time and who are not into publishing research definitely would be happier elsewhere. Some years ago, one of us had an outstanding graduate student who received two very good job offers. One offer was from an extremely prestigious institution, and the other from a prestigious institution but one that could not match the first institution for level of prestige. But there was a problem: the kind of work the student did was a better match to the kind of work done in the somewhat less prestigious place than to the kind of work done in the more prestigious one. Unfortunately, the student took the job at the more prestigious institution. He did well, but did not become the great success all had hoped for. His environment just did not encourage what he had to offer or the kind of work he liked to do. The lesson to us is clear: what is most important is to find an environment that is compatible with you. For a child, it may not be the most prestigious private school or college (or then again, it may be). For the adult, it may not be the most prestigious job or community (or then again, it may be). The overriding consideration should be to find for your children (and yourself ) an environment in which to thrive as individuals. This environment is not necessarily the same one that will be best for someone else. You need to know your own child. It is not enough just to go with the name—the honors course, the honors school, or the most popular and prestigious alternative. Know your child, and help your child find the environment that is the best fit to her or his abilities, interests, and values.

Lesson 6: Teach Sensible Risk-Taking Encourage children to take sensible intellectual risks. Research on creativity shows that creative children and adults are intellectual risk takers (see Sternberg, 2018; Sternberg and Lubart, 1991, 1995, 1999). They are not the people who always play it safe. Think of it like investing money. If you put all your money in a government-insured passbook savings account, chances are you will not lose it. But you will not make much either, and inflation will chip away at the little interest you gain in any case. To earn more substantial interest or dividends on your money, you have to take some risks with it. This is not to say that all your money should be invested in a risky way. But if you are not willing to take any risks at all, your wealth will scarcely increase. Similarly, not every intellectual activity a child engages in should represent a risk, but if none does, the child will probably not end up doing much, if anything, that is creative and that potentially makes a difference—either to the child or to anyone else. What not to do: Always encourage your children to play it safe—with courses, with activities, with teachers, with intellectual challenges. What to do: Teach children sometimes to take intellectual risks and to develop a sense of when to take risks and when not to. Most creative work goes at least slightly against the established way of doing things, with the result that when children take the risk and do something creative, the reaction to their work is not always positive. Consider an example of what happened to the daughter of one of the authors. She was in third grade, and her teacher had a worthwhile idea. The children were studying the planets, and the idea was that the children should pretend to be astronauts about to land on Mars. Such an exercise is called a simulation. One of the best ways for children (or adults, for that matter) to learn is through simulation. The basic idea of a simulation is that you can often learn more by putting yourself in someone else’s place than by simply reading about what the someone else would have done in a given set of circumstances. Thus, children will probably learn more about what it is like for an astronaut to land on another planet 225

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if they have to put themselves in the shoes of the astronaut than if they simply read about an astronaut about to land on the Moon (or Mars, for that matter, although obviously most descriptions focus on the Moon because humans have never landed on Mars). Obviously, reading and simulation are not mutually exclusive. After the simulation, children can supplement what they have learned by reading about how their reactions differed from those of, say, professional astronauts. As the teacher started the lesson, the daughter, a mere 8 years old at the time, suggested she might pretend to be a Martian and meet the astronauts as they arrived on Mars. The teacher responded that the idea was unacceptable, because we know from space probes and other means that there are no Martians. Hence, including a Martian in the lesson would make it unrealistic and not a science lesson. Well, from one point of view, the teacher was right: probably there are no Martians, unless they live in the interior of the planet, hidden from the view of space probes and protected from the harsh outer atmosphere of the planet. But from another point of view, the teacher probably did some damage: the lesson the child learned was that the next time she has a creative idea, she should shut up. As for ourselves, we have had risky articles and grant proposals turned down. We have tried teaching in innovative ways to our students, and the lessons have not always worked. Just recently, one of us tried presenting a paper to Montrealers in French, and the result was just short of catastrophic. When you take a risk, you have to be willing to fall flat on your face sometimes. Then why even encourage children to take risks? Consider the benefits. Practically every major discovery or invention has entailed some amount of risk, but the risks taken by the discoverers and inventors are often forgotten today. Would anyone really want a ballpoint pen when people had fountain pens? Would anyone want to see videos at home on a small television screen when they could go to a movie theater instead? Would anyone find enough use for a home computer to want to spend the money on one? How could the earth revolve around the sun when one only has to look up in the sky to see the sun revolving around the earth? The list is endless. But at all levels, big and small, the people who have contributed most to our world are people who have been willing to take intellectual risks and to see and do things in ways others have not. One of our favorite examples is that of an engineer at the 3M company who worked in the adhesives division of the company. Work on adhesives is certainly important (especially given that so many things in the world are falling apart). The job of engineers in such a division is to try to invent everstronger adhesives. One engineer came up with a weaker adhesive than those we had at the time. The reaction of the engineer’s superiors was that the invention was useless—what we need are stronger, not weaker, adhesives. Indeed, most people in the company reacted in kind. But eventually secretaries (not the high-placed scientists, engineers, and executives!) saw a use for the idea, and today we have the yellow Post-it stickers that enable us to leave notes on a piece of paper and then to remove the notes without leaving a mark. The interesting part of the story, of course, is that this very useful and profitable invention came about only because someone was willing to take a risk and actually do the opposite of what he was supposed to do. One kind of risk for children is the risk of making a mistake, especially in public. Children are often reluctant to make mistakes that might expose them to the ridicule of their teacher, or even worse, their peers. So they start playing it safe in the classroom, responding only when they know they have the correct answer. They may start playing it safe in other situations as well, so as not to look stupid. The only problem with this strategy is that the very best way to learn is from our own mistakes. The lessons learned by watching others are not as powerful as the lessons learned by doing. Smart people are not ones who never make mistakes—on the contrary, smart people always make mistakes, because that is how they learn. Clifford (1988) studied how students’ willingness to take academic risks affected their development and performance. In this research, tolerance for failure at school, which measured how constructively a person responds to failure in school, was highly associated with choosing more difficult and challenging test problems when a choice of problems was offered. Students who tolerated failure well 226

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took greater risks and chose harder problems. Tolerance for failure was also associated with higher standardized achievement test scores. However, tolerance for failure decreased with age—it seems that the older children get, the more we teach them to play it safe. Given the learning opportunities that derive from taking risks and the achievement this learning makes possible, we must ask why so few children are willing to take risks in school. In the school environment, perfect test scores and papers receive praise, and academic failure means extra makeup work. Academic failure is viewed as a result of low ability and motivation, rather than a desire to grow. Playing it safe is advocated, particularly as children reach middle school age. Students are not given choices on assignments, so opportunities to take risks are minimal, and students never develop tolerance for risk-taking. Unfortunately, however, risk-averse students (and adults) lose out in the end because many successes can only be achieved by taking a risk. We have noted that, often, people’s views on intellectual risks are linked to their views on the nature of intelligence. Dweck (1999, Dweck and Bempechat, 1983; Blackwell, Trzesniewski, and Dweck, 2007) distinguished between two types of conceptions of intelligence in children. One type of conception is that intelligence is a more or less fixed entity with which we are born. On this view, there’s not much we can do to increase our intelligence. Children with this point of view often try to minimize and hide their mistakes and tend to experience debilitation in the face of setbacks. The other type of conception is an incremental one. With this view, we can improve our intelligence as we learn and experience the world. The more we learn, the smarter we become, and setbacks become cues either to increase effort or to vary strategy. Clearly, the conception of intelligence we want to reinforce in our children is the second one. It is also the correct conception of intelligence, because intelligence can be increased (Bransford and Stein, 1993; Grotzer and Perkins, 2000; Nickerson, in press; Sternberg, 1986, 1997, 1998; Sternberg and Smith, 1985). To the extent that children believe in this conception, they will be more willing to do what they need to do to increase their intelligence.

Lesson 7: Teach Responsibility Teach children to take responsibility for themselves—both for their successes and for their failures. Something sounds a bit trite when we say that we should teach children to take responsibility for themselves: of course everyone knows this. But sometimes there is a gap between what we know and how we translate what we know into action. In practice, people differ widely in the extent to which they take responsibility for the causes and consequences of their actions. What not to do: Always look for—or allow children to look for—the outside enemy who is responsible for children’s failures (teachers, other students, illnesses, and so on). Always push children because they cannot do it for themselves. What to do: Teach children to take responsibility for themselves. Help children develop their own internal push, so you do not have to push them: enable them to do it for themselves. Rotter (1966, 1990) distinguished between two personality patterns, which he referred to as “internal” and “external.” Internals are people who tend to take responsibility for their lives. When things go well for them, they take credit for their efforts; but when things do not go well, they tend to take responsibility and try to make things go better. Externals, in contrast, tend to place responsibility outside themselves, especially when things do not go well. They are quick to blame circumstances for their failures (and often to attribute their successes to external circumstances as well). Of course, almost no one is purely internal or external. Moreover, all of us know people who accept credit for their successes but who blame others for their failures, or who never credit themselves for their successes but do blame themselves for their failures. The most realistic people recognize that both success and failure come about as an interaction between our own contributions and those of others. From our standpoint as parents and as researchers studying how to maximize intellectual potential, we have found, as has Rotter, that people who tend toward the internal side of the continuum are 227

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better adapted to intellectual success. Because externals are reluctant or even refuse to accept blame, they do not take responsibility for making the most of their lives. They somehow expect others to do for them what they need to do for themselves. We teach at selective universities and have observed for a number of years which of the young women and men who attend these universities tend to succeed and which do not. We have found that one of the best predictors of success is the student’s willingness to take responsibility for herself or himself. Many of the students who attend these universities are used to success—and wait for something to happen. Usually, little does. The opportunities do not simply come to the students, as they may have in high school. The students who succeed are the ones who make their own opportunities—who take responsibility for their lives. This pattern extends throughout the rest of children’s lives as well. One study found that freshman students with an internal locus of control received significantly higher GPAs after their first year of college than their classmates who had a more external locus of control (Gifford, Briceno-Perriott, and Mianzo, 2006). One way to develop this inner sense of responsibility in children is to serve as a role model for it. Children learn more through imitating modeled behaviors than they do through practically any other means: if you want children to behave a certain way, act that way yourself. Don’t expect children to take responsibility for themselves if you are always trying to find someone to blame for your own problems—whether it is a boss, a spouse, an ex-spouse, the government, or whomever. That is not to say that these entities may not be in part responsible for whatever problems you face. But it is in your hands to improve your life, not in theirs, just as it is in your hands to set a take-charge example for children. Recently one of us observed a friend teaching her child precisely how not to develop an inner sense of responsibility. The woman was having an in-depth conversation with one of us in her living room on a topic of much significance to her. Meanwhile, her 3–1/2 year old became jealous that his mother was paying more attention to someone else than to him. He shot the adults with a toy gun, hit them with toys, and wailed at the top of his lungs. Finally, he actually hurt his mother with a toy he threw. She leaned over and said, “Oh, honey, you accidentally hurt mommy. I know you didn’t mean it. Mommy’s been ignoring you, I know, and I’m sorry,” and so on (you get the picture). The boy answered, “Yes, you’ve been hurting me, mommy, but I forgive you!” It was comical, but there was a sobering message being delivered to the child. Later he kicked one of the authors and pulled the family cat’s tail, but he was never held accountable for his actions. This family was headed for a real problem. The mother should have acted as an appropriate role model by taking only the responsibility she deserved and by expecting her son to do the same. He may have been young, but he was not too young to learn to shift blame to others and manipulate the situation to serve his goals. By repeatedly letting him off the hook, his mother was establishing a bad precedent for his later life. Another way to develop the inner sense of responsibility is to know when to push children, but also when not to. Unfortunately, many young women and men who enroll at Cornell or Yale have been pushed throughout their childhoods. They face a tough problem when they arrive at college: their parents are no longer there to push them, and they have never learned how to do it for themselves. The children who are most successful are those who were nudged when circumstances required, but who were not constantly pushed. The ones who were constantly pushed are often at a loss when, for the first time in their lives, they have to find the resources to push themselves from within. Because they were always pushed from without, they have never developed these resources. Nothing is more boring to a teacher than students who always have an excuse for what they should have done that they did not do. They usually run through several dead grandmothers, family crises, and severe illnesses whose symptoms they do their best to fake. The students do not seem to realize that the teachers have heard it all before. Teachers recognize procrastinators and excuse-invention artists from a mile away! The time and place to teach children not to be procrastinators and excusemakers are when they are young and in the home. When you give children chores or other tasks to 228

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do, expect the children to do them. Moreover, expect them to meet your expectations for the tasks you assign them, not just to get by with the minimum. Intellectually successful people are never those who just do the minimum needed to get by. As teachers, we see many students pass through our classrooms who do what they think is just the minimum they need to get an A, a B, or whatever grade they set as their goal. They may or may not get the grade, but the person they are fooling is not the teacher, but themselves—these students are not taking responsibility for their lives. Teachers know who these students are and treat them befittingly. Ask yourself: If you have a special opportunity for someone at work, or in a club where you are an officer, or whatever, to whom will you give that opportunity—the person who does just the minimum to get by, or the person who always tries to meet and even exceed your expectations? Clearly, you will give the choice opportunities to the latter, and so will practically anyone else. People who learn just to get by when they are children behave the same way as adults and find that it is almost always someone else who gets the choice opportunities in life. When the promotion comes up, or the big salary raise, or the chance to work on a particularly good project, they find that someone else gets the opportunity. Sadly, they rarely understand why. They still think they are fooling people in their attitude of doing the least possible to get by. At the beginning of this lesson, we mentioned how important it is that parents translate thought into action with regard to teaching their children to take responsibility. But children also need to be taught to translate thought into action in general. In every line of adult work-life, there is potential gap between what we know how to do and what we actually do. As scholars, we see other scholars who have good ideas but who never get around to publishing them. We have seen inventors who have creative ideas but by the time they get around to trying to put them into practice, someone else has beaten them to it. We have seen managers who know what they need to do in their businesses but for one reason or another, hesitate to do it until they have driven the company into bankruptcy. And for that matter, we have all seen people in personal relationships who know that changes need to be made but who procrastinate indefinitely. By the time they get around to taking responsibility for making the changes, it is often too late—they’ve lost the relationship. The point is that to make the most of your children’s abilities, it is not enough that they learn what they can do—they have to learn to do it.

Lesson 8: Delay Gratification Teach children how to delay gratification—to be able to wait for rewards. In a series of studies extending over many years, Mischel found that children who are better able to delay gratification are more successful in various aspects of their lives, including their academic performance (e.g., Herndon, Bembenutty, and Gill, 2015; Mischel, Shoda, and Rodriguez, 1989). In a typical study, Mischel will place young children in a room and give them a choice between an immediate but smaller reward and a later but larger reward. He will put various temptations in their paths. For example, it is harder to resist temptation if the immediate reward (e.g., a chocolate bar) is visible than if it is hidden. Children’s ability to delay gratification even predicts their scores on the Scholastic Assessment Test (SAT) when they are much older (Goleman, 1995). Rewards for delaying gratification can sometimes surface far down the road. What not to do: Always reward children immediately. Allow children to expect immediate rewards, to get what they want right away. Emphasize the here and now at the expense of the long term. What to do: Teach children to wait for rewards. Teach them that the greater rewards are often those that come down the line. Show them examples in your own life and how these examples may apply to them. Emphasize the long term, and not just the here-and-now. Working hard often does not bring immediate rewards. Children do not become expert baseball players, dancers, musicians, or sculptors right away. And the reward of becoming expert at anything often seems very far away. Often, children succumb to the temptations of the moment—watching 229

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mindless programs on television, or endlessly playing repetitive videogames, or even falling into antisocial groups that seek immediate delights. But the people who make the most of their abilities have to be those who are willing to wait, because there are few challenges that can be met in a moment. Gruber (1986; Gruber and Wallace, 1999) studied the careers of great contributors to the world. His findings belie the notion that the great insights in history correspond to the “Eureka!” experience, whereby someone goes from not understanding something to understanding it in a flash. On the contrary, Gruber found that even the greatest minds had to work hard and long to achieve their major insights and their major works. Of course, there are exceptions. But for the most part, the great accomplishments come after much hard work. Not only do significant accomplishments require hard work, they are often not recognized as significant right away. Creative people have to learn to delay gratification, because their greatest works may be ignored for some period of time before their value is recognized. One of our children has a tendency to quit on things when they become hard. He is afraid to fail, and thereby look inadequate in his own eyes and those of others. But in many pursuits, the hardest part is the “middle.” For example, it is not hard to learn to play tennis or baseball or soccer well enough to get by in gym class. But to become good enough to be on the varsity team often requires a great deal of work and commitment of time. Similarly, to become a really good cellist or pianist or saxophonist requires many, many hours of work and effort. Ericsson, Krampe, and Tesch-Römer (1993; see also Kuhlmann and Ardichvili, 2015) suggested that probably the most important factor in becoming an expert in anything is sheer hard work and practice. Comparisons of distinguished performers in a number of fields with those who are not so distinguished revealed that the distinguished performers, quite simply, worked much harder than the nondistinguished ones. For the child or adult, such hard work on one pursuit represents a risk. After all, there is no guarantee that all the hard work will yield results. The child may practice for hours and hours and never become a great hockey player, artist, or violinist. But again, the work of Ericsson and his colleagues suggests that nothing pays off better than sheer persistence and determination. The findings of Ericsson and his colleagues even more strongly show the importance of finding the right pursuits for your children. If they are really going to work to excel at something, it should be something they really like. All of us know how three hours doing something we hate can seem like a day, whereas three hours spent on something we love can seem like a matter of minutes. So let us help our children find what is right for them and then encourage them really to excel. Your children may or may not make great contributions to the world, but the chances are their accomplishments will be better if they learn to delay gratification. It is often hard to see into the distant future and what may lie ahead. But those who do have foresight have the edge in almost all aspects of life. A child may not see in grade 9, for example, how working hard will benefit him or her later on, but by grade 12, when the child is ready to apply to colleges, the advantages of hard work and solid academic performance will be obvious. One of us has a younger brother who suffered significantly because he could not delay gratification. As a child, the boy was indulged with toys and rewarded instantly for any positive effort. He never learned patience and perseverance because he just did not have to. He was naturally gifted academically and never had to work hard and apply himself to do well in school. He always received better-than-average grades for minimal effort, and he never experienced the rewards of working on long-term projects. This pattern worked for the boy until college. There he found his once-successful approach no longer brought the instant gratification he was accustomed to. Commitments to long-term projects were expected, as were long hours spent studying in the library. Despite his intelligence, the boy did poorly his first semester at college—and so poorly his second semester that he left school. He tried two other colleges for one semester each with the same results. 230

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Finally, he got his act together and learned a tough lesson: life is work, and rewards often come only with time. He enrolled in a fourth college and applied himself to the difficult tasks entailed in earning a degree. He graduated three years later. The moral of this story is clear: you do your children no favor by providing immediate rewards, because the real world will not follow your example. The older a child gets, the more she or he must be able to accept the delay between performing behaviors and achieving rewards. When we started working together, we had only short-term funding for our joint projects and knew we would need to seek some longer-term support. Although we would be fine for three years, we knew that after three years, we would be out of funds. Looking toward the long term, therefore, we started applying for additional funding almost immediately. There is almost nothing we like to do less than write grant proposals. Each of us could have generated endless lists of activities on which we would have rather spent our time. But we did what we needed to do, saving the activities we would have rather done for after we did what we felt we had to do. Actually, we didn’t absolutely have to write proposals at the time—after all, we had three full years of support. But we knew that, down the road, we would be sorry if we waited to seek further support. So we took the long view. Our initial efforts all met with failure. At this point, we really began to ask why we were spending our time on something we did not like doing, when there were other activities that were guaranteed to make us feel better in the short run. Only masochists like to be turned down. But we persevered, and after a losing streak, our fortune changed, and we started winning—we had several proposals accepted. We got more gratification than we had ever imagined possible, but we had to wait for it. That is the way life often is, and children need to know it.

Lesson 9: Teach Perspective Taking Teach children to put themselves in another’s place. Many very bright children never achieve the success in life that could be theirs because they never develop practical intelligence (Sternberg, 1985a, 1988, 1997, 2016; Sternberg et al., 2000). They may do well in school and on tests, but they never learn how to get along with others—and, especially, to see things (and themselves) as others see them. What not to do: Teach children to form a point of view, but not to try to understand the points of view of others. What to do: Teach children the importance of understanding, respecting, and responding to the points of view of others. Some years back, we observed a student at Yale who was academically a great success. He did extremely well in his courses and in all aspects of academic life. His teachers thought that his prospects for success were excellent. We disagreed. Although this student displayed exceptional academic intelligence, he displayed a genuine lack of practical intelligence. He acted arrogantly toward others—as though he knew everything and they knew nothing. He even acted this way toward his teachers, but the fellow was so damn smart, they were willing to overlook it. After all, they were his teachers and felt a familial concern for him. The result was that no one ever put the guy in his place. They were doing him no favor. When the fellow went out on the job market, he did not receive a ringing endorsement from his interviewers; in fact, he was a total flop. This individual did not even have the practical intelligence to realize that on the day of the job interview, he would have to hide his arrogance. He acted toward the people he met in his interview like he knew it all and they knew nothing. But they knew at least one thing—that this was one person they were not going to hire! Eventually, he received a job, but he later lost it. People without the warm and friendly feelings of family members were not willing to put up with him. As parents, we are sometimes willing to overlook the faults of our children that to others are obvious. But in overlooking these faults, we hurt rather than help our children. Others will not have the 231

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indulgence for faults that we have in our own kin. Indeed, one of us just had a conversation with his son on this issue. When several teachers make the same comment about a student, one has got to start listening carefully to it, whether one agrees with it or not. Of course, the child may feel like he is getting a bum rap. What child does not feel this way from time to time? But children need to understand that if people are seeing them in a certain way, whether they are this way or not, they have to take responsibility for changing others’ perceptions. One of us was once told by a subordinate that he had been acting grouchy lately. He then asked others if they had the same perception. He was stunned to find that they did. Were they right? Who knows? But whether or not he was “objectively” grouchy, the perception was there, and the perception was causing problems. He vowed to change the perception, and therefore the behavior that was causing the perception. For many possible reasons, girls on the average tend to be better able to put themselves in the position of another than do boys. In general, girls tend to be more sensitive to and understanding of feelings than are boys (Hall, 1984); thus, we need to pay special attention to these issues with boys. Of course, we may take the tack of forgiving them because they are boys, adopting the old saying that “boys will be boys.” But again, our forgiveness will only hurt them in later life. The better able a child is to understand the point of view of others, the better that child will adapt not only to the demands of school but also to the demands of life after school. The lack of ability to see things from another point of view seems almost to be a national weakness in the United States. When traveling abroad, many citizens of the United States find that the perception of the United States and its people is much more negative in many parts of the world than it is at home. For whatever reason, we have become used to having our way, and of justifying it in one way or another. For example, we have our “Monroe Doctrine,” which has been used as an excuse to justify our intervention in Latin America numerous times. But when other countries have intervened outside their borders, we have often been the first to criticize them. Small wonder that people in other countries find our behavior puzzling, at best. We often do not see things from their point of view. It is not enough just to understand other viewpoints. Children need to learn to act in a way that reflects this understanding, and often, to adopt another point of view when it is superior to their own. Probably few things more impede intellectual development in children (and in adults) than does defensiveness against other points of view. Some people just cannot accept criticism. They do not want to hear anyone else’s point of view, and when they do, they immediately assume it is wrong. Sometimes it is, but it pays to listen. As scholars, we frequently submit work for publication. When authors submit their work for publication, they receive back evaluations of the work, sometimes favorable, but more often than not unfavorable. Indeed, sometimes the reviews are scathing. The first reaction to such reviews is natural—it is to assume that the reviewer is an idiot who doesn’t know the first thing she or he is talking about. But we have learned to read the reviews, put them away for a few days, and then read them again. Their quality sometimes improves with age. That is, sometimes when we read the reviews for the second time, we are able to see value in the suggestions that we did not see at first. When teachers criticize children, the children’s first reaction is often that the teachers must be out of their minds. And even we, as teachers, are the first to admit that teachers can be, and frequently are, wrong. But children need to learn to do the same thing we do—think about the criticisms for a while, consider whether they are coming from other places as well, and only then decide whether to reject them categorically. The chances are that they will contain something the child can use to her or his advantage. Sometimes people are willing to hear other points of view, and even process them. But they refuse to consider the possibility that there might be value in adopting the other point of view themselves. A few years ago, we were teaching a class of teachers in a summer course on how to develop thinking skills in one’s students. We decided to do a workshop exercise with the teachers. Each teacher was 232

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instructed to write on a sheet of paper some view that she or he held especially dear—something that she or he was almost sure was true. The kinds of things the teachers wrote down varied widely. Some dealt with educational practices, others with religion, others with abortion, and still others with social issues. After the teacher had written down the view, she or he was asked to write a defense—of the opposite point of view. The teachers were given about 20 minutes to do so and were then asked to present the opposite point of view from the one they had written down. The results were as interesting as they were surprising. The expectation had been that people would be weak in defending the opposing position—that they only would have thought about the arguments on their own side, and hence would barely be able to reconstruct the arguments of the opposition. To our surprise, the students generally did excellent work in reproducing the arguments of their opposition. Oftentimes, they knew them cold. In fact, they were so good at repeating the lines of their opponents that the course instructors asked them to defend their own position. And here is where the surprise emerged: almost everyone was better at defending the opposite point of view than they were at defending their own! Why? The exercise suggests that oftentimes people do not hold their own point of view for rational reasons, nor have they even carefully thought through this point of view. However, they are familiar with the arguments of the opposing point of view, to which they have no particular attachment. As you might expect, despite the fact that people were often better at arguing for the opposite point of view than for arguing their own, no one has yet changed their point of view as a result of the exercise. In school, children learn through essays, discussions, and debates to defend their point of view. We believe, however, that children (and adults) need at least as much to learn how to falsify their point of view. In other words, they need to learn how to seek evidence that might show them to be wrong. Without learning how to falsify their point of view, they will never grow beyond where they are.

Lesson 10: Spend Quality Time With Your Child It is not the money you spend on your child that matters, but rather the quality of your interactions with your child and the nature of your child’s experiences. What not to do: Worry about the economic resources you are providing your child and spend as much money as possible on toys, camps, special schools, tutors, special lessons, travel, sports, clothes, computers, and so on. Spend all your time earning money to spend on your children. What to do: Focus on the quality of your interactions with your child, on how you spend your time together, and on the types of experiences your child is having both with and away from you. Remember that material possessions do not in themselves create children’s cognitive competence. It is well known that middle-class children have better educational outcomes than working-class children (Bumgarner and Brooks-Gunn, 2013; Coleman, 1966; Grissmer, Nataraj, Berends, and Williamson, 1994; Galindo and Sonnenschein, 2015; Herrnstein and Murray, 1996). Misinterpreting this fact, many parents often act as though there is a perfect causal relation between the money that is spent on children and the children’s performance in school and in life. They buy every “smart” toy in the store; birthdays and holidays become an excuse to flood children with expensive and elaborate gifts. They send their children to several specialty camps every summer and enroll them in expensive private schools, hire tutors to work independently with their children, and sign them up for lesson after lesson and sport after sport. These parents believe that the more they spend, the more their children will learn. The omnipresent link between higher social class and children’s enhanced performance causes many parents who lack economic resources to feel as though their children do not stand a chance. These parents may focus on the economic resources other children have that their own children do not have. In fact, they may blame their children’s failures on a lack of economic resources. These parents are missing an important point: it is not how much money is spent on children that matters, but 233

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rather, the quality of their experiences both with and apart from their parents. Giving a child every smart toy and computer game in the store and sending the child to a ritzy summer camp will not automatically create a budding genius. Although there is undeniably a relation between reasonable environmental enrichment and cognitive performance, the relation is complex. Research by Bronfenbrenner and Ceci (1994) showed that the children of wealthier parents tend to perform better cognitively not due to anything inherent in the wealth or education associated with middle-class living, but rather with the greater frequency of what those authors termed “proximal processes.” Proximal processes are reciprocal, progressively more complex interactions between a parent and child. For example, initially, a 14-month-old child may say the word “Mommy” and thus gain her mother’s attention. Her mother will act excited that the child said the word Mommy. The child will thus be reinforced for saying the word. Over time, however, the child simply saying the word Mommy will bring about less and less of a response from the mother—sometimes, if she is busy, she may not even respond right away to the child. At this point the child will elaborate the statement and say, “Mommy look!” At this new pronouncement the mother will again become excited. Thus, the proximal process taking place is one in which the child’s language development is proceeding and the parent is causing the child to grow and elaborate on prior learning. Proximal processes are in evidence when parents are responsive to their child’s state and level of functioning. As previously discussed, when parents are randomly assigned to behave either in a proximal process manner or in a nonresponsive manner, the former’s children emerge as more cognitively competent, even though both groups of parents may spend similar amounts of time with their children (Riksen-Walraven, 1978). Thus, wealth may be associated with better cognitive outcomes for children because of the greater frequency of higher-quality behavior rich in proximal processes. In general, social class (and its associated wealth) is a complex variable when it comes to understanding parents and their behavior. For one thing, social class differences predict parents’ perceptions of their efficacy as influencers of their children (Luster, Rhoades, and Haas, 1989). Socioeconomic status (SES) also correlates with patterns of parental behavior and particularly discipline—although these patterns and their relation to social class have changed from the time of the Second World War to the present, with middle-class mothers moving from a more rigid and controlling disciplinary style to a more relaxed style over this time period, and lower-class mothers displaying the reverse trend (Bronfenbrenner, 1985). Any discussion of the importance of proximal processes in rearing cognitively complex children must take into account the fact that parents of different cultural and economic groups have different amounts of time to engage in proximal processes, and differential access to resources with which to enrich their children’s cognitive environments. Despite these factors and their consequences, any parent, regardless of social class and economic resources, has the power to engage in interactions that enhance her or his children’s cognitive development. When parents use supportive parenting practices like praising their children instead of threatening them with negative consequences, they actively support brain development, which can lead to a higher volume of the hippocampus in the brain (Luby et al., 2013). Reading and speaking with one’s children is also very important: By age 2, children’s vocabulary may already differ by 300 words depending on the number of words their parents use to talk to them (Huttenlocher, Haight, Bryk, Seltzer, and Lyons, 1991). Perhaps not surprisingly, it is important for parents just to make time to play with their children. One-on-one time creates an emotional bond between parents and children, no matter whether expensive toys are involved or not. Play also contributes to brain development and supports the physical health of the child (Milteer, Ginsburg, and Mulligan, 2012). The lesson for all parents is clear—children are not doomed because their parents cannot afford to shower them with elaborate gifts and toys. Parents should not fixate on economic resources. They must remember that it is the nature of a child’s experiences and the quality of the child’s interactions with parents or other adults that matter most. Many eminent leaders and people who have changed their world as adults have come from humble beginnings. These individuals often mention the role 234

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of mentors in their young lives, adults who got and kept them on track and who excited them about their potential. Major achievements are possible for children, regardless of the wealth of their parents and the quality of their homes and possessions. What matters is what children experience and what they do with these experiences, not simply what things they possess.

Lesson 11: Understanding Oneself Help children understand themselves and others. Understanding our own and others’ thought processes and emotions enables humans to understand things from others’ points of view and not only their own. When children learn what others think and that they have certain beliefs about their environment, children can better understand the people around them and what the reasons for their actions are. To understand one’s own thinking and how others think is not an easy task to accomplish, for children or for adults. However, that knowledge tremendously helps us to live our lives smoothly and to successfully interact with others in ways that more often than not ensure the outcome we set out to accomplish with an interaction. Theory of mind is about our ability to understand thought processes—our own as well as those of others. A theory of mind helps us take the perspective of other people and understand that they, just like us, have desires, motivations, and dreams. Being able to predict what others will do and why they likely will do it helps us navigate our surroundings and interactions. What not to do: Tell children how to behave and what to do in situations they are faced with, without explaining the background of your requests. Also, do not blame or punish children for their emotions without helping them understand what they feel and giving them ways to cope with their feelings. What to do: Help children understand and interpret their own emotions, and help them learn how others feel when they interact with those others. Explain the background of why we behave in certain ways in particular situations. One of the authors had one of her little girls get very angry at her. Her daughter was looking for a favorite pullover (she actually has many favorite pullovers) and requested assistance in searching for it. When the mother asked for a more detailed description of the pullover, the girl became angry, expecting her mother to know which pullover she was talking about even without giving the mother any details. Her theory of mind still needed further development! The more we know about others’ thoughts and motivations, the less confusing our interactions with them are because we can form correct expectations about their behavior. Theory-of-mind studies have expanded to include not only others’ thoughts and knowledge but also their feelings (Westby and Robinson, 2014). It takes children a long time to develop an understanding of the thought processes and emotions of other people. Gopnik and Aslington (1988) showed young children a candy box and asked them what was inside. Given the exterior of the box, they mostly suggested that the box contained candy. When the experimenter opened the box, they found it filled with crayons instead. Then, the experimenter asked what a friend would believe is in the box. Three-year-olds mostly believed that their friend would know the candy box was filled with crayons, even when the friend had not opened the box. In fact, the children might even begin to believe that they knew from the very beginning that the box was filled with crayons. Five-year olds, however, were more likely to assume that their friend would not know that the unopened box was filled with crayons. It is only around the age of 4 or 5 that children develop an understanding that others do not always know what they know and that there are different degrees of certainty. It is also difficult for children to learn that reality and appearance are not always the same. One experiment presented children with a glass of milk (Flavell, Green, Flavell, Watson, and Campione, 1986). Obviously, the milk’s color was white. Then the experimenter gave the children a special pair 235

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of green-tinted glasses to wear. When wearing the glasses, 3-year-olds tended to believe that the milk had changed its color from white to green. Only by the age of 5 or 6 can children begin successfully to differentiate between what is and what seems to be. Children also start to be able to apply their knowledge to emotions and understand that a happy-looking person may feel very sad despite the person’s looks. As parents, we can do many things to help our children develop a more elaborated theory of mind. In role playing and pretend play, children can playfully take others’ perspectives and learn to understand how others think. There is almost no limit to the roles children can play. The parent can pretend to be a patient while the child plays a doctor, for example, or the child can play a cashier at the supermarket with a parent or sibling shopping at the child’s market. Role playing gives children better insight into how they are expected to behave in certain situations and how others likely will behave. It is also very helpful verbally to explain situations children encounter so that the children understand why things happened in a particular way. Anytime you are with your child, put your thoughts into words and explain how the people around her think and act: someone might be smiling because she just received a gift, while another child might be looking sad because she is struggling to finish a puzzle. Reading and discussing books expands children’s perspective as well. Why do the people in the book act in a certain way, and how do they feel? Although people generally have a reason that leads them to act in a certain way, it is sometimes difficult for children (as well as adults!) to understand these reasons.

Lesson 12: Use Digital Devices Wisely Integrate digital devices into your child’s life in a reasonable way. Children growing up today face a very different environment and more varied modes of communication and interaction from what their parents faced when they grew up. These changes present children with both opportunities and challenges that parents can mediate in a way to positively influence and further their children’s development. In 2014, more than two-thirds of American adults owned a smartphone, and almost half owned a tablet computer (Pew Research Center, 2015). Most parents allowed their offspring to use their phone or tablet. Maybe not surprisingly, then, more than a third of children 23 months and younger have already used a mobile device, and around 50% of children aged 7 and below have used apps on a mobile phone or tablet. These days, the question is not so much whether children use digital media, but rather how and how much they use those media. In July 2015, approximately 1.5 million apps were available in Apple’s App Store (Statista, 2016). The Preschool/Toddler category was the most popular category in the store (Shuler, 2012), with more than 70% of the most popular paid apps bought in this category. In fact, entire companies have devoted themselves to developing digital learning systems. No matter where you stand on the question of what impact digital devices have on children nowadays, the fact is that sooner or later your children will be faced with a cell phone, tablet, gaming console, or other devices. Once old enough, they likely will communicate with their peers in a digital form as well, be it on social media platforms like Facebook or via text messages. What not to do: Go to any extremes and not let children use any digital devices at all or let them use digital devices without constraint. What to do: Ensure responsible media use in your household. Choose the apps your children are using wisely (see our tips later), know (or help them choose) what they are watching on TV and how they interact with others on social media. Limit the time your children spend in front of screens. Apps and digital devices certainly can have positive effects on young children and increase critical thinking (Sternberg, 1985b, 1985c). Children often become familiar with technology at an early age and thus become tech-savvy. Apps can be used anytime, whenever a child is ready to play. A good 236

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app or learning system presents educational materials in a fun and interactive way that can effectively support learning. Apps also allow learning in a variety of modes—text-based learning, videos, multiple-choice, games, audio-narration, and more. Children can explore any topics of interest to them independently of adults when using apps and digital devices. Hardesty (2016) investigated the impact of tablets with literacy apps on young children. After four months, U.S. 4-year-olds knew six times as many letter sounds as they had known before. In South Africa, second-graders could read four times as many words as those who did not use the apps (Hardesty, 2016). It goes without saying, however, that digital devices must be used in a responsible way. The American Academy of Pediatrics (2016) suggests that children younger than age 2 should not watch TV or use digital devices at all. The Academy further suggests that children over age 2 should not spend more than two hours on any screens (this refers to all screens, including TVs, computers, and mobile devices). Children’s bedrooms should be screen-free. What are the reasons for these recommendations? Excessive use of digital media puts children at increased risk for developing attention problems, sleep disorders, or obesity. If parents give children devices to calm them down or keep them quiet, their children may not be able to learn how to calm themselves. Children generally learn with all their senses—they interact with others, move their body, feel, smell, and manipulate with their hands. Screens offer a very limited sensory environment that does not engage many senses. These are some general recommendations, but the age at which you start having your children interact with and use devices still depends on your judgment. Two of the authors constrained TV watching in their young children to long car rides until they were 4 years of age and did not let them use digital devices until they were in kindergarten and started using iPads there. Here are some guidelines for choosing apps (Hirsh-Pasek et al., 2015): Choose Apps That • Require mental effort • Keep your child focused for a significant period of time • Teach material that is relevant to children’s lives and that help children connect what they already know to new material • Encourage social interaction like discussion and conversation • Help the child explore new knowledge on his or her own terms Do Not Choose Apps • • • •

In which the child is passive (for example, apps that require repetitive swiping) That have many distracting elements like sounds or visual effects That teach knowledge in a vacuum That tell the child what to know

Conclusions In this chapter we have presented 12 lessons that parents can use to foster the intellectual development of their children. They are not the only lessons we might have proposed, but we chose these 12 because of their significant impact on children’s development and potential for success. They are all things parents can do right away, and they are all things that will make a big difference. Heath (1983) conducted a study comparing the development of children in three communities. She found that one of the major differences in children’s intellectual development stemmed from the involvement of parents in the intellectual upbringing of the children, not only before the children 237

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started school but after as well. The children of parents who quit involving themselves in their children’s intellectual development after the children started school—figuring that this had become the teachers’ responsibility—fared worse than the children of parents who remained involved. This study suggests that much of what we can do to foster the intellectual development of our children does not devolve simply from a specific set of behaviors, but rather from an attitude. The attitude is one of seeking activities that promote our children’s intellectual development and then participating with children to help them grow. A good model might be that of the athletic coach. The coach watches and helps, but he does not do the activities for the child. Similarly, the parent should watch and guide, remain involved, but not do for the child what the child needs to do for herself or himself. Importantly, the effective coach and parent engineers an environment for which mastery is within the child’s potential grasp, and yet poses a meaningful developmental challenge. Unfortunately, some parents believe they are helping their children when they do their children’s homework, or their science projects, or otherwise take on their children’s responsibilities as their own. These parents may be meeting some inner need of their own, but they are not meeting any need of their child. The coach does not play for the team members; she or he helps each team member be the best she or he can be. This is what we try to do for our own children, and what we hope you will try to do for yours.

Acknowledgments This chapter is a revision of an earlier chapter: Williams, W. M., and Sternberg, R. J. (2002). How parents can maximize children’s cognitive abilities. In M. Borstein (Ed.), Handbook of Parenting:Vol. 5. Practical Issues in Parenting. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. It therefore draws on that chapter and of course on our related work.

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9 PARENTING OF CHILDREN’S ACADEMIC MOTIVATION Adele Eskeles Gottfried

Introduction The present chapter focuses on the role of parenting in the development of children’s academic motivation, including theory and research, longitudinal outcomes, and implications of parenting for children’s academic success. As research on the development of children’s academic motivation has expanded over the course of the 20th century and into the 21st, there has been an increasing emphasis on the role and importance of parenting with regard to children’s academic motivational development and educational success. Findings have indicated the specific, unique, and significant role of parenting from early childhood throughout the school years and into adulthood for academic motivation and competence across differing populations, academic domains, and career interests. Throughout the literature, parenting is recognized as being of importance for the development of children’s academic motivation and competence (Gottfried, 2009, 2016, 2018, in press; Pomerantz and Grolnick, 2017; Wigfield, Eccles, Fredricks, Simpkins, Roeser, and Schiefele, 2015). Academic motivation is conceptualized herein as motivation that concerns learning and achievement in the academic realm. Many theories of academic motivation have been advanced, all pertaining to the overarching issue of how such motivation supports individuals’ academic competence. What differs across theories are the processes accounting for the development of such motivation. Whereas parenting has been shown to play a role in fostering children’s academic motivation across various theories, the nature of parental involvement differs according to the specific theoretical underpinning. Hence, the impact of parental involvement on children’s academic motivation differs depending on the theory examined. Several key theories that have emerged are addressed herein. In addition to different theories, research methodologies and statistical analyses have become increasingly complex and sophisticated, with contemporary emphasis on multivariate and latent statistical longitudinal models (Gottfried, Schlackman, Gottfried, and Boutin-Martinez, 2015; Simpkins, Fredricks, and Eccles, 2015). Such models seek to delineate specific pathways to determine directional relations between parenting and academic motivation and to examine mediating and/or moderating factors that operate between parenting and academic motivation. In this regard, longitudinal research has become the preferred method to determine trajectories between parenting and children’s academic motivation (Gottfried et al., 2016; Nurmi and Silinskas, 2014). In the present chapter, the role of parenting with regard to children’s academic motivation is presented in three sections. In the first part, an overview of early research, contemporary perspectives and theories, and major findings within those theories is presented. Each theory provides a different

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lens with which to examine the manner in which parenting relates to children’s academic motivation. In the second part, focus is on a long-term, longitudinal research program in the ongoing Fullerton Longitudinal Study (FLS) regarding parenting as it relates to children’s academic intrinsic motivation and academic competence from childhood into adulthood. Issues examined include the durability of parental influences across long-term trajectories, direct and indirect relations between parenting and academic intrinsic motivation and academic competence, and implications for parenting. The last section presents conclusions and addresses generalities and specificities of parenting and academic motivation that emerge from integrating findings across the perspectives. Gottfried (2009) has previously noted the importance of deriving both replicable and generalizable findings regarding the development of academic motivation that emerge across different research studies and theories and to identify the specificities that emerge due to differing theories and contextual factors. Determining how parenting relates to children’s academic motivation is critical for theory and research, understanding the development of competence across the academic life span, and implications for parents’ stimulation and encouragement of academic motivation. Of particular importance is the need to determine longitudinal influences of parenting across children’s academic school years and into adulthood to determine its durability throughout (Gottfried et al., 2015). Such will be addressed in this chapter.

Central Issues, Theories, Historical Considerations, and Classical and Modern Research This section focuses on specific aspects of parenting behaviors as they related to children’s academic motivation and competence from the perspectives of prominent theories. Early foundations, contemporary findings, pathways from parenting to academic motivation and competence, and contextual factors are presented.

Foundations of Research on Parenting of Children’s Academic Motivation Early and contemporary research on parenting and children’s academic motivation has been shaped by several trends. One pertains to the role of parental socialization, such as providing specific environmental experiences that facilitate children’s school achievement, and parents’ educational involvement both in schools and at home. Epstein and Sanders (2002) identified several aspects of parental involvement, including home provision of educational experiences for children, as well as supporting school activities in the home. Differentiation of parental home involvement has been found across the literature in studies of parental school involvement for children’s academic motivation and competence (Grolnick and Slowiaczek, 1994; Sy, Gottfried, and Gottfried, 2013). Because parental involvement significantly relates to children’s achievement and academic competence (Epstein and Sanders, 2002; Jeynes, 2005, 2007; Sy et al., 2013), it is plausible that it does so through academic motivation. Accordingly, an issue examined across the literature, and addressed later, concerns determining pathways from parenting to children’s academic motivation, which in turn, relates to their academic competence. Children’s academic motivation often serves as a mediating variable between parenting and academic competence. Determining longitudinal relations between these variables is a focus across the literature. Parental involvement also exhibits considerable stability across childhood and adolescence (Sy et al., 2013), suggesting the importance of parental stimulation as early as possible. Another foundational trend in research on parenting of children’s academic motivation pertains to the distinction between distal and proximal aspects of environment (Bradley, 2002; Gottfried, 1984; Gottfried, 2009). The former (also called macroenvironmental) refers to background or demographic factors, such as socioeconomic status (SES), gender, or ethnicity, whereas the latter refers to stimulation

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or specific experiences that directly impinge on the child (Gottfried, 2009). Whereas distal and proximal aspects of the environment may be related to each other, the proximal environment delineates the specific variables or processes to which children are exposed, which explains what children experience. This distinction is relevant to parenting and academic motivation, as it is the proximal motivationally relevant experiences parents provide, and that children experience, that play key roles for the development of children’s academic motivation. Distal variables such as SES, culture, ethnicity, and gender are important to determine how they relate to the provision of motivationally relevant proximal stimulation that relates to the development of academic motivation. Contemporary studies focus on parental provision of proximal experiences as they relate to children’s academic motivation and how distal variables provide a context for the provision of parental motivational experiences to which children are exposed (Bempechat and Shernoff, 2013). A third foundation for parenting of children’s academic motivation concerns early research investigating parental involvement as it relates to children’s achievement motivation. An early study was conducted by Winterbottom (1958). In a sample of twenty-eight 8-year-old middle-class boys and their mothers, the relation between mothers’ reports of early and current experiences of independence and mastery training were examined as they related to boys’ need for achievement assessed using the Atkinson methodology entailing projective tests. Mothers whose sons evidenced higher achievement motivation made more independence and mastery demands before age 8 years, evaluated their sons’ accomplishments more positively, and were more rewarding than mothers whose sons had lower achievement motivation scores. These findings provided a beginning point for research on parenting and children’s academic motivation by showing a relation between early parenting experiences and children’s academic motivation. Other early research on parenting as it related to children’s academic motivation includes work by Katkovsky, Crandall, and Good (1967) and Rosen and d’Andrade (1959). Additionally, Baumrind’s (1966) typology of parental control styles, particularly authoritative, has been incorporated into early and contemporary research (Aunola, Stattin, and Nurmi, 2000) indicating the continuing importance of these parenting processes for children’s academic motivation.

Central Issues in Research on Parenting of Children’s Academic Motivation The literature on parenting and children’s academic motivation is continuously evolving through the distinction of parental involvement and provision of experiences into increasingly finer subcomponents generated from theories differing as to their explanatory principles and mechanisms (Gottfried, 2009). The central issue across studies pertains to how and to what extent parenting plays a role in children’s academic motivation and, consequently, their academic competence. Despite varied conceptualizations, in common to all is that parents engage in specific behaviors that have an impact on children’s academic motivation and hence their academic competence. Discerning these specific parental behaviors related to children’s academic motivation comprises the main issue addressed in this chapter, with a particular focus on longitudinal research because of its importance in assessing long-term relations between parenting and children’s academic motivation, mediating, and moderating variables, as well as directional influences between parenting and children’s academic motivation. Developmental, contextual, and demographic variables are examined as pertinent to particular studies.

Contemporary Theories of Academic Motivation and Parenting An overview of the most current theories on parenting related to academic motivation is presented next. Theories chosen for inclusion have played key roles in the literature, and specific studies within these theories have been selected to illustrate pertinent parenting processes. 244

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As with the parent involvement literature (Kim and Hill, 2015), research on parenting and children’s academic motivation primarily involves mothers because they have traditionally been primarily the caregiver with greater availability to participate in research. Some studies included mothers and fathers but have combined data across both parents (Affuso, Bacchini, and Miranda, 2017), and others have reported that mother and father participants may be drawn from overlapping but not equivalent samples (Simpkins et al., 2015). Given the current nature of the extant research, a comparative analysis of mothers and fathers is not possible. Further, theories refer to parents. Hence, the term parent is used throughout this chapter.

Self-Determination Theory A major tenet of self-determination theory is that individuals have tendencies to develop motivation on behalf of their own agentic strivings (Ryan and Deci, 2000, 2017). It is an organismic theory examining psychological growth and wellness, as well as the biological, social, and cultural conditions that foster psychological engagement (Ryan and Deci, 2017). In the self-determination conceptualization, regulation of motivation ranges on a continuum from the lack or absence of motivation (i.e., amotivation) to motivation that is totally internalized and intrinsic, developing from interest and enjoyment (Ryan and Deci, 2000, 2017). Between these two extremes of the continuum are intermediary points ranging from less to more internalized regulation, including external introjected, somewhat external introjected, identified (somewhat internal), and integrated (internal) (Ryan and Deci, 2000, 2017, p. 193). A major dimension of social regulation concerns autonomy and control, or most to least self-determined. Based on self-determination theory, studies of parenting have been oriented to determining the processes that parents utilize to provide environmental and family conditions that enhance children’s self-determination motivation, or those that either facilitate or thwart the development of selfdetermination and well-being. Studies have examined parenting that develops children’s autonomy, relatedness, and competence, which contribute to their self-determination motivation (Grolnick, Friendly, and Bellas, 2009; Ryan and Deci, 2017). Autonomy refers to self-initiation of activities and perceptions that one is the cause of one’s effectiveness in the environment (Grolnick et al., 2009). Relatedness refers to the need to be connected with others, and competence concerns effectiveness and success in one’s environment (Grolnick et al. 2009). In the context of academics, parental provision of educationally oriented experiences, such as allowing for choice of academic activities as opposed to parental control; positive involvement, including time, support, and warmth; and consistency of structure in the home, should promote children’s autonomy, relatedness, and competence that are central to their self-determination (Grolnick et al., 2009). Support for parenting pertaining to self-determination motivation has been obtained. In their review of studies including elementary and high school students, Ryan and Deci (2017) reported that across different respondents, including teachers, children, and parents, children whose parents are perceived as more autonomy supportive are higher in their own autonomous regulation for school and homework as well as pursuing future education. Children whose parents are more autonomy supportive tend to be more intrinsically motivated in school, perceive themselves as more competent, have higher achievement, and have more positive academic adjustment (Bronstein, Ginsburg, and Herrera, 2005; Ginsburg and Bronstein, 1993; Raftery, Grolnick, and Flamm, 2013; Ratelle, Duchesne, and Guay, 2017; Rowe, Ramani, and Pomerantz, 2016). Providing clear expectations in an autonomy supportive context also relates to more positive academic competence (Raftery et al., 2013). Pomerantz, Moorman, and Litwack (2007) conceptualized parental involvement relevant to selfdetermination theory constructs to include autonomy support versus control, process versus person orientation, positive versus negative affect, and positive versus negative beliefs about children’s abilities. They suggested that autonomy support facilitates children’s intrinsic motivation and their initiative 245

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to take on challenges, whereas controlling parenting denies children an agentic sense of self. For process versus person orientation, which refers to parental emphasis on learning as opposed to ability or performance, respectively, Pomerantz et al. (2007) suggested that learning or process involvement facilitates the development of mastery orientation. Pertaining to a focus on positive rather than negative affect, positive affect may convey to children that learning is enjoyable despite possible irritations, which would foster a more intrinsic orientation in children and help develop skills. Lastly, positive perceptions of children’s abilities may encourage parents to engage children in more challenging activities and view themselves as more capable. Conversely, parents who are more controlling, emphasize a person orientation, emphasize more negative affect, and have more negative views of children’s abilities are likely to have children engaging in fewer challenges, have lower intrinsic and mastery motivation, and have lower views of their capabilities (Pomerantz et al., 2007). Research has revealed nuances concerning the role of parenting for children’s self-determination motivation. For example, mastery-oriented parental practices have more positive outcomes for children with more negative perceptions of their academic competence and mastery orientation (Pomerantz, Ng, and Wang, 2006). Studies have also examined parental involvement a propos the self-determination perspective across countries and cultures. Korean middle schoolers’ perceptions of their parents’ autonomy supportive and controlling motivational styles, as well as their perceptions of parents’ mastery goals, were related to student perceptions of personal goal orientations as mediated by their own self-regulated motivation (Kim, Schallert, and Kim, 2010). Moreover, students’ perceptions of their parents as controlling did not interfere with mastery through identified regulation. This latter finding differs from research conducted with samples in Western countries in which controlling parental styles are typically adverse for more internalized aspects of self-determination motivation (Grolnick et al., 2009). Perhaps control is more normative and expected in Korean culture, and hence would not be expected to have an adverse relation to self-determination motivation (Kim et al., 2010). Directionality cannot be determined in this study because it was correlational and not longitudinal. However, it provides interesting suggestions pertaining to culture, parenting, and motivation. In a meta-analysis, Vasquez, Patall, Fong, Corrigan, and Pine (2016), reported that parents’ autonomy support had positive relations with children’s autonomous and intrinsic motivation, and was also found to relate to extrinsic motivation in some studies, suggesting that parental involvement per se facilitates a broad range of motivation. In a longitudinal study of young Italian adolescents, Affuso et al. (2017) found that parental monitoring of children’s academic activities (e.g., knowledge of children’s schoolwork and homework) positively related to their self-determined motivation and academic self-efficacy contemporaneously and over a one-year period, which in turn related to children’s academic achievement across subject areas, controlling for parent education and child gender and intelligence. Hence, parental monitoring was indirectly related to achievement through children’s motivation, a finding supporting the mediational role of academic motivation between parental monitoring and academic achievement. This study also used multiple sources of data and was not limited to children’s or parents’ perceptions alone. Additional studies have indicated cultural differences concerning parental inputs to the development of autonomy motivation. Chinese parents’ collectivistic orientations were indirectly related to eighth-graders’ autonomous motivation through autonomy granting (positively) and psychological control (negatively; Pan, Gauvain, and Schwartz, 2013). In a study of Ghanaian sixth-graders, autonomy was often interpreted differently than expected. Items tapping autonomy were sometimes interpreted as independence and viewed negatively, not positively, in this collectivistic culture (Marbell and Grolnick, 2013). Whereas parental encouragement of children’s autonomy, competence, and relatedness have been shown to be important to the development of children’s self-determination motivation, cultural beliefs need to be considered because interpretations of autonomy support may be positive or negative depending on the views of a particular culture. 246

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Expectancy-Value Theory The expectancy-value theory of achievement motivation has its foundations in early motivational theories of Lewin on valence; Tolman on expectancies for success; and Atkinson, who developed a mathematical formulation of the relation between expectancies and values to explain achievementrelated behaviors, such as strivings, choice, and persistence (Wigfield, Tonks, and Klauda, 2016). Based on this groundwork, Eccles, Wigfield, and colleagues elaborated expectancy-value theory in developmental and educational psychology contexts to examine relations to children’s achievement behaviors, choice, and persistence (Wigfield et al., 2015, 2016). This modern expectancy-value theory, as it has been called (Wigfield et al., 2015), expanded in perspective to include the socialization context ranging from the more exogenous aspects of environment, such as family demographics, through more specific parenting processes, including achievement-related expectations, values, and beliefs about children’s abilities, future success, and achievement goals as well as person characteristics. Child constructs include, for example, expectations of success, perceptions of socializers’ beliefs and behaviors, interpretation of experience, self-concepts and beliefs about competence and ability, achievementrelated choices and performance, goals, and subjective task values (attainment, intrinsic, utility, and cost; Wigfield et al., 2016). A conceptual model and review of literature of this conceptualization has been presented (Wigfield et al., 2015, 2016), examining relations between parents’ expectations, beliefs, values, and experiences to children’s achievement-related beliefs, expectancies, goals, and values, and ultimately their academic and career choices, persistence, and performance (Wigfield et al., 2016, p. 56). Evidence across studies supports the role of parents for children’s academic motivation within the expectancy-value framework. An area that has been emphasized in expectancy-value theory concerns gender and how parents’ beliefs and expectations about boys’ and girls’ entry into science, technology, engineering, mathematics (STEM) courses of study relate to children’s achievement-related behaviors, expectations, and task values (Wigfield et al., 2015). If parents are more encouraging of boys and have a higher evaluation of boys’ abilities and potential in math and/or science, resulting in higher expectations and value achievement in STEM more for boys, then the courses of study and career choices of boys and girls are affected accordingly, with greater entry into STEM for boys (Wigfield et al., 2015). Gender differences are more pronounced in cultures that emphasize more traditional gender role beliefs (Wigfield et al., 2015). Hence, the culture in which the family is embedded plays a role in shaping the expectations and values of parents and children from the demographic context, to the parental general and childspecific beliefs, to the children’s own beliefs and values, and ultimately to children’s achievementrelated behavior, performance, and choices. Similarly, advancement from general to specific aspects of parenting and children’s academic outcome was supported in a longitudinal, cascade model (Bornstein, Putnick, and Suwalsky, 2017). A cascade approach examines how processes in one domain spread, or cascade, to processes across domains and over time (Masten and Cicchetti, 2010). Bornstein et al. (2017) found that general cognitions about parenting success during toddlerhood predicted parents’ supportive behaviors during preschool, which in turn, predicted children’s classroom externalizing behaviors in middle childhood. Longitudinal studies have been conducted examining parenting within the expectancy-value framework. Simpkins et al. (2015) examined a socialization model of parenting regarding children’s achievement-related motivation using the expectancy-value theory framework. In a longitudinal study from elementary through high school, a cascade approach examined pathways from parents’ beliefs to children’s achievement-related choices in sports, music, math, and reading. These areas were chosen to tap gender differences within academic and leisure domains. Parental beliefs and values (e.g., perception of children’s ability, value of domain for their child, encouragement of child) and children’s beliefs and values (e.g., self-concept of ability, task value), as well as choice behaviors (participation in activities, elective courses), were included. Of the various pathways examined, it was within the leisure domains of music and sports, rather than the academic areas of reading and math, 247

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that results were most consistent for the relation from parents’ perceptions of children’s abilities to increases in their children’s beliefs over the course of a year. Children were more apt to increase their own beliefs and participation when their parents believed they had ability (Huston, 2015). Gender differences in parental beliefs pertained primarily to sports and instrumental music, with parents of males being more positive and encouraging for sports, and females for music. Gender differences were not obtained for reading and math. The authors attributed these gender differences across domains to schooling influences inasmuch as reading and math are required areas in school, but extracurricular activities would be more influenced by family experiences or adolescent identity (Simpkins et al., 2015). In a short-term, longitudinal study from grades 6 to 7, parents’ perceptions of children’s ability and effort in English and math predicted children’s self-concept of ability and perceptions of task difficulty in these areas, which, in turn, related to children’s expectations for success (Frome and Eccles, 1998). Parents’ perceptions mediated between children’s grades and their perceptions of ability and task difficulty and were somewhat more strongly related to children’s perceptions than were grades themselves. Overall, this study supports the role of parental beliefs in relating to children’s perceptions. In other longitudinal research, Bleeker and Jacobs (2004) found that at grade 7, parents’ predictions of their children’s success in a math-related career were indirectly related to their child’s math/science career self-efficacy two years after high school, through adolescents’ self-perception of math ability at grade 10. In a study of German high school students from 11th to 12th grades, Lazarides, Rubach, and Ittel (2017) found that students’ perceptions of parents’ mathematics value beliefs in grade 11 positively predicted their utility value at grade 12, but not their intrinsic value or career plans. The authors suggested that parents’ utility value is more extrinsic and not related to student intrinsic value. In Australian secondary students across grades 7 through 11, Gniewozc and Watt (2017) found positive effects for student-perceived parental overestimation of their own perceived math ability, for their math intrinsic and utility task values. Overestimation predicted positive changes in intrinsic task values more consistently than for utility task values over time. The authors interpreted findings as providing evidence that parental overestimation may foster the development of intrinsic and utility task values if perceived as encouragement. In another longitudinal study of Australian secondary students, grades 9 to 11, Lazarides and Watt (2017) found that girls’ perceptions of mothers’ ability beliefs were lower than boys’, predicting lower intrinsic task values and mathematics-related career plans for girls. Overall, across these studies, support is provided for the importance of parental beliefs and values as they related to children’s self-perceptions, values, and choices. In addition to the general findings reported, specificity was obtained with regard to gender that varied with the specific aspect of the construct investigated, family context, and nationality of the sample. Expectancy-value theory has provided the basis for an experimental intervention study. To increase high school students’ involvement in STEM courses, and consequently their possible involvement in STEM careers, a utility value intervention study was implemented with high school students and their parents (Harackiewicz, Rozek, Hulleman, and Hyde, 2012). The intervention occurred over a 15-month period when students were in grades 10 and 11. Parents in the experimental group were provided with brochures and a website focusing on the importance and usefulness of STEM as well as communicating about it with their children. The control group did not receive these resources. Students whose parents were in the intervention group reported having more conversations with them about the value of STEM courses and also took more STEM courses in the last two years of high school, regardless of parents’ educational level. Students’ conversations with parents and mothers’ perceived utility value, in turn, predicted students’ own perception of STEM utility value after high school graduation. In a follow-up to the initial study (Rozek, Hyde, Svoboda, Hulleman, and Harackiewicz, 2015), analyses indicated differential success of the intervention depending on a combination of gender and achievement level of the students. The intervention was beneficial in increasing STEM course-taking for higher-achieving daughters and lower-achieving sons as mediated through changes 248

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in parents’ (mothers’) STEM utility value. Differences in the effectiveness of the intervention for boys and girls were viewed by the authors as possibly related to gender composition of STEM-related careers. Because of specificity of results across gender and achievement level, blanket interventions would likely not be universally effective.

Self-Theories: Entity Versus Incremental, Goals, and Self-Efficacy Due to the interrelatedness of these three aspects of self-theories, they are all presented in this section. Individuals’ beliefs about whether intelligence is fixed or malleable (i.e., termed entity versus incremental theories of intelligence, respectively; Dweck, 2017) have implications for the types of goals pursued (e.g., performance or mastery) (Dweck and Master, 2009; Dweck and Molden, 2005, 2017) and also for views that one is able to meet a challenge (e.g., self-efficacy) or live up to the demands of a task (Dweck and Master, 2009). Whereas these are interrelated constructs, each has also garnered its own research in support of their view.

Entity Versus Incremental Theory of Intelligence The theory of entity versus incremental conceptions of intelligence, known as fixed and growth mind-set, respectively (Dweck, 2017; Dweck and Molden, 2017), emerged from social psychology dimensions of attributions regarding learned helplessness as a response to failure not being under one’s control versus mastery for which effort is viewed as an orientation to meet a challenge (Dweck, 2017). Helpless and mastery orientations relate to differences in types of achievement goals that students pursue. These earlier theoretical foundations provided a basis for the development of mind-set theory comprising the individual’s theory of intelligence, in which ability is viewed either as an entity that is fixed and not changeable or as malleable and subject to change with effort, referred to as incremental or growth mind-set (Dweck, 2017; Dweck and Molden, 2017). When one views intelligence as fixed or malleable, successes or failures are interpreted within this framework. For the former, performance is viewed as a result of fixed ability, and performance goals would pertain to demonstrations of competence or avoidance of incompetence within this framework. Helpless orientations follow from not seeing intelligence as subject to change through effort. For the latter, if one views intelligence as subject to change through effort (i.e., incremental), then mastery approaches pertain to adapting, improving, or changing one’s intelligence through applying growth-producing learning strategies. Given this distinction between fixed (entity) versus growth (incremental) mind-sets of intelligence, the issue for parents is the use of strategies that derive from either fixed or malleable views of their children’s intelligence and whether parental behaviors have a relation with children’s intelligence mind-sets. In a longitudinal study, Gunderson et al. (2013) examined parents’ use of praise pertaining to children’s fixed or incremental views of ability (i.e., their motivational frameworks). Parents’ use of person-oriented (ability) versus process-oriented (effort, learning) praise was naturalistically observed in the home environment when children were 14 to 38 months. Subsequently, children’s fixed or incremental motivational frameworks were assessed when they were between ages 7 and 8 years. Parents’ provision of process praise at 14 to 38 months predicted children’s incremental motivational frameworks at ages 7 to 8, and person-oriented praise was not associated with fixed-ability frameworks. Based on experimental literature, the authors suggested that parents’ process praise may be a causal mechanism in relation to children’s mind-sets (Gunderson et al., 2013). However, because this study was correlational, such an interpretation cannot itself be supported based on these findings. About the absence of a relation between person praise and fixed motivational views, the authors suggested that this was due to the decline in parents’ use of person praise over time. Boys received more process praise and had more incremental mind-set frameworks than girls. Whereas this study 249

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used a construct from the experimental literature and applied it in the home, these findings are limited in that parents’ praise was assessed only prior to school entry, but not thereafter, nor were children’s motivational frameworks assessed over time. Thus, in this study it was not known whether continuity in provision of praise could have related to the incremental mind-set reported, nor whether child trajectories of mind-set would have related to parents’ use of praise. Also, children varied in age, so it is not known how age differences may relate to the outcomes. In a follow-up study, Gunderson et al. (2018), using the same sample, found that parental process praise to the children when toddlers predicted their reading comprehension and math achievement in fourth grade through earlier incremental frameworks, showing long-term relations. Pomerantz and Kempner (2013) found evidence contrary to Gunderson et al. (2013). Whereas Gunderson et al. (2013) found that parents’ use of process praise was related to children’s incremental motivational frameworks and that person praise was unrelated to fixed motivational frameworks, Pomerantz and Kempner (2013) found the opposite pattern. In their study of children ranging in age from 8 to 12 years, parents’ praise was assessed daily via telephone interview over a 10-day period. Children’s entity and incremental beliefs were assessed prior to and 6 months after parents’ praise was assessed. The more that praise was reported being used, the more likely was the child to have a fixed motivational orientation. Process praise was unrelated to children’s incremental conceptions. Although both Gunderson et al. (2013) and Pomerantz and Kempner (2013) found that parents’ praise related to children’s incremental or fixed mind-sets, the results were the reverse of each other. Children in Pomerantz and Kempner (2013) had a four-year age range and were older than the children in Gunderson et al. (2013), raising the possibility of developmental differences in the salience of different types of praise for younger and older children, an issue that has not been studied in this literature. Both studies provide evidence that parents’ praise is related to children’s mind-set motivational beliefs. Replication is needed to reconcile different outcomes across studies and distinguish between specificity versus possible unreliability of findings. Examining a different aspect of parental behavior and children’s motivational patterns, Hokoda and Fincham (1995) conducted a laboratory study of 8-year-old helpless and mastery-oriented children in interaction with their mothers conducting problem-solving tasks. Aspects of parental behaviors assessed included attributions, affect statements to the children, and task-focused and control-oriented teaching. Parents of helpless and mastery children used different behaviors in interaction with their children, with the latter more supportive of mastery as evidenced by their use of task-focused teaching behaviors and positive affect. They also appeared to be more sensitive to their children’s ability perceptions and requests for help. Given the small sample size, these results need confirmation in larger samples. Haimovitz and Dweck (2016) assessed the relation of parents’ and children’s intelligence and failure mind-sets. The latter concerned the effect of failure (i.e., whether failure is debilitating as in fixed or entity mind-set or failure is enhancing as in incremental mind-set). Parents’ failure beliefs (i.e., failure as debilitating versus failure as enhancing) were related to children’s intelligence mind-sets, with the former being related to entity mind-set. Parents’ performance or learning orientation mediated the relation between parental views of failure and children’s fixed mind-set. The authors proposed that parents’ failure mind-sets are visible to children and thereby predictive of their children’s mind-sets. Children were found to accurately perceive parents’ failure, but not intelligence, mind-sets. Viewing parents’ failure mind-set as debilitating would be related to children’s viewing intelligence as fixed, as it is not viewed as changeable, and hence likely to affect children’s belief.

Achievement Goals Achievement goals, entailing the purpose or meaning of achievement-related activity (Maehr and Zusho, 2009), pertain to individuals’ beliefs and feelings regarding success, incorporating aspects of achievement motivation comprising conceptions of success, ability, effort, and evaluation (Elliot, 2005; 250

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Elliot and Hulleman, 2017). Achievement goals have been distinguished into two broad types: mastery and performance (Maehr and Zusho, 2009). Achievement goals began with approach orientations (mastery approach, performance approach), and avoidance orientations were subsequently added, producing two aspects of mastery and performance goals each. Mastery approach goals have been aligned with engaging in learning for the sake of developing self-set standards of competence through effort, and performance approach goals are oriented toward external confirmation of competence, or demonstration of competence in comparison to others, such as comparison of grades with others (Maehr and Zusho, 2009). Mastery avoidance goals focus on preventing loss of one’s abilities; performance avoidance goals focus on preventing perceptions of lack of competence. Additional goal models, including self-referenced goals, have been described by Elliot and Hulleman (2017). Achievement goals are related to academic learning and competence, with mastery goals being associated with more positive learning and performance outcomes, including self-efficacy and persistence when confronted with challenge (Bempechat and Shernoff, 2013; Maehr and Zusho, 2009). However, the relation of achievement goals to academic competence is complex, with performance approach goals often having positive relations as well (Elliot, 2005; Elliot and Hulleman, 2017). A multiple-goal perspective is often examined to determine if achievement has more than one type of goal determinant (Elliot, 2005). Parental warmth, authoritative interactions, and participation with children are more likely to be related to mastery goals (Bempechat and Shernoff, 2013), and greater use of external control relates to performance goals, suggesting that parents’ provision of the social-emotional home context is important to the development of children’s achievement goals. Furthermore, studies reported earlier with regard to self-determination theory have also shown that parental encouragement of autonomy relates to children’s mastery, findings in alignment with those for achievement goal theories (Kim et al., 2010; Pomerantz et al., 2006). In a short-term longitudinal study of children’s perceptions of parental involvement (investment and participation in children’s lives), control styles (parents’ pressuring children by using threats and giving orders), and children’s mastery and performance goals from the end of elementary through the beginning of middle school, Duchesne and Ratelle (2010) found that parental involvement was positively related to mastery goals, and parental control was related to performance goals, over this time period. The latter path between control and performance goals was mediated by student anxiety, but not so for the mastery goals. The authors suggested that parental involvement may provide emotional closeness to children, which allows for the development of autonomy as it relates to mastery goals. Parental control may pressure children, raising anxiety, which in turn positively relates to performance goals of expected behavior. In addition to having implications for parental behavior, these results suggest that parenting has implications over time for children’s academic goals that may ultimately relate to their academic success. In a two-year longitudinal study of Korean middle school, early adolescent students (grades 7 to 9), Song, Bong, Lee, and Kim (2014) examined parents’ academic and emotional support in relation to students’ mastery and performance and approach and avoidance goals. Parents’ emotional support (encouraging students, caring about feelings) had the most benefit, by positively predicting children’s mastery goals and negatively predicting performance avoidance goals, which was positively related to academic achievement. Parental academic support (e.g., monitoring grades, checking schoolwork, supervising daily life, and overseeing schedule) related to performance goals in addition to mastery goals and to student anxiety, suggesting that this type of academic support in which parents play a supervisory role was perceived as pressuring. When compared to teacher and peer support, parental support was found to be the strongest predictor. The authors suggested that in the Korean Confucian culture, parental academic support is perceived as pressure to perform and live up to expectations in the family. These results for parental support as it relates to achievement goals and achievement were controlled for initial student anxiety and achievement, showing that they played a role beyond those 251

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variables. This study indicates that parental support has different interpretations within different cultural groups. In a cross-sectional study of parents’ homework support of Greek fifth- and ninth-grade students, Gonida and Cortina (2014) found that parents’ autonomy support of student homework (promoting self-regulation and reflection to find answers) and parental control (e.g., checking mistakes, ensuring homework completed) were related to parents’ own mastery and performance goals. Students’ mastery goals were positively predicted by parent autonomy support and negatively by parents’ interference (solving homework for them); children’s performance goals were positively predicted by parental control. Student achievement was positively predicted by their mastery but not their performance goals. Pathways from parents’ own mastery goals related to their support behaviors, and ultimately to children’s achievement goals and achievement. Origins of parental involvement may have roots in their own goal beliefs. Given that this is a cross-sectional study, however, causal interpretations cannot be made. Across studies, research on parenting and children’s achievement goals tends to show positive relations between parental provision of mastery and autonomy supports with children’s own mastery goals and achievement (Bempechat and Shernoff, 2013; Friedel, Cortina, Turner, and Midgley, 2007; Koul, Lerdpornkulrat, and Poondej, 2016; Madjar, Shklar, and Moshe, 2016). As noted, many studies have found generalizable results across different countries with varying cultural beliefs. Even in studies finding cultural differences in children’s interpretations of parents’ autonomy and control parental behaviors, the evidence tends to support a positive role for parents’ encouragement of autonomy and mastery as they relate to children’s own achievement goals and achievement outcomes.

Self-Efficacy Self-efficacy in education derives from Bandura’s theory in which individuals perceive their ability to engage in learning activities at particular levels (Schunk and DiBenedetto, 2016). Those with high self-efficacy are more apt to achieve selected goals and evidence greater engagement, learning, participation, persistence, interest, and achievement (Schunk and DiBenedetto, 2016). Drawing on Bandura’s concepts, individuals’ self-efficacy involves triadic interactions among person and environmental variables and behaviors. A multiplicity of persons and sources may provide feedback to the individual regarding learning effectiveness, and these contribute to the development of an individual’s self-efficacy. These include one’s own performance; vicarious experiences, such as observing the effectiveness of others; information provided by others about one’s performance, including social persuasion; and physiological feedback, such as excitement or anxiety in the pursuit of a task (Schunk and DiBenedetto, 2016). Self-efficacy has been differentiated into various types, such as self-efficacy for learning, performance, collective or group, and self-regulation (Schunk and DiBenedetto, 2016). Choices of concurrent and future educational activities are likely to be related to self-efficacy concerning specific learning activities in the academic realm. Based on this theory (Schunk and DiBenedetto, 2016), higher self-efficacy for specific learning domains is likely to result in greater involvement in those areas and increase choices to pursue these realms in school or careers. Lower perceptions of self-efficacy are likely to result in avoidance of challenging tasks in those areas. Given the role that parents play in providing feedback to children about their academic competence, they are likely to affect their children’s self-efficacy. Research on the role of parents in self-efficacy theory has included general and specific aspects of the family. In this research frame, the former includes provision of family capital, such as financial resources; opportunities for learning, including activities and materials; parental educational level; and provision of warm and responsive environments that provide opportunities to experience curiosity and mastery (Schunk and DiBenedetto, 2016). Specific parental behaviors include support, monitoring, and demandingness (Affuso et al., 2017; Carlo, White, Streit, Knight, and Zeiders, 2018; Fan, Williams, and Wolters, 2012). Such 252

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home factors play a role in children’s self-efficacy because they allow for the experience of perceiving self-capability with regard to education. In a longitudinal study, academic self-efficacy was shown to mediate parenting and academic achievement. As in their results for self-determination, Affuso et al. (2017) also found that greater parental monitoring of adolescents (knowing more about their child’s schoolwork and homework) positively related to children’s academic self-efficacy, which in turn related to academic achievement. An indirect relation of parental monitoring and children’s achievement was obtained through both self-efficacy and self-determination. When more involved in their children’s schooling, parents convey a message that the child is capable of success, which is pertinent to self-efficacy (Affuso et al., 2017). In a cross-sectional study of tenth-graders’ English and mathematics self-efficacy (confidence in achieving in the respective subject area), Fan et al. (2012) found that across four ethnic groups (European-American, African-American, Asian-American, and Latin American), parental aspirations for postsecondary education were positively related to students’ English self-efficacy, and to math self-efficacy for European-American, African-American, and Latin American students. Where significant, children’s confidence in achieving in the specific subject area positively related to their parents’ aspirations for their children to pursue higher education. Higher parental aspirations may convey parents’ confidence in children’s achievement, thereby stimulating self-efficacy. When parents increased parent–school communication concerning student problems, negative relations were obtained between this involvement and English and math self-efficacy across ethnic groups (Fan et al., 2012), indicating that it is not parental involvement per se that is important with regard to self-efficacy, but the type and reasons for involvement that play a role. Because of the cross-sectional nature of this investigation, causal interpretations were not possible (Fan et al., 2012). The authors explained differences in findings as related to cultural and ethnic backgrounds of families. In a longitudinal study of U.S. Mexican students from grades 5 through 12, Carlo et al. (2018) examined the relations between parenting style and student self-efficacy as mediated by prosocial behaviors. Based on fifth-graders’ perceptions of parenting, four parenting styles were identified based on latent profile analysis, including authoritative (high acceptance, low harshness), less involved authoritative, moderately demanding, and no-nonsense (warm but harsh) parent involvement styles. Students’ academic self-efficacy (belief they could master the schoolwork) was measured at grade 12. Across grades 5 through 12, parental involvement indirectly related to students’ academic self-efficacy (belief they could master schoolwork) through its relation with prosocial behavior, and self-efficacy in turn related to students’ self- and teacher-reported math and English grades, also at grade 12. Perceptions of authoritative parenting had the most consistent and positive relation to student prosocial behavior and evidenced indirect relations to self-efficacy and ultimately grades, compared to parents who were perceived as moderately demanding or less involved. The authors suggested that prosocial behaviors contribute to children’s confidence, which may be associated with a sense of competence and thus self-efficacy. Whereas longitudinal evidence was provided regarding parenting as it related to academic self-efficacy in a U.S. Mexican sample, causal interpretations are not possible due to the absence of a fully prospective study design (Carlo et al., 2018). In a sample of multiethnic students (Latin American, European-American, Asian-American, AfricanAmerican, other) attending a state university, Weiser and Riggio (2010) investigated relations between students’ perceptions of their parents’ involvement in academic and school-related activities (e.g., inquiring about school, help with homework, communication with school) and general and academic self-efficacy, GPA, and expectations of academic career success. Academic, as well as general, selfefficacy mediated the relation between parental involvement and students’ expectations of academic success. Greater parental involvement related to students’ higher academic and general self-efficacy, which related to more positive perceptions of academic outcomes. Although this study was crosssectional based on self-report, it demonstrated that in multiethnic, college-age students, parenting played a significant role in student career expectations through its relation to student self-efficacy. 253

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Further, their research with college students extends findings by indicating that such relations are not restricted to children and adolescents.

Academic Intrinsic Motivation Academic intrinsic motivation, pleasure inherent in school learning, has significant and pervasive relations to students’ academic achievement and competence across the school years and into adulthood. Parenting is significant for the development of academic intrinsic motivation and its relation to academic competence. Gottfried and colleagues have been engaged in longitudinal research on parenting as it relates to the development of academic intrinsic motivation across the academic life span from infancy through adulthood. The following section presents this research program.

Summary Across theories, in common to all is that parents’ use of motivationally relevant behaviors affects children’s academic motivation and academic competence. Specific parenting behaviors derived from the specific theory examined, and, as reviewed earlier, provided differing implications for children’s motivational and competence outcomes. Developmental, contextual, and demographic variables were also examined as pertinent to particular studies.

Longitudinal Research on Parenting and Academic Intrinsic Motivation in the Fullerton Longitudinal Study In this section, focus is on the long-term, longitudinal research conducted in the ongoing Fullerton Longitudinal Study (FLS) regarding parenting specifically oriented toward the development of academic intrinsic motivation and academic competence from childhood into adulthood. Issues examined include parental behaviors and practices engaged in derived from academic intrinsic motivation theory; parental effects across long-term trajectories; direct and indirect relations between parenting, academic intrinsic motivation, and academic competence; and implications for parenting.

Academic Intrinsic Motivation, Parenting, and the Fullerton Longitudinal Study Academic intrinsic motivation is a major area of inquiry in the long-term, longitudinal investigation, the FLS. This research has provided findings elucidating parents’ role in fostering children’s academic intrinsic motivation as it relates to academic competence across the academic life span from childhood through adulthood. The FLS is a contemporary, ongoing, long-term, prospective longitudinal investigation in which 130 children were followed from infancy through adulthood (ages 1 through 38 years). Prior to school entry, the children were assessed semiannually and then annually throughout the formal school years through age 17. At the 29- and 38-year assessments, the participants completed questionnaires via the Internet. Across study waves, research comprised multiple sources of data and informants, contributing to validity and generalizability of the findings. In the course of investigation, standardized assessments were conducted in the university laboratory, and various questionnaires were completed by parents, teachers, and the participants themselves. The socioeconomic status (SES) of families was determined by the Hollingshead Four-Factor Index of Social Status (see Hollingshead, 1975; Gottfried, Gottfried, Bathurst, Guerin, and Parramore, 2003) based on mothers’ and fathers’ level of education and occupational ranking. SES ranged from semiskilled workers with no high school degree through professionals. The gender distribution of the children at the outset was approximately equal (52% males) and remained so throughout the 254

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course of the investigation. Ethnicities included 117 European-American, 7 Latin, 1 Asian, 1 East Indian, 1 Hawaiian, 1 Iranian, and 2 interracial children, which reflected the demographics of the area at the outset of the investigation. Throughout the study, participant retention was high, with at least 80% returning for any assessment with no evidence of attrition bias (Guerin, Gottfried, Oliver, and Thomas, 2003). When the investigation was launched, the families resided in proximity to the research site. Geographic mobility has long been known to be common and expected in extensive longitudinal projects (Harway, Mednick, and Mednick, 1984). As anticipated, the study sample gradually resided throughout the United States. Thus, the findings are not restricted to a specific region. For additional details concerning the demographics, study sample, and design, see Gottfried (1984); Guerin et al. (2003); and Gottfried, Marcoulides, Gottfried, and Oliver (2013). Within the FLS, the study of academic intrinsic motivation has been continuously investigated, including measurement across time; developmental trajectories; specificity and generality of academic intrinsic motivation (specific subject areas and school in general); and relation to academic competence from childhood through adulthood across a variety of indices, including achievement, perception of competence, academic anxiety, course selection in high school, STEM career interests, and educational attainment in adulthood (Gottfried, 1985, 1990, 2009, 2016, 2018, in press; Gottfried, Fleming, and Gottfried, 2001; Gottfried, Nylund-Gibson, Gottfried, Morovati, and Gonzalez, 2017). Specific methodology is discussed within the context of particular studies. The role of parenting in the development of academic intrinsic motivation and competence is a focus and ongoing area of investigation in the FLS. Within the home context, parents provided proximal environmental stimulation essential to the development of academic intrinsic motivation and its relation to academic competence across the educational life span. As conceptualized by Gottfried (1985), academic intrinsic motivation and its measurement focus specifically on school learning and are differentiated into specific school subject areas (reading, math, social studies, and science), as well as for school in general. Because of the differentiation of academic intrinsic motivation into specific subject areas in the FLS, it was possible to examine parenting with regard to particular academic domains, noted as important for research by Rowe et al. (2016), as well as for school in general. Parenting is examined specifically with regard to developing academic intrinsic motivation. Other theories and research have included aspects of intrinsic motivation in the context of a particular perspective (e.g., expectancy-value, self-determination, goal theory), not with regard to academic intrinsic motivation as defined and conceptualized herein. In the FLS, academic intrinsic motivation is recognized as a construct in its own right (Gottfried, 2016; Gottfried, Marcoulides, Gottfried, and Oliver, 2009, 2013), and intrinsic motivation has also been identified as a theory in its own right, both historically and in contemporary research (Csikszentmihalyi, Abuhamedeh, and Nakamura, 2005; Day, Berlyne, and Hunt, 1971). The FLS allows for the examination of cross-time pathways and mediation between variables, from parenting to children’s academic motivation and competence, across childhood through adulthood. The methodology permitted addressing the longevity and durability of relations between parenting and academic intrinsic motivation and competence over a long-term period, which is rare in studies of parenting and motivation, as well as determining cross-time direction of pathways across age (Gottfried et al., 2015; Gottfried et al., 2016). Analyses have been conducted with latent variables and latent variable methodologies. Other studies of parenting and children’s intrinsic motivation have been primarily either cross-sectional or short-term longitudinal (Gonzalez-DeHass, Willems, and Holbein, 2005), limiting the ability to examine the potential impact of parenting across time.

Academic Intrinsic Motivation Theory Academic intrinsic motivation concerns the performance of activities for their own sake in which pleasure is inherent in the activity itself (Berlyne, 1965; Deci, 1975). It is defined as “the enjoyment of school learning characterized by an orientation toward mastery; curiosity; persistence, task-endogeny; 255

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and the learning of challenging, difficult, and novel tasks” based on theory and research (Gottfried, 1985, p. 632). This definition provided the foundation for the development of the Children’s Academic Intrinsic Motivation Inventory (CAIMI; Gottfried, 1985, 1986a), which provides the assessment of academic intrinsic motivation in the FLS research. Based on the perspective that individual students’ academic intrinsic motivation would be expected to vary with their experiences and successes across different subjects, the CAIMI was developed to measure academic intrinsic motivation (Gottfried, 1985). Three theoretical orientations (Gottfried, 1983, 1986b) provided the basis for the research program on the development of academic intrinsic motivation: cognitive discrepancy (e.g., curiosity), mastery and competence, and attribution (intrinsic versus extrinsic motivation) (Gottfried, 1983, 1986b). The processes that account for the development of intrinsic motivation according to these orientations provided the foundation for conceptualizing the role of the proximal environment and the basis of the hypotheses for studying the role of parenting. Regarding cognitive discrepancy, academic intrinsic motivation is viewed as the result of children encountering stimuli that are discrepant from, or do not match, existing cognitive structures (Gottfried, 1983, 1986b). Children are motivated to reduce such discrepancies and manifest curiosity, exploration, play, and the desire to learn more about the new and the unknown. Providing the opportunity to encounter cognitive discrepancies would be expected to enhance children’s academic intrinsic motivation, including such features as novelty, incongruity, complexity, surprise, and variety of stimulation (Gottfried, 1983, 1986b, 1990, 2018, in press; Gottfried and Gottfried, 1984; Gottfried et al., 2009). Parents who provide materials and experiences that facilitate their children’s cognitive discrepancies would be expected to have children with greater academic intrinsic motivation. Competence and mastery aspects of academic intrinsic motivation concern children’s effectiveness in interaction with the environment resulting in their experience of and development of mastery (Gottfried, 1983, 1986b, 1990;2018 Gottfried et al., 2009; White, 1959). Central to competence and mastery is building the sense of autonomy and control, in which the child experiences being a causal agent of outcomes in the environment (Ryan and Deci, 2017; Gottfried, 1986b; Hunt, 1981; Piaget, 1962; White, 1959). When children perceive themselves as producing successful and noticeable outcomes in the environment, academic intrinsic motivation develops. Activities that encourage competence and mastery motivation include the responsiveness of learning materials, toys, and play opportunities, as well as positive interactions with significant individuals, including parents (Gottfried, 1986b). Parents’ provision of mastery experiences and responsiveness to their children, as well as challenging learning materials, should promote children’s experience of competence and mastering their environment and enhance their academic intrinsic motivation. The attribution conceptualization of academic intrinsic motivation concerns the impact of extrinsic consequences for learning on intrinsic motivation (Gottfried, 1983, 1986b). Rewards may undermine children’s intrinsic motivation due to the attribution that one is engaged in an activity to receive the extrinsic task-contingent reward, rather than to engage in the activity for the inherent pleasure per se, referred to as the overjustification effect (Lepper, Greene, and Nisbett, 1973). The relation between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, and performance, is an ongoing area of investigation (e.g., Cerasoli, Nicklin, and Ford, 2014; Ryan and Deci, 2017). Because extrinsic consequences are external to, rather than inherent in, learning, they may deter children from the enjoyment of learning per se, resulting in lower intrinsic motivation. If children believe they are engaged in an activity to receive an extrinsic consequence (e.g., money, toys), their focus (i.e., attribution) of motivation is likely to shift from the process of learning and its enjoyment to the receipt of the reward (Gottfried, 1986b). Rewards may also have complex relations to intrinsic motivation to the extent that they relate to children's perception of competence or self-determination (Gottfried, 1986b). As to parenting, the issue addressed in the FLS is whether parents’ provision of extrinsic rewards contingent on children’s learning is related to children’s academic intrinsic motivation and competence, compared to provision of intrinsically 256

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motivational experiences. Because external rewards continue to be pervasive in society and schools, their role in academic motivation and competence remains an enduring question for research.

Measuring Academic Intrinsic Motivation: Children’s Academic Intrinsic Motivation Inventory Academic intrinsic motivation is assessed in the FLS with the CAIMI, the only published scale measuring academic intrinsic motivation across subject areas (reading, math, social studies, science), as well as a general orientation toward school learning. It is based on the foregoing definition and conceptualization of academic intrinsic motivation. The CAIMI is a highly reliable and valid instrument, with strong continuity, stability, and construct validity over time (Gottfried, 1985, 1986a; Gottfried et al., 2001; Gottfried et al., 2017). Initially developed for elementary through middle school children (Gottfried, 1985, 1986a), to extend the grade range across which academic intrinsic motivation is assessed, downward and upward extensions were subsequently developed for primary- and high school level–students, called the Y-CAIMI and CAIMI-HS, respectively (Gottfried, 1990; Gottfried et al., 2001). The CAIMI has been used in the United States as well as internationally, and has been translated by other researchers into several languages, such as Chinese, Dutch, Hebrew, Japanese, Slovene, and Spanish (Gottfried, 2009). Items were included to measure enjoyment of learning, with an orientation toward mastery, curiosity, persistence, and learning challenging, difficult, and novel tasks; and intrinsic-extrinsic orientation (Gottfried, 1985, 1986a). For complete details pertaining to inventory development, and examples of items, see Gottfried (1985; 1986a).

Research on Academic Intrinsic Motivation and Academic Competence A brief overview of the relations between academic intrinsic motivation and competence illustrates the need for parenting to encourage academic intrinsic motivation. Academic intrinsic motivation is positively related to a host of achievement measures, including standardized achievement test scores, parents’ and teachers’ ratings of achievement, high school grade point average (Gottfried, 1985, 1990; Gottfried, Gottfried, Cook, and Morris, 2005; Gottfried, Marcoulides, Gottfried, Oliver, and Guerin, 2007), math and science course taking in high school (Gottfried et al., 2013; Gottfried et al., 2016), and educational attainment in adulthood (Gottfried et al., 2013; Gottfried et al., 2017). These relations hold with IQ and SES controlled (Gottfried, 1985, 1990; Gottfried et al., 2017; Gottfried et al., 2016). Relations between academic intrinsic motivation and achievement are differentiated into subject areas as the magnitudes tend to be higher within corresponding (e.g., reading motivation and reading achievement) rather than across noncorresponding subject areas, showing the importance of differentiating academic intrinsic motivation into subject areas. Academic intrinsic motivation also has relations to noncognitive aspects of academic competence, positively to perception of competence and inversely to academic anxiety (Gottfried, 1982, 1985, 1990). Students with higher general academic intrinsic motivation have temperaments characterized by greater propensity to approach new situations, flexibility, and task orientation (Guerin et al., 2003). Students with greater academic intrinsic motivation in high school are more likely to assume leadership positions in extracurricular activities in and out of school (Gottfried and Gottfried, 2011) and have higher motivation to lead in early adulthood (Gottfried et al., 2011). Students higher in academic intrinsic motivation across childhood through adolescence exhibited higher need for cognition in early adulthood (Gottfried et al., 2017). Academic intrinsic motivation declines from childhood through adulthood (Gottfried et al., 2001, 2013, 2017), a pervasive trend across many measures of academic motivation. Children’s inherent enjoyment of school learning tends to start higher in childhood and diminish over time. The steepest 257

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normative decline is in the STEM areas, greatest for math followed by science. Reading and school in general also decline, with no decline in social studies (Gottfried et al., 2001). Concomitant with that decline, academic intrinsic motivation becomes increasingly stable from childhood through adolescence (Gottfried et al., 2001; Marcoulides, Gottfried, Gottfried, and Oliver, 2008). Therefore, individuals tend to remain in their relative rank order from childhood through adolescence and into adulthood (Gottfried et al., 2001; Gottfried et al., 2017; Marcoulides et al., 2008). With these trends in mind, children who in the early school years evidence lower levels of academic intrinsic motivation are at a disadvantage, and at greater risk, for less academic intrinsic motivation and competence, compared to those beginning with higher motivation (Gottfried et al., 2001; Gottfried, Gottfried, Morris, and Cook, 2008). This adverse outcome may be attributable to the stability of interindividual differences across time, as those beginning lower in childhood are likely to continue to evidence lower motivation into adolescence as well as declining amount of motivation as the group decreases across the school years (Gottfried et al., 2001, 2015, 2017; Marcoulides et al., 2008). To prevent these dual risks, parental stimulation and encouragement of academic intrinsic motivation may be essential for enhancing and maximizing children’s academic intrinsic motivation to enter adolescence at a greater advantage and propel adolescents to higher levels of success preventing progressive motivational declines. Those entering adolescence at a higher level continue to have higher academic intrinsic motivation and greater motivation and educational attainment throughout adolescence into adulthood (Gottfried et al., 2001, 2017; Marcoulides et al., 2008). Finally, children who evidence exceptional continuously high academic intrinsic motivation, termed gifted motivation (Gottfried and Gottfried, 2004; Gottfried et al., 2005), and those who evidence exceptional continuously low academic intrinsic motivation, termed at-risk motivation (Gottfried et al., 2008), evidence different outcomes across the life span. The former show greater, and the latter show diminished, academic competence (Gottfried and Gottfried, 2011; Gottfried et al., 2008).

Research on Parenting and Academic Intrinsic Motivation in the FLS Because academic intrinsic motivation has significant relations to academic competence, parenting takes on a fundamental role to start children on a positive trajectory as early as possible. Parents as children’s first educators have an ongoing opportunity to stimulate their children’s academic intrinsic motivation throughout the school years. Based on the conceptualization of academic intrinsic motivation presented herein, a program of research ascertains the longitudinal role of parental stimulation of academic intrinsic motivation and its relationship to academic competence.

Parental Motivational Practices, Academic Intrinsic Motivation, and Achievement In an initial investigation (Gottfried, Fleming, and Gottfried, 1994), the role of parental intrinsic and extrinsic motivational practices as they relate to children’s academic intrinsic motivation and achievement was examined. When children were 9 years old, parental motivational practices were assessed with the Parental Motivational Practices Scale (PMPS, Gottfried et al., 1994), developed to measure task-intrinsic (task-endogenous) and task-extrinsic parental practices. For the former, items were created to tap parents’ use of cognitive discrepancy and competence/mastery aspects of academic intrinsic motivation, such as encouraging children’s persistence, enjoyment of, independence, and mastery of schoolwork and exposing children to new experiences and activities. For the latter, items comprised parents’ task-extrinsic practices such as rewarding children with toys, money, or privileges (Gottfried et al., 1994). The CAIMI was administered at ages 9 and 10 years. Children’s achievement was assessed 258

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at age 10 years with the Woodcock-Johnson Psychoeducational Battery (Woodcock and Johnson, 1977) providing standardized measures of children’s reading and math achievement. Based on theory, two hypotheses were tested using structural equation modeling (SEM): (1) parental task-intrinsic motivational practices are positively related to children’s academic intrinsic motivation and achievement, and (2) parental task-extrinsic motivational practices are inversely related to academic intrinsic motivation and achievement. Further, parental motivational practices were expected to be indirectly related to academic intrinsic motivation and achievement at age 10 years through their relations with 9-year academic intrinsic motivation. Across CAIMI scales the predictions were supported with no gender differences. Parental taskintrinsic practices evidenced positive paths, whereas task-extrinsic practices evidenced negative paths, to academic intrinsic motivation at 9 years. In turn, the 9-year CAIMI had positive paths to subsequent academic intrinsic motivation and achievement at age 10 years, indicating that academic intrinsic motivation continues to relate to children’s academic intrinsic motivation and achievement a year later. Children whose parents used more task-intrinsic motivational practices evidenced higher motivation, whereas when parents used more task-extrinsic motivational practices children had significantly lower motivation at 9 years and subsequently to age 10 years. Significant cross-time indirect relations revealed that parental motivational practices continued to affect children’s subsequent motivation a year later at age 10 years. This effect generalized to achievement as well because the CAIMI at 9 years was also related to achievement at 10 years. These results provided ecological support regarding the facilitative role of parents’ task-intrinsic and the adverse role of parents’ task-extrinsic motivational practices, supporting the cognitive discrepancy, competence/mastery, and attribution aspects of academic intrinsic motivation. The significant enduring role of parental motivational practices over a one-year period was demonstrated. This study revealed the longitudinal role of parental motivational practices on children’s academic intrinsic motivation at age 9 years, which continued to affect subsequent academic intrinsic motivation and achievement a year later at age 10 years, as well as mediation of parenting across time. Implications for practice concern facilitating parental knowledge of using task-intrinsic as opposed to task-extrinsic practices.

Parental Motivational Practices and Developmental Decline in Math and Science Academic Intrinsic Motivation In a further study, the role of parental motivational practices was investigated pertaining to developmental trajectories of academic intrinsic motivation from ages 9 through 17 years (Gottfried et al., 2009). Math and science were chosen as the subject areas in this research because of their steep developmental declines and the critical need to enhance students’ motivation and involvement in STEM so as to develop scientific talent and enter STEM-related fields. Parental task-intrinsic and task-extrinsic motivational practices were measured when children were age 9 years as described earlier, and children’s math and science academic intrinsic motivation were assessed from ages 9 through 17 years. Latent curve models for math and science tested predictions that task-intrinsic and task-extrinsic motivational practices are differentially related to both initial status at age 9 and developmental change trajectories of math and science academic intrinsic motivation across ages 9 through 17, with taskintrinsic practices advantageous and task-extrinsic practices adverse. The proposed model that was tested for math and science intrinsic motivation separately is presented in Figure 9.1 (Gottfried et al., 2009, p. 733). Parental task-intrinsic and task-extrinsic motivational practices evidenced different relations to both initial status and change over time in math and science motivation. Both predicted children’s initial status in math and science but with different directions. At age 9 years, children whose parents reported providing greater task-intrinsic practices had higher math and science academic intrinsic 259

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Y1 Motivation Age 9

Y2 Motivation Age 10

Y3 Motivation Age 13

F1

Y4 Motivation Age 16

Y5 Motivation Age 17

F2

Level

Shape

(Initial Status)

(Growth Rate)

Parental Intrinsic Practices

Parental Extrinsic Practices

Figure 9.1 Proposed model for the longitudinal role of parental motivational practices on children’s academic intrinsic motivation across ages 9 to 17, applicable for math and science. For Y1 = Math motivation at age 9 and Science motivation at age 9, the loading on the second factor is set to 0—also indicated by the dotted line. F = Factor. See Gottfried et al., 2009, p. 733.

motivation, whereas children whose parents used more task-extrinsic practices had lower math and science academic intrinsic motivation. As for developmental decline, the change (shape) factor in Figure 9.1, task-intrinsic practices predicted developmental change, whereas task-extrinsic practices did not. These different outcomes indicated that greater use of task-intrinsic practices were associated with less developmental decline in children’s rate of change for math and science. However, task-extrinsic practices did not relate to math and science motivation change, indicating that parental use of extrinsic practices did not reduce children’s developmental decline, as did task-intrinsic practices. Children’s initial levels of academic intrinsic motivation did not relate to their parents’ task-intrinsic and task-extrinsic scores, indicating that parents’ motivational practices were not a reciprocal response to their children’s initial motivational status. Model invariance statistical tests revealed no gender differences. This research shows the robust and long-term role of early provision of parental motivational practices across an eight-year interval with findings generalizing across the critical areas of math and science intrinsic motivation. This study and Gottfried et al. (1994) together reveal that task-intrinsic parental practices emphasizing cognitive discrepancy and competence/mastery are of vital importance for parental stimulation of academic intrinsic motivation and that task-extrinsic parenting practices are adverse, as predicted by theory and supported by research. Because parents are likely to use extrinsic practices with the expectation that these will enhance children’s motivation and achievement, the present research showed that using such motivational practices does not provide the intended beneficial effect for either initial motivational status or reducing 260

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developmental decline. Parents’ use of task-intrinsic practices had beneficial effects for both initial status and preventing motivational decline and set children on a more positive trajectory of math and science academic intrinsic motivation across childhood through adolescence.

Cognitive Stimulation and Children’s Academic Intrinsic Motivation To determine the role of parents’ provision of a cognitively stimulating home environment with respect to children’s academic intrinsic motivation across childhood through early adolescence, a longitudinal study was conducted from middle childhood through early adolescence (Gottfried, Fleming, and Gottfried, 1998). Provision of a cognitively stimulating home environment is consistent with the cognitive discrepancy aspect of academic intrinsic motivation, and children’s curiosity, knowledge seeking, and inquisitiveness should be enhanced through exposure to cognitively stimulating experiences. Home environment in this research comprised provision of a wide range of stimuli and experiences, including novelty, complexity, and variety of stimulation (Gottfried, 1983, 1986b). Parenting oriented toward cognitive stimulation should also facilitate the mastery aspect of academic intrinsic motivation through exposure to optimal levels of challenging learning experiences, materials, and toys, which should promote children’s persistence, competence, and mastering their environment. Using SEM, this study tested directional predictive paths between parental provision of a cognitively stimulating home environment and their children’s academic intrinsic motivation across childhood through early adolescence. The prediction tested was that children whose parents provide more cognitive stimulation in the home environment would have higher academic intrinsic motivation. To distinguish distal and proximal environments, SES was included as a control to determine if proximal cognitive stimulation related to academic intrinsic motivation above and beyond distal family status. The cognitively stimulating home environment as conceptualized earlier was assessed when children were age 8 years. A latent factor measuring cognitive stimulation was created from major scales in the field of home environment: the Active Stimulation subscale of the Home Observation of the Measurement of the Environment (HOME), Elementary version (Bradley, Caldwell, Rock, Hamrick, and Harris, 1988); the Learning Opportunities Scale of the Home Environment Survey (Gottfried, Gottfried, Bathurst, and Guerin, 1994); and the Intellectual-Cultural Orientation Subscale of the Family Environment Scale (Moos and Moos, 1994). The HOME scale involves direct observation of the home environment, and the other two scales measured home environment via parental report. Academic intrinsic motivation was assessed with the CAIMI at ages 9, 10, and 13 years. The hypothesis was supported across all CAIMI scales. Controlling for SES, provision of a cognitively stimulating home environment at age 8 years positively and independently predicted academic intrinsic motivation at age 9 years, which positively predicted motivation at age 10 years. Motivation at age 10 positively predicted motivation at age 13. A cognitively stimulating home environment also bore indirect effects to later academic intrinsic motivation through its relation to earlier academic intrinsic motivation, indicating that early environment predicts later motivation through earlier motivation. Hence, it was the proximal environment of cognitive stimulation that was most potent in relating to academic intrinsic motivation. SES bore no direct or independent relation with academic intrinsic motivation and only related indirectly to academic intrinsic motivation through the proximal environment. The parentally provided proximal environment children directly experience is important for development of their academic intrinsic motivation. Children whose homes were higher on cognitive stimulation had higher academic intrinsic motivation across a five-year period, indicating the longevity of effects from parental provision of cognitive stimulation to academic intrinsic motivation across childhood through adolescence. This result further highlights the importance of early parental provision of an environment that enhances children’s academic intrinsic motivation. These results recommend practices for parents as to their stimulation of children’s academic intrinsic motivation and academic competency. 261

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Pathways From Stimulation of Children’s Curiosity to Their High School Science Course Accomplishments and Career Interests That students enter science courses of study, and ultimately science careers, continue to be areas of national and global need (Gottfried et al., 2016). Because science intrinsic motivation wanes across childhood through adolescence (Gottfried et al., 2001, 2009), and because early cognitive stimulation is important for the initial development of academic intrinsic motivation and its continuation across the school years (Gottfried et al., 1998), it is critical to determine parenting factors that stimulate students’ science intrinsic motivation and competence (Gottfried et al., 2016). Given the research described earlier regarding the role of parental provision of cognitive stimulation for the development of academic intrinsic motivation, we sought to determine the specific role of parental stimulation of children’s curiosity for their science intrinsic motivation and competence from elementary through high school (Gottfried et al., 2016). Curiosity was selected, as it is a driving factor in the pursuit of and involvement in scientific careers (Gottfried et al., 2016; Shonstrom, 2016; Turner, 2014), as well as being a motivator and characteristic of scientific thinking (Klahr, Matlen, and Jirout, 2013; Markey and Loewenstein, 2014). Because of children’s early manifestation of curiosity, parents play an important role in its facilitation. Beginning in infancy, curiosity is evident in behaviors such as novelty seeking, exploration, persistence, and question-asking (Klahr et al., 2013; Markey and Loewenstein, 2014; Moch, 1987; Voss and Keller, 1983), all of which signify inquisitiveness. Investigating curiosity falls within the cognitive discrepancy aspect of academic intrinsic motivation, and parental stimulation of children’s curiosity is essential to developing motivational pathways, which may be enduring from childhood to high school. The issue addressed was whether parental stimulation of children’s curiosity in childhood has long-term pathways to science acquisition in high school via earlier science intrinsic motivation and achievement. Using a developmental progression model, the role of parental stimulation of children’s curiosity in facilitating their entry into science was investigated. The progression advanced from parental stimulation of curiosity at age 8 to the pathways of science intrinsic motivation and achievement across ages 9 through 13 (critical years for determining science career proclivities), which in turn were related to a new construct called “science acquisition,” created specifically within this research comprising high school science course accomplishments and science career interests and skills. Figure 9.2 shows this developmental progression model (Gottfried et al., 2016, p. 1984). At age 8 years, parental stimulation of children’s curiosity was assessed with the following items, which comprised a latent curiosity factor in the SEM model: expose child to new experiences, expose child to curiosity-producing experiences, encourage child to ask questions, and take the child to museums. Children’s science academic intrinsic motivation was assessed with the science scale of the CAIMI at ages 9, 10, and 13 years. Children’s science achievement was rated by teachers on the Teacher Report Form of the Child Behavior Checklist (Achenbach and Rescorla, 2001) at ages 9, 10, and 11 years. Concerning science acquisition, science high school course accomplishments were recorded directly from the participants’ high school transcripts and composed a latent variable, including the number of science courses taken; number of Advanced Placement (AP), International Baccalaureate (IB), and Honors courses taken; and the highest level of high school science courses taken. Science career interest and skill were assessed with the Campbell Interest and Skill Survey (Campbell, Hyne, and Nilsen, 1992). SES was included as an antecedent latent variable, comprising assessment via parents at ages 5, 6, and 7 years. Data were derived from multiple sources, including parents, children, teachers, and high school transcripts, thereby providing ecological validity. Results of the SEM model are presented in Figure 9.2. Children whose parents provided higher levels of curiosity stimulation were more likely to be involved in science in a number of ways. They were more intrinsically motivated in science and

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Longitudinal progression model from parental stimulation of children’s curiosity to high school science acquisition with standardized parameter estimates.

.99*

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Promote Curiosity

See Gottfried et al., 2016, p. 1984. * p < .05.

Figure 9.2

Age 7

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achieved at a higher level as reported by their teachers. In turn, science intrinsic motivation and achievement were related to science acquisition in high school. Students with greater science intrinsic motivation and higher achievement were more likely to take advanced and challenging science high school courses, were more likely to aspire to a science career, and viewed themselves as more skilled in science such as using laboratory equipment. An indirect effect showed that parental stimulation of curiosity was related to science acquisition through paths with science intrinsic motivation and achievement, further supporting the developmental progression model. SES, being positively related to stimulation of curiosity, served as a covariate, and all paths in the model were significant independent of SES. Gender did not contribute to the model. Finally, a direct path that was tested from parental stimulation of curiosity to science acquisition proved not to be significant, indicating that parental stimulation of curiosity is mediated by science intrinsic motivation and achievement to science acquisition. Long-term longitudinal pathways show that parental stimulation of children’s curiosity as early as age 8 is significant with regard to their long-term development of science acquisition, as mediated through the dual pathways of science intrinsic motivation and achievement. These findings further support the proximal environment children experience as critical for development of their academic intrinsic motivation and ultimately academic competence in science. This research has implications for parental stimulation of children’s curiosity. Because children’s science career interests are largely formed by age 14 (Gottfried et al., 2016; Tytler, 2014), it is essential to stimulate curiosity as early as possible to foster their scientific motivation, which may then affect subsequent science career entry. Parents who provide a higher level of curiosity-enhancing experiences launch their children on mediated trajectories toward science involvement in courses and science career interests and skills. In light of the fact that teachers rarely consider curiosity as a priority to encourage in their students (Engel, 2011, 2015), and based on the findings of this research, there is even more reason for schools to involve parents as partners to enhancing students’ proclivities to enter science. It is critical to ascertain how best to dovetail and integrate parents in the schools to support their children’s science intrinsic motivation and teachers’ efforts toward cultivating students’ science advancement.

Parental Provision of Early Literacy Environment as It Relates to Reading and Educational Outcomes Across the Academic Life Span Literacy is a fundamental component of children’s academic achievement. National and international assessments of children’s literacy and reading achievement have provided a bleak picture for U.S. children in that approximately only one-third of children from fourth through twelfth grade read at proficiency level (National Center for Education Statistics, 2010, 2011, 2013). In the Progress in International Literacy Study, it was reported that 18% of children never read for fun outside of school, and the United States ranked 33rd out of 35 countries with respect to reading for pleasure and appreciation of books (Mullis, Martin, Gonzalez, and Kennedy, 2003). Given the fundamental significance of reading motivation and achievement for children’s success in school across a wide range of domains, the role of parental provision of a competence-enhancing literacy environment and experiences is critical to ascertain, especially because, as previously noted, parents are children’s first educators. Such knowledge can provide information on how parents may launch children on a trajectory toward academic competence via their reading motivation and achievement across their academic life span (Gottfried et al., 2015). Within the FLS, in a study spanning from infancy through adulthood at age 29 years, the overarching issue investigated was the role of parental provision of children’s home literacy environment during infancy and early childhood for long-term relations with reading achievement, motivation, and educational attainment across childhood through adulthood (Gottfried et al., 2015). This investigation 264

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addressed the long-term durability of parental provision of early experiences over three decades of development, an issue with historic significance in the developmental science literature (Bornstein, 2015; Gottfried et al., 2015). Within this overarching issue, several specific issues were examined, including (1) whether early literacy experiences pertain only to reading achievement or also to children’s reading academic intrinsic motivation; (2) whether there is a differential effect of parents’ time spent reading to children as compared to provision of reading materials pertaining to reading achievement and motivation; (3) are there long-term effects over the course of three decades of life, resulting from parental provision of early literacy environment to educational attainment in adulthood; and (4) how do reading achievement and reading academic intrinsic motivation mediate pathways from parental provision of literacy environment to their educational attainment in adulthood? To investigate these issues, a conceptual longitudinal progression model using data across ages 1.5 through 29 years was tested (see Figure 9.3). To assess the home literacy environment, from ages 1.5 to 5 years, two latent factors were included comprising variables drawn from the HOME (Caldwell and Bradley, 1979) and Purdue Home Stimulation Inventories (Wachs, 1976), widely used scales of home stimulation. These factors were Reading Time, comprising the amount of time spent reading to children per day and over the course of a week, and Reading Materials, comprising the presence of reading materials in the home (children’s books, newspapers, magazines, adult books, and the like). Children’s reading achievement and intrinsic motivation were assessed at ages 9 through 17, the former with the total reading scale of the Woodcock-Johnson Psychoeducational Battery (Woodcock and Johnson, 1989), and the latter using the reading intrinsic motivation scale of the CAIMI (Gottfried, 1985; Gottfried et al., 2001). Separate latent factors for reading achievement and motivation were included for childhood (ages 9 and 10 years) and adolescence (ages 13, 16, and 17 years). Children’s educational attainment at age 29 years was measured via participants’ reports. A unique aspect of this research is the availability of both mothers’ and children’s adulthood educational attainment measured at approximately the same ages (29 years). The former was included in the model as an initial condition to determine the role of mothers’ education in the provision of literacy environment. We controlled for mothers’ educational attainment as well as uniquely for the relation

Reading Time

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.34*

Children’s Educational Attainment

.29* .54*

.33*

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Adolescent Reading Intrinsic Motivation

Figure 9.3 Longitudinal progression model from parental reading to young children, to reading achievement and intrinsic motivation, to educational attainment during adulthood. Abstract model presented. For full model, see Gottfried et al. (2015, p. 30). Standardized solution, * p < .05. See Gottfried et al. (2015), p. 30.

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between mothers’ and children’s adult educational attainment when both were at comparable ages. These controls provided an intergenerational component of parents’ and children’s educational attainment to determine the independent contribution of the literacy environment for achievement, motivation, and educational attainment and to distinguish between SES and the proximal environment. Results are presented in Figure 9.3 (abstracted model presented; for the full model, see p. 30 of Gottfried et al., 2015). Using SEM, the model appraised the longitudinal progression of Reading Time and Reading Materials on reading achievement and intrinsic motivation across childhood and adolescence, and the subsequent relation of these factors to children’s educational attainment in adulthood. Succinctly, the amount of time parents spent reading to children during infancy and early childhood, and not the provision of reading materials, related to children’s reading achievement and intrinsic motivation, which then related to adolescent reading achievement and motivation, respectively. The latter, in turn, predicted children’s educational attainment in adulthood. With mothers’ educational attainment and the relation between mothers’ and children’s educational attainment controlled, time spent reading to children independently and positively related to children’s reading achievement and intrinsic motivation through childhood and adolescence and to children’s adulthood educational attainment via childhood and adolescent reading achievement and motivation. Hence, the proximal experience parents provided, and not SES, was significant for children’s reading achievement, motivation, and educational success in adulthood. This research elucidates the developmental pathways that exist from parental provision of reading to children in infancy and early childhood through to their children’s adulthood educational attainment. A long-term study such as this has been noted to be uncommon and important in determining the role of early experiences across the life span (Bornstein, 2014). It is also the first investigation to show that reading to children in the opening years of their life has long-term educational and motivational benefits across the academic life span (Gottfried et al., 2015). Early parental provision of literacy experience has effects that persist through the confluent pathways of reading achievement and intrinsic motivation. Reading exposure per se provides a foundation for subsequent long-term educational success through the mediated pathways of reading achievement and intrinsic motivation. Further, this research demonstrates that reading to children, not the provision of reading materials, is significant for their achievement and intrinsic motivation. Whereas the presence of reading materials may provide the potential opportunity to stimulate children’s reading, actual engagement in reading is critical. Therefore, it is important to teach parents the value and process of reading to children in infancy. Parents who read to their infants and young children provide the foundation for them to enter a trajectory of continuous cultivating experiences that foster reading achievement, reading intrinsic motivation, and postsecondary educational attainment. This investigation encompasses the largest age range with regard to this issue of parenting and its relation to the development of academic motivation in the FLS, beginning in infancy and extending into adulthood. Overall, the studies on parenting and academic motivation conducted in the FLS are the only ones in the literature that can address the issue of how early parents should begin to stimulate their children’s academic motivation. The answer is, as early in infancy as possible, given the significant, long-term longitudinal outcomes for academic intrinsic motivation across the academic life span. The implications for intervention are discussed next.

Integration and Summary Across FLS Studies on Parenting and Academic Intrinsic Motivation Across the studies of the FLS, parents’ stimulation of children’s cognitive discrepancy, competence/ mastery, and attribution (task-intrinsic versus task-extrinsic) promoted children’s academic intrinsic motivation. Children’s academic intrinsic motivation and competence through the school years, as well as their educational attainment as adults, are enhanced if parents provide novel, challenging, and 266

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varied experiences; encourage children’s curiosity and exploration; provide opportunities that encourage mastery and competence; facilitate children’s enjoyment of, persistence in, and independence in accomplishment of schoolwork; and limit the provision of task-extrinsic rewards. Parents should begin stimulating children’s academic intrinsic motivation as soon as possible due to the findings that parental provision of experience as early as infancy has long-term effects through adulthood. Because of the increasing stability of academic intrinsic motivation across childhood through adolescence and into adulthood, both early and continuous parental encouragement of academic intrinsic motivation are desirable. Children need to enter adolescence with as high a level of academic intrinsic motivation as possible to protect them from being motivationally at risk during adolescence and thereafter. Because parents are children’s first educators and are in a position to stimulate their children’s motivation from infancy on, teachers and schools need to become partners with parents to promote students’ academic intrinsic motivation.

Implications for Parenting and Future Directions Integration and conclusions across issues, theories, research findings, directions for future research and methodology, and implications for parenting and educational practice appear herein.

Parenting and Backfire Whereas the theories and research presented elucidate many positive outcomes of parenting for children’s academic motivation, adverse outcomes of parenting may occur as well. “Backfire” is a risk with regard to educational policy and academic success (Gottfried and Conchas, 2016). In the policy arena, backfire refers to programs that are implemented to promote positive educational outcomes but unexpectedly result in detrimental outcomes as a result of implementing the policy. Such was illustrated for a case of school choice (Sattin-Bajaj, 2016). The concept of backfire has also been applied in the arena of parenting and children’s academic motivation. For example, a review of parental praise by Brummelman, Crocker, and Bushman (2016) showed that certain types of praise backfire for certain children (i.e., praise has unintended adverse instead of positive outcomes that were expected). When children with low self-esteem are provided with person oriented (e.g., you’re smart) and inflated praise (e.g., that’s incredibly beautiful), they may become focused on enhancing their self-worth and engage in self-validation of their self-worth, rather than on their intrinsic motivation, and consequently avoid tasks and challenges at which they perceive they will fail. Praise intended to enhance children’s self-esteem and motivation could have unintended negative consequences exacerbating these problems. Brummelman et al. (2016) suggest a transactional analysis in which adults respond to children’s low self-esteem by providing personoriented and inflated praise, which is then responded to by children to self-validate their sense of worth and help produce additional low self-esteem. Similarly, in their review and synthesis of praise, Henderlong and Lepper (2002) discussed several instances in which praise undermined children’s intrinsic motivation, especially when it focuses on control rather than autonomy, external reasons for task engagement, and ability. Another aspect of parental backfire pertains to the use of task-extrinsic parental motivational practices (Gottfried et al., 1994; Gottfried et al., 2009). As discussed earlier, parents’ use of task-extrinsic consequences had unintended negative relations to academic intrinsic motivation across childhood through adolescence. Parents undoubtedly used task-extrinsic consequences with the expectation that these have positive outcomes for their children’s academic success, yet the opposite was obtained, indicating that use of extrinsic incentives backfired. Therefore, in using motivation practices, it is advisable for parents to be cognizant of potential adverse outcomes of applying task-extrinsic consequences before implementing such practices. 267

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Other researchers have examined well-intended parenting behaviors emphasizing control rather than autonomy that backfired (Grolnick, 2003). For example, Gurland and Grolnick (2005) found that for third-graders’ mothers’ worrying about environmental threats was associated with their use of more controlling, rather than autonomy-supporting, behaviors with their children. Control, in turn, was associated with children’s endorsement of performance rather than learning goals, whereas autonomy showed reverse relations to performance and learning goals. Gurland and Grolnick (2005) suggested that parents’ use of controlling behaviors may have been well meant but backfired by undermining children’s active attempts at mastery. Research also shows that overinvolved parenting may be related to adverse motivational consequences. For example, in a study of college students, Schiffrin and Liss (2017) found that when students perceived their mothers as overcontrolling and engaged in greater “helicopter” parenting, they evidenced less advantageous motivation, including mastery avoidance, performance approach and avoidance, and perfectionism. Mothers’ reports were related to a greater sense of entitlement in their students. In another study of college students, Kriegbaum, Villarreal, Wu, and Heckhausen (2016) found that parents’ use of directing was related to students’ amotivation, which in turn related to decreased GPA. Parents may perceive their involvement as facilitative, but when it is overinvolvement or directing, it could result in adverse consequences. Overall, it can be concluded that what happens in the policy arena with respect to educational programs (Gottfried and Conchas, 2016) also applies to parenting practices that produce adverse outcomes unintentionally with regard to children’s academic motivation. It is important to disseminate such findings to parents and educators, as well as the positive practices that have been identified in research, to optimize students’ academic motivation.

Conclusions Across Theories Research has provided a plethora of findings supporting the importance and significance of parenting for the development of children’s academic motivation. The representation of theories is indeed rich. All those included herein have contributed to the field, and each adds to understanding the role of parenting in children’s academic motivation. Additionally, there are many questions that remain to be addressed in the research. Consideration of generalities and specificities in the literature on parenting and children’s academic motivation is important for theory development, determining future research directions, and implications for practice. As for generalities, across a wide array of theories, perspectives, methods, populations, and children’s ages, parenting bears significant, and in most instances positive, relations to children’s academic motivation. Further, studies detailed earlier and across theories reveal that parenting relates to children’s academic competence through its relation with academic motivation. Therefore, the effects of motivationally relevant parenting radiate through academic motivation to children’s academic competence. As for the role of environment, studies consistently demonstrate that across differing theoretical orientations, it is the proximal environment (i.e., the environmental processes that children directly experience) that stimulates their academic motivation. For example, parenting was shown to uniquely relate to children’s academic motivation above and beyond SES (i.e., with SES variables controlled, parenting per se was independently related to children’s academic motivation; Affuso et al., 2017; Gottfried et al., 1998, 2015, 2016). Overall, results across theories and studies lead to the conclusion that parents play an important role and need to be educated about the most effective ways to stimulate their children’s academic motivation. These broad conclusions may be important to form policy that will positively affect children’s academic motivation and competence. As for specificities, there are multiple theories of academic motivation, each with its own principles regarding which aspects of parenting facilitate development of academic motivation. More positive academic motivational outcomes are predicted to occur when parents use processes derived 268

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from principles in accord with each specific theory as delineated herein (e.g., autonomy as it relates to self-determination theory, parent beliefs as they relate to expectancy-value theory, task-intrinsic practices and cognitive stimulation as they relate to academic intrinsic motivation theory, and so forth). Depending on, and in accord with, the specific theory guiding practice, the principles of those theories provide direction in applications for parenting. Specificities also pertain to contextual differences of family environments. Culture and gender are two variables that create contextual specificities for parenting and academic motivation. For example, research reviewed earlier indicates that individuals from different cultures have distinctive perceptions of the role of autonomy, not all of them positive (Marbell and Grolnick, 2013). Individuals in non-Western cultures do not necessarily view autonomy as favorable, albeit this view is prevalent in Western societies. In another vein, in their review, Brummelman et al. (2016) noted that Chinese parents use praise less and criticize more than American parents. In the United States, praise is viewed as a positive aspect of socialization, but not necessarily so in Chinese families. In Korean Confucian culture, parental academic support is perceived as pressuring children to perform (Song et al., 2014). Hence, parenting cannot be viewed as having the same meaning or impact on academic motivation across different cultural groups. An area for future research regarding cultural differences is the establishment of measurement invariance. Without developing assessments that have equivalence of measurement across cultures, one cannot be sure that scales measure the same construct (Lambert, Ferguson, and Rowan, 2016; Preston et al., 2016). In recent research, a scale measuring Positive Family Relations (PFR) was developed in the FLS establishing measurement equivalence across informants and time using the nominal response model from Item Response Theory and parameter linking (Preston et al., 2016; Preston et al., 2017; Preston et al., 2015). Such methodology should be utilized to develop scales with invariance across cultural groups. Whereas many studies have found no gender differences for parenting and academic motivation, even in STEM areas (Gottfried et al., 2001, 2009, 2016), others have obtained gender differences, particularly in math (Lazarides and Watt, 2017; Simpkins et al., 2015). These differences could be due to cultural, population, and sample differences as well as different aspects of motivation, competence, and choice behaviors measured by theories. Differences in academic motivation might occur if parents use different motivational practices with sons and daughters. For example, Crowley, Callanan, Tenenbaum, and Allen (2001) found that when visiting a science museum, parents were more likely to explain scientific principles to boys than girls. Although they engaged in interactive behavior at the museum equivalently with girls and boys, boys received discussions of scientific principles regarding the exhibit. It is possible that specific parental behaviors could be pertinent to academic motivation theories, and such behavioral differences responsible for gender differences. As to subject area specificity, in the FLS aspects of parenting were examined in relation to subject areas. For example, amount of time spent reading to children (Gottfried et al., 2015) was examined as it relates to children’s reading motivation. For science motivation, parental encouragement of children’s curiosity was investigated (Gottfried et al., 2016). These two aspects of parenting are highly relevant to the respective subject area for which they were studied. Therefore, parenting can be linked to the nature of a given subject area domain and particular stimulation specific to that domain. Rowe et al., (2016) recognized the need to examine parental influences in academic subject domains for achievement and motivation.

Future Research Other than a few studies (Gottfried et al., 2015; Gottfried et al., 2016; Simpkins et al., 2015), little is known about long-term effects of parenting on children’s motivation through high school and adulthood, nor the mediators through which they operate. Indeed, existing studies show that parenting has 269

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enduring relations to long-term outcomes across the academic life span. Therefore, there is a continuing need for investigation of long-term relations between parenting of children’s academic motivation from infancy and early childhood through adulthood. The importance of this issue for academic competence and life success is apparent. A prime question to address is: Does parenting as early as infancy continue to influence individuals through their middle adulthood years and later in academic and other life domains? In the FLS, a new wave of data collection of the participants who are nearing middle adulthood (age 38 years) has just been completed. We intend to examine the long-term role of parenting with regard to adult intrinsic motivation, competence such as motivation in the context of employment, aspects of leadership, and personal success. The role of distal and proximal variables will be examined in relation to the persistence of parenting effects and life span motivation. A major issue that cuts across theories and research, and requires additional elucidation, concerns determining causal relations between parenting, academic motivation, and competence across the life span. Long-term longitudinal research provides insights as to potential causal relations (Gottfried et al., 2015, 2016; Simpkins et al., 2015). Nurmi and Silinskas (2014) likewise supported the need for longitudinal research to elucidate developmental mechanisms with regard to parenting and motivation. Sophisticated statistical methods, pathways, and mediators are honing our knowledge of causality by establishing temporal precedence and disentangling complex relations. Short-term longitudinal studies are limited because they do not allow for determining durable effects of parenting for children’s motivation that would elucidate processes across conceptually related life span variables. Crosssectional studies preclude determining directional, causal, or mediated relations (Jose, 2016). Many studies include measures of parenting as perceived by the child/adolescent but not as reported by the parents themselves (Carlo et al., 2018). The rationale for this approach is that perceptions are valid indicators of parenting in and of themselves, but the weakness is that perceptions of parenting and motivational outcomes suffer from method bias—that is, the same person is reporting on the parent as well as their own motivation, and this shortcoming has been recognized in such research (Gniewozc and Watt, 2017). Researchers should include multiple sources of data in addition to children’s reports, including parents’ own reports, as they do not necessarily duplicate each other and often add distinctively and incrementally to outcome variables (Ratelle et al., 2017). A number of other research directions provide opportunities. One avenue includes how children themselves may elicit parents’ motivational practices (e.g., child effects or transactions). Because parental provision of cognitive enrichment has been shown to be stable and transact with academic achievement (Sy et al., 2013), it is plausible that parents who provide early stimulation likely provide ongoing motivationally enhancing activities throughout their children’s development that are responsive to children’s requests. These responsive activities may continue to fuel the transaction between parenting and children’s academic motivation. Additionally, child characteristics as precursors to parents’ motivational practices should be investigated, as suggested by such findings that parental beliefs of children’s abilities relate to their academic motivation (Frome and Eccles, 1998). Finally, groups of children and parents might be identified, such as through latent profile or growth mixture modeling, to determine whether there are classes of the population that would respond differentially to parent motivational practices. This notion could pertain to intraindividual change as well (Grimm, Ram, and Estabrook, 2017).

Implications and Practical Considerations Given the persistence of achievement gaps (Engel, Claessens, Watts, and Stone, 2016), the failure of a large proportion of the U.S. population to reach proficiency standards in reading and math on national assessments (Gottfried et al., 2015, 2013), students’ mediocre reading and STEM performance in international comparative assessments (Gottfried et al., 2015, 2016), and the progressive decline in STEM performance, even for advanced students, in the United States and internationally (Mervis, 270

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2016), more supports for stimulating children’s academic motivation are needed from sources other than schools themselves. Therefore, harnessing the power of parents to be partners with the schools and being involved with their children is critical to provide motivationally relevant parenting practices that enhance their child’s own academic motivation and competence (Gottfried et al., 2016). Few intervention studies educate parents to utilize motivational practices to enhance their children’s academic motivation and competence (Lazowski and Hulleman, 2016; Pomerantz and Grolnick, 2017; Su and Reeve, 2011). We must translate what we have learned from the research into practical applications for parents to implement. Parents could be a valuable resource, requiring the willingness of educators and parents to work together to stimulate children’s academic motivation and competence. All of the theories reviewed provide fruitful avenues for practical applications in schools, such as developing parents’ knowledge of the role of cognitive stimulation, task-intrinsic practices, achievement beliefs and expectations, mastery, autonomy, support, self-efficacy, and incremental intelligence views. The adverse role of rewards and control should be included as well. It may be said that achievement gaps do not begin at the inception of school, but rather earlier in the home environment (Gottfried et al., 2015), which serves to stimulate children’s curiosity, investigation, and provide competence and mastery experiences so crucial to the development of intrinsic motivation and competence. If such is embraced in early childhood and beyond, then we can truly hope that children’s positive academic motivation and competence begin in the crib (Gottfried et al., 2015), with parents playing a fundamental role.

Conclusions The power of parental stimulation of children’s academic motivation cannot be emphasized enough. This is evident with respect to the Wright brothers, known for their pioneering, historical contributions to flight and successful development of the first powered airplane. When Orville Wright was asked about having any special advantages in the brothers’ upbringing, he responded emphatically “the greatest thing in our favor was growing up in a family where there was always much encouragement to intellectual curiosity” (McCullough, 2015, p. 18). All children should be afforded the Wrights’ opportunity.

Acknowledgments Various phases of the Fullerton Longitudinal Study have been supported by grants from the Thrasher Research Fund; Spencer Foundation; California State University, Fullerton; California State University, Northridge; Kravis Leadership Institute; W. K. Kellogg Foundation; BLAIS Foundation; and Army Research Institute. My deepest appreciation is extended to the FLS participants and their parents for their continuous dedication and involvement in this long-term investigation. Permission to use figures in Gottfried et al. (2015) and Gottfried et al. (2016) provided by Taylor & Francis. Figure in Gottfried et al. (2009) permitted by APA publication policy.

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10 PARENTS AND CHILDREN’S PEER RELATIONSHIPS Gary W. Ladd and Becky Kochenderfer-Ladd

Introduction Beginning in the 1980s, researchers began to search for the origins of children’s peer competence within the family (Ladd, 2005) and embraced tenets from ecological theory, which hold that the family and the peer culture operate as interconnected contexts within larger social systems (Bronfenbrenner, 1986). As researchers refined their conceptions of the relationships that children form with parents and peers, they began to develop and investigate hypotheses about how these relationships might be linked and, specifically, how parenting processes might contribute to children’s social development. Eventually, inquiry shifted toward a more complex agenda, such as understanding the processes of relationship learning, the transfer of such learning across contexts, and the conditional nature of parent–child connections and their effects on child outcomes (Collins, Maccoby, Steinberg, Hetherington, and Bornstein, 2000). The introduction of more complex explanatory paradigms altered research agenda and challenged assumptions about the mechanisms underlying the links between the family and peer systems. One such emergent paradigm was founded on the principles of behavior genetics and raised doubts about parenting as a formative influence on children’s social skills and relational competence. Researchers who embraced this perspective argued that the parents’ and child’s shared gene pool, and its interaction with rearing experiences (e.g., shared/nonshared family environments), were responsible for children’s sociability and peer competence (Reiss, Neiderhiser, Hetherington, and Plomin, 2000). This hypothesis, and its implications, is considered in a later section of this chapter. The other long-standing and dominant paradigm was advanced by researchers who focused social learning, attachment, and other environmental/organismic perspectives, and it emphasized relationship learning in the family as the means through which children acquire skills and form peer relationships. Although this paradigm and its underlying premises have evolved to incorporate theoretical revisions and changing conceptions of causality, a basic tenet has been that parents influence children’s social development. For this reason, researchers who work from this tradition have been interested in explicating parenting processes as causes of children’s social competence and peer relationships. Although developmental scientists adopt various definitions of childhood social competence, the term is used here to refer to children’s abilities to (1) initiate/sustain positive interactions with peers (e.g., utilize specific socioemotional skills), (2) form affiliative ties (i.e., friendships, peer-group acceptance) and high-quality relationships with peers (e.g., stability, support, security), and (3) avoid negative social roles and behaviors (e.g., aggressor, victim, peer rejection, social withdrawal) and psychoemotional consequences (e.g., loneliness, anxiety). 278

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The framework used to organize the evidence reviewed in this chapter is built on the assumption that two types of family processes may have important implications for the socialization of children’s social competence: (1) those that occur as part of family life, and most likely derive from relationships and dynamics that are internal to the family system (rather than external to it, such as within the child’s peer environment) and (2) those that transpire in the family context or with family members but are predicated on children’s actual or anticipated experiences in the peer milieu, or parents’ perceptions of the child’s needs within the social context. Thus, for organizational and heuristic purposes, the mechanisms included in the former category are termed indirect because they refer to aspects of family life that may affect children’s social competence, but they represent modes of influence that do not provide the child with any explicit connection to the world of peers. In contrast, direct modes of influence encompass parents’ efforts to socialize or “manage” children’s social development, especially as parenting behaviors and strategies pertain to the peer context. Also considered are mediating variables, such as learning experiences that children acquire in the family that transfer or generalize to the peer context. Of course, our attempt to distinguish between indirect and direct family influences does not preclude the possibility that both forms of socialization operate simultaneously within children’s rearing environments and have combined effects on children’s competence with peers. In the sections that follow, evidence pertaining to indirect influences is reviewed first and is parsed into six domains, including studies of (1) attachment, (2) childrearing styles and parent–child interactions, (3) parental disciplinary styles, (4) parental stress, (5) divorce and marital discord, and (6) family pathology. Next, findings pertaining to direct parental influences are organized around four key constructs: parent as (1) designer, (2) mediator, (3) supervisor, and (4) advisor and consultant. In the final sections, we critique the current status of the discipline, including issues such as hypothesized “mechanisms of transmission” and the specificity, generality, and causal priority of family socialization “inputs.”

Indirect Parental Influences Indirect parental influences occur when children transfer the behavioral and relationship patterns they have learned in the family to the peer domain. Many of the constructs classified as indirect parental influences come from distinct research domains that have evolved from differing theoretical perspectives. Our goal is to evaluate evidence from each of these literatures as it pertains to the premise that parenting processes affect the quality of children’s social competence and peer relationships.

Attachment Research on this construct has been guided by the proposition that attachment relationships create differences in children’s emotional security and “internal working models” (see Bowlby, 1980; Bretherton and Munholland, 2008) and structure their approach and expectations about nonparental relationships (Bowlby, 1980; Bretherton, 1990). Children whose caregivers are available and responsive, as compared to those who are not, are expected to develop positive expectations about others and be better equipped to apply relationship principles such as reciprocity (Elicker, Englund, and Sroufe, 1992/2016).

Attachment as a Precursor of Peer Competence A key tenet of attachment theory is that security in the parent–child relationship shapes the form and quality of children’s later relationships. It also has been argued that these consequences are expressed most powerfully in children’s relationships with peers (Groh et al., 2014, Groh, Fearon, van IJzendoorn, Bakermans-Kranenburg, and Roisman, 2017). 279

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Initial support for this proposition was reported by investigators who examined the peer relationships of both younger and older children (Ladd and Pettit, 2002). Investigators have evaluated this proposition via meta-analyses of evidence from numerous studies conducted over substantial time periods (Groh et al., 2014, 2017; Schneider, Atkinson, and Tardif, 2001). In one of the first such metaanalyses, Schneider et al. (2001) examined 63 studies and concluded that a modest association existed between parent–child attachment status and children’s peer relationships. The average estimated effect size (ES) was 0.20, although a stronger overall effect was found for children’s relationships with friends as opposed to nonfriends. These researchers concluded that attachment was only one of many factors that may influence children’s peer relationships and that researchers should evaluate the relative and combined contributions of multiple family factors (e.g., parenting styles, disciplinary strategies, family stressors) to children’s peer relationships. In other meta-analyses, Groh and colleagues (2014, 2017) examined data from 80 samples and drew finer distinctions among both attachment predictors and the criteria used to evaluate potential attachment outcomes. Groh and colleagues examined specific attachment status subtypes (e.g., avoidant, resistant, disorganized) as predictors and, for criteria, differentiated between children’s functioning with peers (e.g., social competence) and indicators of child psychopathology (e.g., internalizing and externalizing problems). Parent–child attachment security was more closely linked with positive features of children’s peer relationships than with early indicators of psychopathology. Attachment insecurity, in contrast, was associated with lesser peer competence, and this result was found to be invariant across attachment insecurity subtypes. The direction and strength of these links, moreover, were relatively constant across age, suggesting that attachment may have enduring effects on children’s ties with peers.

Working Models and Relationship Representations The premise that attachment influences children’s working models of relationships has been investigated largely by examining links between attachment status and the development of children’s relationship representations, including those formed about peers. Some investigators have examined whether children’s representations of their parent–child relationships generalize to peers (Rudolph, Hammen, and Burge, 1995). Cassidy, Kirsh, Scolton, and Parke (1996), for example, found that children who tended to see their parents as rejecting were more likely to ascribe hostile intentions to familiar and unfamiliar peers. Others have argued that the children’s attachment histories should be manifested in the beliefs they form about their competence at joining and maintaining peer relationships. Consistent with this premise, Thompson and colleagues found that securely attached children possessed better social problem-solving skills (Raikes and Thompson, 2008), greater emotional understanding (Raikes and Thompson, 2006), and more advanced levels of conscience (Thompson, Laible, and Ontai, 2003). Conversely, insecure attachment has been linked with less adaptive peer beliefs and representations. Young children who had resistant and avoidant attachment histories, for example, make more negative attributions about peers and peers’ motives (Cassidy et al., 1996; Raikes and Thompson, 2008).

Attachment to Mothers, Fathers, or Both Parents The Schneider et al. (2001) meta-analysis supported the conclusion that linkages between father– child attachment and children’s competence with peers were not substantially different in magnitude from associations found for mother–child attachment. However, few studies included in the metaanalysis included both mothers and fathers. Nonetheless, subsequent evidence has tended to support and extend this contention. Diener, Isabella, Behunin and Wong (2008), for example, found that a secure attachment with either parent correlated positively with elementary aged children’s perceptions of their social competence, and children who had secure ties with both parents were more competent with peers than those who had only one secure tie. 280

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Child Gender and Other Moderators It has been theorized that parent–child attachment is of greater consequence for boys’ social development (e.g., Cohn, 1990), and some investigators have found that boys with insecure attachments developed externalizing problems (Fearon, Bakermans-Kranenburg, van IJzendoorn, Lapsley, and Roisman, 2010). However, findings from the Schneider et al. (2001) meta-analysis failed to support a gender difference hypotheses, and in Groh et al.’s (2014) analysis of 80 samples, child gender did not emerge as a significant moderator of the relation between attachment security and children’s peer competence. In other moderators, it has been proposed that certain risks have the potential to strengthen or weaken the effects of early attachment security on children’s social development (see Belsky and Fearon, 2002; DeKlyen and Greenberg, 2008). Investigated risk factors include poverty or low socioeconomic status (SES), fetal exposure to teratogens, and child psychopathology. Few, however, have found that these risk factors—when examined singly—consistently moderate the relation between children’s attachment security and their functioning among peers. In the Groh et al. meta-analyses (2014, 2017), for example, tests of moderated relations involving these factors were found to be nonsignificant. However, there is some evidence to suggest that combinations of these risk factors (multiple risks) disrupt the linkage between attachment and peer competence. Belsky and Fearon (2002) found that insecure-avoidant infants became less socially competent when they had been exposed to multiple contextual risks. In sum, evidence from meta-analyses supports two of attachment theory’s main premises: attachment security fosters children’s peer competence, and insecure ties cause social difficulties. Further, these findings, along with longitudinal studies linking infant attachment security to adult attachment styles (Fraley, Roisman, Booth-LaForce, Owen, and Holland, 2013) and security with romantic partners in adulthood (Roisman, Collins, Sroufe, and Egeland, 2005), suggest that the benefits of early attachment security persist across the life span (Bornstein, 2014). Progress has also provided better answers to the question of whether child characteristics, such as temperament, underlie and account for relations observed between attachment and children’s social functioning among peers. Groh and colleagues (2014, 2017), in an analysis of 80 samples gathered across five decades, found only weak associations between children’s attachment security and their temperament. The premise that such outcomes are mediated by the child’s internal working model of relationships (Bretherton and Munholland, 2008) continues to receive support (Groh et al., 2017), but is in need of further substantiation. Although more attention has been devoted to father–child attachment, the number of studies in which investigators have examined this relation as a predictor of children’s functioning among peers remains small. Other potential mediators of the attachment–peer competence relation warrant investigation as well, including neurological mechanisms and children’s emotion regulation (Groh et al., 2017). Aspects of the child’s social context might also serve as mediators, including caregiving continuity, children’s involvement in social networks, or the emotional support children receive in peer contexts (e.g., Bost, Vaughn, Washington, Cielinski, and Bradbard, 1998; Booth, Rubin, and Rose-Krasnor, 1998; Groh et al., 2017).

Childrearing Styles, Parenting Behavior, and Parent–Child Interaction Childrearing Styles Early research on childrearing styles was guided by efforts to delineate the role of parental warmth and control on children’s social development (Baumrind, 1973; Maccoby, 2015). Constructs such as parental warmth (e.g., parental responsiveness) and parental control (e.g., parental demandingness) were used to describe types of childrearing styles: authoritarian (i.e., low warmth; high control), authoritative (i.e., warm and responsive; age-appropriate demands), permissive (i.e., highly responsive; low control), and 281

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indifferent-uninvolved (i.e., low in warmth and control). Results from this body of research revealed that children with authoritarian parents tended to exhibit poor social competencies in their peer interactions (e.g., difficulty initiating positive interactions, hostility, and decreased empathy; Fagot, 1997). In contrast, those whose parents used a more authoritative style evidenced greater social competence (e.g., more mature, assertive, confident; Baumrind, 1973). Researchers have since expanded descriptions of parenting styles beyond the relative interactions of warmth and control. For example, authoritarian parenting styles include characteristics such as hostility, coerciveness, and dominance (e.g., strict rules reinforced with little warmth), whereas authoritative styles encompass supportiveness and involvement in addition to warmth, closeness, and age-appropriate demands and control (e.g., Robinson, Mandleco, Olsen, and Hart, 2001). Further, permissive parenting may include excessive attention to children’s requests (irrespective of the reasonableness of the request), along with allowing a high degree of self-regulation and conflict avoidance (e.g., Xu, Farver, and Zhang, 2009). In support of these conceptualizations, Robinson et al. (2001) developed and evaluated a 62-item Parenting Styles and Dimensions Questionnaire (PSDQ) and found that the items reliably factored into three dimensions of parenting consistent with Baumrind’s typology. Specifically, items reflecting warmth, involvement, reasoning/induction, democratic participation, and good nature/ easy-going loaded on a factor consistent with authoritative parenting, whereas items reflecting verbal hostility, corporal punishment, directiveness, and nonreasoning/punitive strategies loaded onto an authoritarian factor. Last, permissiveness included parenting behaviors such as lack of follow-through and ignoring misbehavior. The factor structure of the PSDQ has been replicated in many studies, including those conducted in Turkey (Altay and Güre, 2012) and Spain (PascualSagastizabal et al., 2014). Studies using the PSDQ have found that authoritative parenting behaviors are associated positively with social competence, whereas authoritarian behaviors—and to a lesser extent permissive parenting—are linked to more aggressive or disruptive behaviors with peers. For example, in their study of 300 mothers and their preschoolers, Altay and Güre (2012) found that children of authoritative mothers showed more prosocial behaviors than those whose mothers had a more permissive style. In addition, Pascual-Sagastizabal and colleagues (2014) found that both mothers’ and fathers’ authoritarian parenting styles were positively correlated with their 8-year-old children’s physical aggression. In addition, maternal permissiveness was associated with girls’ use of physical and relational aggression. Girls with more authoritarian fathers also evidenced greater relational aggression. Children who have more authoritarian parents also tend to be more disruptive in their play with peers and less active than agemates whose parents were less authoritarian (Gagnon et al., 2014). It has been posited that parenting styles influence the development of aggression via modeling negative social behavior and poor emotional control as well as conveying behavioral rules that condone aggression (Lorber and Egeland, 2011). Moreover, coercive and controlling authoritarian parenting not only provides a model for such behavior, but it likely provokes children’s hostility while simultaneously establishing a rigid structure that hinders their ability to exercise self-control and resolve conflicts using positive social skills (Casas et al., 2006). Despite continuing efforts to categorize parents as authoritarian, authoritative, or permissive, research suggests that parenting typologies are not as robust as originally conceptualized (Maccoby, 2015). Moreover, investigators argue that trait conceptualizations of parenting diminish the complexity of childrearing by assuming that parents utilize the same set of behaviors with each of their children and across all interactions and contexts (e.g., whether in public or private, or in play or quiet time). Further, this dimensional approach seems to ignore the bidirectional influence between parents and their children, such that parents adjust their childrearing strategies to meet the demands of the specific situation, including the child’s age and maturity level, temperament, emotional state or behavior (e.g., nature of the infraction), and their present parenting goals (Bornstein, 2015; Grusec and 282

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Goodnow, 1994). Thus, researchers have called for a more nuanced conceptualization of parenting and parenting behaviors (Bornstein, 2015). Some researchers have addressed the limitations of studying global parenting styles by exploring distinct aspects of parenting behaviors that may promote or hinder the development of children’s social competencies. The identification of specific parenting behaviors, they argue, is necessary for developing programs (e.g., social-emotional learning, bullying prevention/intervention) to improve children’s social competences outside the school context (Lereya, Samara, and Wolke, 2013). Some investigators also shy away from global typologies because they have found that specific features of parenting may have different interpretations cross-culturally. For example, in their sample of Korean families, Rohner and Pettegill (1985) found that, rather than being an indicator of an authoritarian style, parental control was positively associated with warmth and negatively with feelings of rejection or neglect. Thus, there is a general movement away from studying global typologies to examining the role of specific parenting behaviors in the development of social competence.

Parenting Behaviors The movement to studying specific parenting behaviors has led to the “unpacking” of global parenting styles. For example, investigators examining specific features of authoritative parenting have focused on parental behaviors, such as warmth and supportiveness (Davidov and Grusec, 2006; Clark and Ladd, 2000; Swanson, Valiente, Lemery-Chalfant, and O’Brien, 2011), emotional and linguistic responsiveness (Black and Logan, 1995), mutually responsive parenting (e.g., coordinated routines, harmonious communication, mutual cooperation), and limit setting (Chae and Lee, 2011; Kochanska, Boldt, Kim, Yoon, and Philibert, 2015; Lengua, Honorado, and Bush, 2007). Findings from this body of research have shown that parental positive engagement, warmth and responsiveness are associated with positive peer relationships (Castro-Schilo et al., 2013; Clark and Ladd, 2000; Lengua et al., 2007; Rispoli, McGoey, Koziol, and Schreiber, 2013) and appropriate emotional expressiveness and regulation (Davidov and Grusec, 2006). Similarly, Lengua and colleagues (2007) found that maternal limit setting (e.g., clear and consistent follow-through with directives, such as modulating child affect or behavior) and scaffolding during play interactions predicted increases in children’s effortful control. Moreover, longitudinal research shows that responsive and supportive parenting is associated with the development of social competencies from infancy into early childhood (Rispoli et al., 2013), as well as into early and late adolescence (Valiente, Lemery-Chalfant, and Swanson, 2009). For example, in their study of over 10,700 mothers and their 9-month-old infants, Rispoli et al. (2013) found that parental responsiveness at 9 months and parental emotional supportiveness in preschool predicted social competence in kindergarten. Specific positive parenting behaviors may also protect children from being bullied in school (Lereya et al., 2013). For example, in their meta-analyses of almost 300 studies conducted between 1970 and 2012, Lereya et al. (2013) concluded that children and youth who experienced positive parenting, including authoritative parenting; good parent–child communication; parental warmth and affection; and parental involvement, support, and supervision, were less likely to be either a victim or a bully/ victim. Moreover, in general, victims and bully/victims tend to experience more maladaptive parenting practices, such as abuse and neglect. Although it was noted that the effects of poor or negative parenting tended to be stronger for bully(aggressive)/victims than nonaggressive victims, findings support the contention that victimized children do not receive the same level of positive (e.g., warm, involved, supportive) parenting that nonvictims experience. Further, parental supportiveness continues to be important well through adolescence (Swanson et al., 2011) and into young adulthood (Moilanen and Manuel, 2017). In a study of 240 predominantly Mexican-American 10- to 14-year-old youth, Swanson et al. (2011) found that adolescents whose parents endorsed supportive strategies, such as comforting them and trying to understand them 283

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when they are scared or upset, evidenced greater ego resilience and engagement coping. In other words, such adolescents recovered more quickly (“bounced back”) from stressful or bad experiences and were more likely to cope adaptively with social stressors. In contrast, youth with controlling parents (who do not allow their children to get angry with them; believe criticism helps their offspring improve) exhibited lower levels of ego resilience. In addition, Moilanen and Manuel (2017) studied the effects of parental acceptance, psychological control, and firm (behavioral) control on young adults’ (18- to 24-year-olds) interpersonal competence (e.g., initiation, disclosure, emotional support, conflict resolution). They found that perceived parental acceptance was positively correlated with competence with both same-sex friends and romantic partners. Differential effects were found for psychological and behavioral control, such that psychological control was negatively associated with same-sex peer competence, whereas behavioral control was negatively related to romantic partner competence. However, neither forms of control were predictive of competence after controlling for acceptance, suggesting that young adults who feel accepted and supported by their parents are more likely to feel efficacious in their adult peer relationships. Together these findings offer evidence that parental warmth and supportiveness are important for the development of social competence from preschool through early adulthood, whether by modeling appropriate behaviors and social skills or providing the maturing offspring with age-appropriate expectations and autonomy as well as an accepting, safe, engaging, and supportive environment. Researchers investigating specific behaviors associated with authoritarian parenting have found that harsh control, coerciveness, directiveness, hostility/rejection, and intrusiveness (domineering) have shown robust links with poor social competence (Rispoli et al., 2013), including aggressive tendencies (Hart, Nelson, Robinson, Olsen, and McNeilly-Choque, 1998) and risk for bullying and peer victimization (Lereya et al., 2013). For example, Shin and Kim (2008) reported that parental neglect/ rejection increased Korean preschoolers’ (4- and 5-year-olds) risk for being victimized by peers. In addition, Rispoli et al. (2013) found that observed parental negativity when interacting with their children at 2 years was directly related to poorer socioemotional skills and behavioral functioning when their children entered kindergarten. Further, this link was mediated by increases in children’s negativity. In a study examining the relative contributions of parental hostility and psychological control (e.g., behavioral and emotional intrusiveness) on adolescents’ friendship competence, Cook and Fletcher (2012) reported that only parental psychological control was associated with later friendship difficulties. They speculated that adolescents may be especially susceptible to the negative effects of psychological control because it disrupts their increasing need for autonomy and independence. In sum, studies that examine specific parenting behaviors have revealed more nuanced links between parenting and children’s social competence than when considering global typologies. For example, researchers have found that specific negative parenting behaviors differentially predict boys’ and girls’ risk for peer victimization such that, coercive emotional control (intrusiveness) and lack of responsiveness are correlated with peer victimization in girls, but maternal overprotectiveness is associated with peer victimization among boys (Finnegan, Hodges, and Perry, 1998; Ladd and Ladd, 1998; Olweus, 1993). Moreover, when mothers’ and fathers’ negative parenting have been compared, results suggest that fathers’ harshness has a stronger influence on children’s aggressiveness toward peers than does mothers’ harshness (Casas et al., 2006; Chang, Schwartz, Dodge, and McBride-Chang, 2003).

Parent–Child Interactions It has been argued that both the quantity (e.g., “shared time”; Lam, McHale, and Crouter, 2012) and quality of the parent–child relationship influence the development of social competence, presumably by providing opportunities for parental coaching and modeling as well as by setting the stage for mutual responsiveness and receptivity (Bugental and Grusec, 2006; Laible and Thompson, 2007). 284

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For example, in terms of mere quantity of time spent together, father–child shared time appears to be influential on youth social competence—even more so than time spent with mothers. Specifically, Lam and colleagues (2012) found that youth who spent more time with fathers self-reported higher levels of social competence (e.g., found it easy to make friends); however, no such relation was found for shared time with mothers. It was speculated that when fathers spend time with their offspring, it is more likely to involve leisure or playful (e.g., joking, roughhousing) activities. Thus, peer-like egalitarian interactions with fathers may be particularly conducive to modeling social behaviors, and thus predictive of youth social development. However, the quality of the interactions with fathers was not assessed in their study; thus, such speculations remain to be empirically tested. Studies focusing on the quality of parent–child interactions have found that parent–child dyads characterized by connectedness (Clark and Ladd, 2000), synchrony (Skuban, Shaw, Gardner, Supplee, and Nichols, 2006), and mutual responsiveness (Kochanska, Aksan, Prisco, and Adams, 2008) are associated with children’s greater peer competence. Moreover, in a study comparing the effects of maternal behavior to qualities of the parent–child interaction, researchers found that synchrony is a stronger predictor of social competence than maternal warmth (Mize and Pettit, 1997). It appears that synchrony in the form of shared positive affect is especially important to adolescents’ prosocial behavior (Lindsey, Colwell, Frabutt, Chambers, and MacKinon-Lewis, 2008). Although studies of the overall quality of the parent–child interaction have been productive, they nevertheless fall short of explicating how each participant contributes to the nature of the relationship. In other words, parent–child interactions are bidirectional and dynamic, such that both parent and child mutually influence one another and the social environment (Kucznksi, 2003; Russell, 2011; Sameroff, 2009). For example, studies have shown that parents of shy children tend to respond to their shyness with overprotectiveness or overly controlling behaviors to manage situations they perceive may be distressing to the shy child (Coplan, Arbeau, and Armer, 2008; Miller, Tserakhava, and Miller, 2011). Consequently, children may learn they are not able to handle socially challenging situations on their own and may further withdraw. Miller et al. (2011) found that for girls, but not for boys, psychologically controlling parenting exacerbated the link between shyness and exclusion. Additional support for bidirectional influences can be culled from studies indicating that harsh or coercive parenting predicts children’s aggressive behavior (Pascual-Sagastizabal et al., 2014) and that temperamentally based child behaviors, such as irritability, hyperactivity, or negative emotional reactivity, tend to elicit harsh parenting (Kent and Pepler, 2003). Investigators contend that some parenting behaviors (e.g., responsiveness) may have differential effects on children’s social behavior depending on their temperament (“differential susceptibility hypothesis”; Kochanska et al., 2015; Stright, Gallagher, and Kelley, 2008). For example, Spinrad and Stifter (2006) found that maternal responsiveness was more predictive of prosocial behavior for infants who were prone to anger than for those who were not. Specifically, whereas maternal unresponsiveness predicted less prosocial behavior for highly anger-prone infants, high responsiveness was associated with greater prosocial behavior for such infants. Kim and Kochanska (2012) reported similar findings. Specifically, they found that highly emotionally negative infants are more affected by differences in positive mutually responsive parenting than their non-negative counterparts, such that when exposed to optimal mutually positive parenting, highly emotional negative infants had better developmental outcomes than did infants not prone to negative emotionality. Stright and colleagues (2008) also reported that high-quality parenting (i.e., maternal sensitivity, positive regard, low intrusiveness) had a stronger influence on first-grade social competence for children who had been identified as temperamentally difficult as infants than those who had not been identified as difficult as infants. Moreover, recent studies reveal a bidirectional influence such that sensitive parenting not only promotes children’s prosocial competence (Davidov and Grusec, 2006), but kind, compassionate, and helpful children tend to evoke more sensitive and warm parenting (adolescence: Carlo, Mestre, Samper, Tur, and Armenta, 2011; middle childhood: Newton, Laible, Carlo, and Steele, 2014). Conversely, 285

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antisocial behaviors tend to develop within the context of difficult parent–child interactions, such that harsh parenting is linked to children’s externalizing behaviors, which in turn may elicit even harsher parenting (Patterson, 2002). Similar bidirectional links have been found between maternal depression and children’s externalizing problems (Gross, Shaw, and Moilanen, 2008). Contexts are especially important to consider when investigating the role of parenting in children’s social development. Three contexts in particular seem to be particularly relevant: (1) parent–child conflict or disputes, (2) parent–child play, and (3) expressions and discussions of emotions. For example, evidence suggests that children’s conflict resolution skills may develop within the context of disputes with parents. Herrera and Dunn (1997) found individual differences in the way mothers argue with children when minor disputes occur, such that children of mothers who use other-oriented reasoning during arguments were more likely to develop constructive ways to manage conflicts with a friend than were children whose mothers tended to focus on their own needs during such disputes. As play skills have long been recognized as important competencies in children’s social repertoires (Jack et al., 1934; Ladd, 2005; Page, 1936), it is not surprising that parent–child play would have special significance as a context for the development of social competence (Attili, Vermigli, and Roazzi, 2010; Gagnon et al., 2014; Tamis-LeMonda, Užgiris, and Bornstein, 2002). That is, parent–child play is a highly relevant context for acquiring critical social skills, including cooperation, sharing, turntaking, good sportsmanship, and the like. For example, researchers have shown that parental success at eliciting their offspring’s positive affect during play increased children’s ability to understand and interpret peers’ emotional expressions during play (MacDonald, 1987). In turn, children’s ability to read and display emotional cues are associated with greater social competence in peer interactions and acceptance by peers (MacDonald, 1987; Parke et al., 1989). In the context of play, parents can adopt an interactional role that is more “horizontal” and offers an amenable environment for practicing skills needed to be successful in the peer domain. Parental engagement and affect during parent–child play is linked with children’s peer competence. Attili et al. (2010) observed 34 children twice during ten-minute free play sessions—once with mothers and then with fathers. The absolute frequency of six behaviors—neutral conversation, positive (approving, encouraging), negative (threatening, criticizing), controlling (forbidding, commanding), correcting, and disconfirming (ignoring, noncontingent response)—were recorded for each participant (mother to child, father to child, child to mother, and child to father). Preliminary support for the hypothesis that interaction patterns are learned at home and transfer to school were found. Specifically, maternal negative overtures and parental (both maternal and paternal) disconfirming behavior were negatively correlated with their children’s prosociality. Moreover, parental disconfirming was positively correlated with children’s aggression. Comparing sociometrically derived (i.e., liked most/liked least nominations) popular, rejected, and average groups, popular children had less controlling parents and more positive mothers than rejected and average children, and positive behaviors were observed more frequently for mothers of popular and average children than rejected classmates. Popular children were also themselves less negative and controlling toward their mothers than rejected or average children, whereas rejected children displayed more disconfirming interactions with their mothers. In sum, more socially successful children (e.g., prosocial, well-liked, less aggressive) experience more positive maternal behaviors and fewer negative and disconfirming parental ones. Others have also found that the quality of parent–child play is associated with children’s competence with peers. For example, Lindsey, Mize, and Pettit (1997) found that parent–child mutuality in play (i.e., a relative balance in parents’ and children’s rates of initiating play) was associated with peer acceptance and teacher-rated social skills. Moreover, sex-differentiated patterns have been found such that mothers’ play behaviors are more strongly linked with their daughters’ competence, whereas fathers’ play behaviors were linked more strongly with their sons’ competence (Lindsey and Mize, 2000), suggesting that children are attending more to their same-gender parent for models of gender normative social behavior. 286

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Parent–child interactions within the context of emotion socialization also offer an avenue for examining the development of social competence. Emotions are an inherent part of social interactions and challenge even the most socially competent; that is, children must be aware of their own emotions and how to manage and express them, and they must be able to discern, navigate, and respond to those of others. Thus, how parents handle their own emotions provides children with models of behavior (for better or worse). Moreover, how parents respond to their children’s emotions can serve as opportunities for coaching or discussion of relevant social skills. For example, the emotional climate of the home, such as mothers’ emotional regulation and expression, plays a critical role in how children learn to understand and control their own emotions. Specifically, maternal expressions of positive affect have been found to associate positively with children’s social competence (Eisenberg et al., 2003), whereas children whose mothers have difficulty regulating negative affect tend to be less socially competent (e.g., they exhibit deficits in their abilities to identify negative emotions and use emotion word labels; Raver and Spagnola, 2003). Green and Baker (2011) found that parental expressions of positive affect were differentially associated with social skills depending on characteristics of the child, such that they were positively associated among typically developing children, but not for children with intellectual disabilities (ID). They speculated that children with ID may not be able to discern subtle forms of positive emotions and instead may need to be exposed to more obvious expressions of positive affect to benefit from it. In addition, mothers’ responsiveness to children’s emotional expressions has been linked to children’s social competence (Root and Rubin, 2010). In general, parents tend to reinforce and encourage positive emotion displays while discouraging and regulating negative ones. Moreover, when parents respond to children’s emotions in supportive and comforting ways, children tend to exhibit more socially and emotionally mature skills. However, children of parents who dismiss, discredit, minimize, or punish their emotions tend to lack the ability to express and regulate their emotions in a socially competent manner (Root and Rubin, 2010). It is argued that mothers’ responsiveness to children’s distress provides behavioral models as well as opportunities for children to practice managing their own and others’ distress (Brophy-Herb et al., 2010; Davidov and Grusec, 2006). Such findings are not just limited to mothers; rather, it appears that the affective tone of father–child interactions may be important too. Children exhibiting more reciprocated negative affect during play with fathers elicit higher levels of negative reciprocity in peer interactions (Fagot, 1997) and tend to be avoidant, aggressive, and less prosocial toward peers (Carson and Parke, 1996). Researchers are increasingly applying dynamic systems frameworks to the study of children’s social development (Barnett, Gustafsson, Deng, Mills-Koonce, and Cox, 2012). Investigators adopting this approach consider the complex interplay among multiple domains that influence children’s social competence that are both internal (e.g., language, socioemotional skills) and external (e.g., parenting) to the child. For example, children’s social competence is closely tied with their emotional understanding as well as their receptive and expressive language skills—both of which are positively linked to sensitive and responsive parenting (Barnett et al., 2012; Lengua et al., 2007; Pungello, Iruka, Dotterer, Mills-Koonce, and Reznick, 2009). There is some support for the dynamic systems perspective such that sensitive parenting not only encourages and promotes more advanced language and social skills, but children who are more socially and linguistically competent elicit positive parenting—presumably because these children are easy to get along with, cooperative, and engage in more positive verbal exchanges (Barnett et al., 2012). For example, Bornstein, Hendricks, Haynes, and Painter (2007) found that 20-month-old children who have larger expressive categories were more attentive (sensitive) to their mothers. Moreover, their mothers were rated as more sensitive than the mothers of toddlers with smaller vocabularies. Further, as their children’s expressive vocabularies increased, these mothers became even more sensitive toward them. Barnett and colleagues (2012) directly tested a dynamic systems model of the interrelations among sensitive parenting, expressive and receptive language development, and social competence in a sample 287

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of socioeconomically and ethnically diverse mother–child pairs. Data were collected during tenminute free play sessions when children were 12, 24, and 36 months. Sensitive parenting including sensitivity toward child as well as positive regard, animation, stimulation of cognitive development, and (reverse scored) detachment/disengaged. Although findings failed to reveal cross-domain (i.e., language and social competence) interactions over time, support was found for a transactional model of parent–child influence. Specifically, sensitive parenting at 12 months was positively associated with language and social competence at 24 months, and children’s social competence at 24 months predicted increases in sensitive parenting at 36 months. Better receptive language skills at 24 months also predicted increases in mothers’ sensitive parenting—but only for boys and not for expressive language. This link may be due to more variability in boys’ language development during this period; further research is still needed to disentangle the dynamic relation among parenting, language development, and social competence. In sum, among the trends that have characterized advances in research on childrearing styles, parenting behavior, and parent–child interaction are moving away from frameworks in which parenting is construed in terms of broad, trait-like typologies (e.g., stable parenting styles) toward models that emphasized specific parenting features, behaviors, and interaction patterns. Included in this progression is a propensity to replace unidimensional, unidirectional conceptions of socialization in the family (e.g., parent or parenting effects) with perspectives that broaden the unit of analysis to include more of the family context (e.g., the parent–child dyad, family as a social system) and potential modes of influence (e.g., reciprocal, bidirectional, transactional patterns of influence). Not surprisingly, these trends have expanded the purview of research on family socialization beyond the study of parents (e.g., the study of mothers and mothering, in particular) to incorporate constructs such as parent–child interaction patterns and mother–child, father–child, and mother–father–child relationships.

Parental Discipline Over the years, those who have studied parents’ disciplinary styles have focused on both assertion and induction as strategies for reducing undesirable behaviors and promoting desirable ones (Altschul, Lee, and Gershoff, 2016; Ferguson, 2013; Gershoff, 2013). Assertive discipline involves actions such as the use of verbal commands and physical power to discourage unwanted behavior and includes behaviors such as spanking a child on the bottom with an open hand (Gershoff, 2013) and corporal punishment (e.g., striking the face, hitting with an object, shaking, pushing; Ferguson, 2013). In contrast, inductive discipline emphasizes verbal instructions or reasoning for why behavior should be changed (Altschul et al., 2016) and is aimed at encouraging prosocial and moral actions.

Assertive Discipline Despite society’s enduring beliefs that assertive discipline, such as spanking and corporal punishment, is effective at promoting children’s positive behavior (Taylor, Hamvas, Rice, Newman, and DeJong, 2011; Vittrup and Holden, 2010), researchers tend to agree that there is ample evidence showing that neither spanking nor corporal punishment promotes positive social behavior or moral character (Baumrind and Thompson, 2002; Gershoff, 2013). Rather, any existing debate among researchers is not about whether such strategies are effective at promoting children’s social development, but whether such strategies are actually harmful (Baumrind, Larzelere, and Cowan, 2002; Gershoff, 2013). That is, not only is assertive discipline ineffective at reducing undesirable behavior but most research consistently links assertive discipline to adverse outcomes, such as increases in aggression and antisocial behavior (Gromoske and Maguire-Jack, 2012; Gershoff, Lansford, Sexton, Davis-Kean, and Sameroff, 2012). 288

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Further, restrictive and harsh disciplinary styles are linked with children’s peer problems. For instance, Pettit and colleagues showed that maternal restrictiveness is correlated with lower levels of peer acceptance and social skill and higher levels of aggressive behavior (Pettit, Dodge, and Brown, 1988). Similarly, McFadyen-Ketchum, Bates, Dodge, and Pettit (1996) found that, among boys, the combination of maternal coercion and nonaffection predicted gains in aggressiveness over the early grade school years. Among girls, however, only coercion predicted changes in aggressiveness over time, and the direction of this trajectory was negative (declining) suggesting that these parenting processes differentially affected girls’ and boys’ behavior. However, other than these sex differences, linkages between harsh discipline and antisocial behavior appear to be independent of confounds such as family SES and child temperament (Weiss, Dodge, Bates, and Pettit, 1992). It is argued that discipline that includes aggression (e.g., hitting/spanking, yelling) increases antisocial behavior because it models aggression, interferes with internalization of appropriate behavior, and fails to convey why particular behaviors are wrong (Gershoff, 2013). Moreover, it is contended that harsh parenting is linked to the development of maladaptive processing patterns that transfer from the home environment to peer contexts (Pettit et al., 1988). For example, research has shown that the antisocial behaviors (e.g., aggression, fighting, noncompliance) children learn from coercive parent–child interactions generalize to interactions with peers (Patterson, Reid, and Dishion, 1992), including the use of power-assertive tactics (Dishion, 1990; Hart, DeWolf, Wozniak, and Hurts, 1992). Additionally, harsh and unpredictable discipline may result in social withdrawal, such that children may learn to disengage from situations that they perceive as uncontrollable. Likewise, intrusive, psychologically controlling forms of parental discipline may also put children at risk for poor peer relationships. Barber (1996), for example, found that parental controlling behaviors that are thought to undermine children’s autonomy and confidence, such as denigration, guilt induction, and shaming, predict higher levels of delinquent behavior as well as higher levels of anxiety, depression, and associated internalizing problems.

Inductive Discipline Hart and colleagues (Hart et al., 1992) have worked from a model in which the effects of parental disciplinary styles are seen as affecting the child’s outcome expectations for peer interactions, including those involving conflicts. According to this perspective, parents who employ inductive discipline strategies teach children about interpersonal outcomes, whereas parents who rely on power-assertive techniques draw children’s attention to control and compliance themes and thereby encourage them to develop outcome expectations that are more instrumental in nature (i.e., focused on achieving or satisfying one’s own needs). Hart, Ladd, and Burleson (1990) reported findings consistent with this contention in that children whose parents relied on power-assertive disciplinary strategies exhibited a higher incidence of instrumental rather than relational interaction strategies and are less accepted by their peers. However, it remains to be shown that inductive discipline increases children’s prosocial behavior or peer relationships. In one of the few studies undertaken to examine the relative effects of spanking and parental warmth on changes in children’s aggression and social competence, Altschul et al. (2016) followed children from age 3 to age 5 and observed their interactions with mothers. Results revealed that spanking at age 3 predicted increases in child aggression but was not associated with changes in social competence. In contrast, maternal warmth predicted increases in social competence over the same time period, but no relation was found for aggression. Moreover, findings were not due to lower levels of warmth among mothers who spanked their children; that is, mothers who reported higher levels of spanking were not rated by observers as any less warm in their parent–child interactions. This finding replicated other studies showing that children who are spanked evidence higher levels of aggression even when mothers are high in warmth (Lee, Altschul, and Gershoff, 2013). Whereas parental warmth 289

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models positive interactions that promote social competence, spanking models aggression as an appropriate way of interacting socially and handling interpersonal problems. In sum, findings are consistent with the hypothesis that inductive disciplinary styles focus children on the interpersonal consequences of their misdeeds and thereby encourage them to learn social principles that guide expectations and beliefs about how their behaviors might affect peer interactions and relationships. In addition, research supports the tenet that when parents engage in coercive disciplinary interactions, children tend to escalate oppositional behaviors (e.g., aggressiveness) and become skilled at perpetuating “coercive” cycles of interaction. Such patterns may then generalize to the peer group, such that children who initially learn coercive behavior patterns in disciplinary encounters with parents re-create them in their peer culture as a means of resolving conflicts with peers, or as a means through which to obtain desired outcomes.

Parental Stress, Marital Discord, and Divorce Parental stress, discord, and disruption have been singled out by researchers as family processes that are particularly likely to diminish children’s social competence and impair their peer relationships. Key assumptions in this area of investigation are that these processes create stress in the rearing environment and degrade parenting quality, both of which negatively affect children’s social development.

Parental Stress Parents’ exposure to stressors, whether located outside or inside the family, has been linked with a variety of negative child outcomes (Ladd and Pettit, 2002). There is a large body of evidence that links a broad range of parental stressors with diverse aspects of children’s social behavior and peer relationships, including social withdrawal, acting out, aggression, social incompetence, antisocial behavior, and peer rejection (e.g., Garmezy, Masten, and Tellegen, 1984). Consideration here is limited to those forms of parental stress that can be conceptualized as occurring within the family environment and that stem from the demands or difficulties of being a parent (Anthony et al., 2005). For example, daily hassles (i.e., everyday irritants and problems; see Crnic and Low, 2002) can be considered one such type of parenting stress. Patterson (1983) found that daily hassles predict maternal irritable behavior during parent–child interactions, which in turn, predict children’s use of aggression. Similarly, data gathered by Crnic and Greenberg (1990) revealed that hassles associated with parenting correlate with more frequent child behavior problems and lower levels of social competence. Other studies have been guided by the premise that parenting stress arises when there is a less-thanoptimal fit between the parent’s and child’s characteristics and when childrearing imposes restrictions on parents’ activities and social supports. In one such study, conducted with preschoolers, Anthony et al. (2005) found that stressors of this type were negatively correlated with young children’s social competence. In another study, Neece and Baker (2008) gathered data on parenting stress, followed two types of children longitudinally (i.e., those with and without intellectual disabilities), and assessed children’s social skills at ages 6 and 8. Stress levels were found to be higher in parents whose children had poorer social skills, and these findings were stronger at age 8, when the complexity of children’s peer relationships increased. Results were not specific to children with intellectual disabilities, but moderation effects suggested that parents of such children were more stressed, perhaps because they faced greater childrearing demands.

Divorce and Marital Discord Evidence suggests that both divorce and marital discord harm children’s overall psychological health and social functioning (Cummings, Iannotti, and Zahn-Waxler, 1985; Grych and Fincham, 1990; 290

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Long, Forehand, Fauber, and Brody, 1987). In one of the earliest studies of its kind, Hetherington, Cox, and Cox (1979) followed children for two years after their parents were divorced and found that, compared to boys from stable households, those from divorced families were more hostile and aggressive in peer interactions and more disliked by peers. Girls from divorced families, in contrast, did not differ from their stable-family counterparts in peer competence or liking. Long et al. (1987) found that adolescent boys and girls from divorced households reported significantly lower perceived social competence. An analogous but growing collection of findings has emerged from research on marital discord. Results from a longitudinal study in which grade-schoolers were followed into preadolescence (Kouros, Cummings, and Davies, 2010) showed that children who were exposed to interparental conflict tended to develop externalizing problems which, in turn, led to lower levels of prosocial behavior and social difficulties with peers. Similar findings were obtained in a longitudinal study of marital aggression (Finger, Eiden, Edwards, Leonard, and Kachadourian, 2010) where investigators examined both mothers’ and fathers’ aggression as predictors of children’s social competence during early childhood. Children whose parents fought more aggressively evidenced lower levels of peer competence by the time they entered kindergarten. Evidence from other investigations substantiates these longitudinal findings and links aspects of marital discord to a range of peer behavioral and relationship problems. Children who were exposed to parental conflict, marital discord, or marital violence have been found to have lower levels of empathy (Margolin, Gordis, and Oliver, 2004), trouble getting along with friends (Katz and Gottman, 1993), higher levels of aggressiveness toward peers (Jouriles, Barling, and O’Leary, 1987), and poorer peer relationships overall (Katz and Gottman, 1993; McCloskey and Stuewig, 2001; Stocker and Youngblade, 1999). Even marital dissatisfaction, rather than overt conflict, has been linked with poor peer relationships in younger children (Cookston, Harrist, and Ainslie, 2003). In contrast, higher marital quality has been linked with children’s social competence. Gallagher, Huth-Bocks, and Schmitt (2015) found that school-age children whose mothers reported higher levels of martial quality were more likely to be prosocial toward peers and refrain from negative behaviors. Likewise, in a study conducted with adolescents, investigators found that youth who perceived their parents’ marriage positively evidenced higher levels of prosocial behavior (Markiewicz, Doyle, and Brendgen, 2001). Potential mediating and moderating pathways between marital discord and children’s social development have been proposed and, increasingly, investigated. Gottman and Katz (1989) hypothesized that children exposed to marital discord would exhibit higher levels of negative affect and less mature play styles with peers and that these relations would be mediated, in part, by parenting styles. It was proposed that couples who were maritally distressed would tend to utilize unresponsive and permissive parenting styles and that children would respond with noncompliant behavior, less mature play, and negative interactions with peers. Although these mediated pathways have not been fully explored, investigators have found that children who are exposed to conflictual marital relationships tend to be more oppositional in their peer interactions and less successful at forming friendships (Buehler and Gerard, 2002; Katz and Gottman, 1993; Katz and Woodin, 2002; Parker and Herrera, 1996). Another mediated model was advanced by Cummings and colleagues (Cummings and Davies, 2002; Davies and Woitach, 2008). These researchers proposed that the form of emotional security that exists in the parent–child relationship, or attachment style, mediates the impact of the marital relationship on children’s social competence and functioning. Support for this mediational hypothesis has begun to accrue. For example, Lindsey, Caldera and Tankersley (2009) found that although preschoolers exposed to marital conflict played less positively and more negatively with peers, these relations were mediated by parent–child attachment relationship and varied with the sex of the parent. Whereas mother–child attachment security partially mediated the link between marital conflict and children’s positive peer play, father–child attachment fully mediated the association between conflict and negative peer play. 291

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Findings also point to other aspects of parenting and the parent–child relationship that might function as potential mediators of the effects of marital discord. Gallagher et al. (2015) reported that mothers’ positive caregiving mediated the relation between martial quality and children’s social competence with peers. Suggestive also are findings from studies that point to other aspects of parenting that vary as a function of marital discord. In one such study, Sturge-Apple, Davies, and Cummings (2006) found that mothers were less available emotionally to children when they were experiencing marital withdrawal. In another study, Cummings, Keller, and Davies, P. T. (2005) determined that parent discipline and parenting practices suffered when they were exposed to marital conflict. Although neither of these disruptions in parenting was examined as mediators, it may be productive to explore these and other alterations in parenting within future studies of children’s social relationships. Moderating hypotheses have been advanced as well (Frosch and Manglesdorf, 2001; Kaczynski, Lindahl, Malik, and Laurenceau, 2006), the most prominent of which is that secure parent–child attachment can offset the negative effect that marital conflict is likely to have on children’s peer relationships. This hypothesis remains underinvestigated, and preliminary evidence has been mixed. One team reported evidence of mediation plus partial moderation (El-Sheikh and Elmore-Staton, 2004), and another found evidence of mediation but not moderation (Lucas-Thompson and Clarke-Stewart, 2007). Inquiry into these aspects of parenting remains active, and findings largely have been consistent with the premise that parental stress, discord, and disruption reduce children’s social competence, promote maladaptive behaviors, and interfere with the formation of healthy peer relationships. Efforts to study processes responsible for the observed linkages have begun to shed light on important mediators and moderators, including features of the child’s relationship with parents (e.g., attachment status, positive caregiving) and changes in parenting styles and quality.

Family Pathology In this section, the potential effects of parental disorders on children’s peer competence are considered. Disorders such as depression and child abuse (for reviews see Cicchetti, Lynch, Shonk, and Manly, 2016; Downey and Coyne, 1990; Zahn-Waxler, Denham, Iannotti, and Cummings, 2016) have received the most empirical attention and thus serve as focal points for our review.

Parental Depression Maternal depression has been studied more extensively than paternal depression, and this disorder has been linked to various social difficulties in children (see Zahn-Waxler, Duggal, and Gruber, 2002). Data from several longitudinal studies indicate that maternal depression, measured early in children’s lives, predicts children’s antisocial and aggressive behavior during the early school years (Ashman, Dawson, and Panagiotides, 2008; Hippwell, Murray, Ducournau, and Stein, 2005; Kim-Cohen, Moffitt, Taylor, Pawlby, and Caspi, 2005). Although less well substantiated, maternal depression also has been linked with children’s shyness and withdrawn behavior (Weintraub, Prinz, and Neale, 1978). Zahn-Waxler, Cummings, McKnew, and Radke-Yarrow (1984), for example, showed that children of manic-depressive parents had more difficulty maintaining peer interactions and controlling aggressive behavior and exhibited lower levels of prosocial behavior. Support has also been found for the premise that maternal depression interferes with children’s peer relationships and social competence. Ashman et al. (2008) found that mothers who were depressed early in children’s lives tended to have children who were less socially competent around the time they entered formal schooling. Other longitudinal findings show that early-occurring maternal depression correlates negatively with children’s later peer acceptance (at age 5; Maughan, Cicchetti, Toth, and Rogosch, 2007). 292

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In one of the rare cases where investigators studied both maternal and paternal depression (Cummings, Keller, and Davies, 2005), important gender differences were found in that maternal depression was linked with peer exclusion for girls but not boys. Paternal depression, in contrast, was negatively associated with boys’ but not girls’ prosocial behavior.

Child Abuse In the peer context, investigators have found that abused children display a variety of social deficits, many of which are known to predict relationship difficulties with peers. In research conducted with grade-schoolers in summer camp settings, Alink, Cicchetti, Kim, and Rogosch (2012) found that maltreated children exhibited an array of deficits, including lower prosocial behavior, higher aggressive behavior, and elevated withdrawn behavior. Particularly problematic may be maltreated children’s propensity to respond to peers’ overtures or initiations with aggressive or withdrawn behavior. Evidence suggests that, compared to nonabused children, those who have experienced abuse are more likely to aggress against peers (Howes and Eldredge, 1985; Howes and Espinosa, 1985; Main and George, 1985) or withdraw from peers’ friendly overtures (George and Main, 1979). Abused children seem particularly likely to use instrumental aggression (i.e., aggression performed as a means toward and end; George and Main, 1979; Haskett and Kistner, 1991) or verbal aggression (Troy and Sroufe, 1987) with peers. Children’s competence with agemates has been shown to vary with the timing, form, and severity of parental maltreatment. Bolger, Patterson, and Kupersmidt (1998) found that children who were emotionally maltreated, especially early in development, appeared to have difficulty forming friendships. In families where children were physically abused, especially chronically so, children appeared to form close friendships but had difficulty maintaining them over time. In contrast, parental neglect was associated with children’s social isolation, or infrequent contact with peers. Even more important, however, was the duration of maltreatment. The chronicity of maltreatment was found to predict peer dysfunction independent of the type of abuse. Other studies suggest that abusive family conditions are linked with another form of child abuse— victimization at the hands of peers (Mohr, 2006; Shin and Kim, 2008). Schwartz, Dodge, Pettit, and Bates (1997), for example, found that aggressive male victims had family histories that included physical harm by family members, harsh disciplinary styles, and exposure to violence between adults in the home. A number of propositions have been advanced to explain how parental abuse affects the quality of children’s peer relationships. One is that maltreated children develop forms of behavioral and emotional dysregulation that impair their relationships with peers. In a longitudinal study conducted with maltreated school-age children, Kim and Cicchetti (2010) found that poorer emotion regulation was associated with externalizing problems that, in turn, predicted eventual rejection by peers. This pattern of relations was especially evident for children who had experienced neglect as well as physical or sexual abuse. Other, less well investigated contentions are that physical abuse lowers children’s self-esteem, which, in turn, motivates compensatory reactions, such as seeking enmeshed ties with friends who are expected to affirm their worth (Bolger et al., 1998), and abusive parental relationships cause children to develop aberrant “working models” (e.g., dysfunctional relationship schemes, self-perceptions; Belsky and Vondra, 1989) that cause children to mistrust peers and degrade their social competence (Cicchetti et al., 2016). More recently, investigators have begun to consider biologic, including genetic and endocrinerelated agents, such as cortisol, as either causes or moderators of maltreated children’s social difficulties and eventual risk for psychopathology. It has been established that dysregulated cortisol levels (a stress-related hormone) are associated not only with maltreatment (Gunnar and Quevedo, 2007) but 293

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also with peer rejection (Gunnar, Sebanc, Tout, Donzella, and van Dulmen, 2003). Alink et al. (2012) have proposed that maltreated children’s dysregulated cortisol may, in part, be attributable to the types of social difficulties these children experience, including problematic peer relationships. Longitudinal data gathered by these investigators provided some support for this hypothesis, in that children’s social difficulties emerged as a partial mediator of maltreatment’s association with later cortisol regulation. In sum, parental depression and, particularly child maltreatment, represent aspects of family pathology that remain at the forefront of scientific inquiry. A growing body of evidence indicates that parental depression is inversely related to children’s social competence, but the mechanisms that account for this relation still are not well understood. Several causal pathways have been proposed (Zahn-Waxler et al., 1984, 2016), and all warrant further empirical scrutiny, including the possibilities that (1) children adopt the depressed parent’s negative emotions; (2) depressed parents withdraw, creating insecure attachments; (3) children’s interactions with depressed parents cause them to develop learned helplessness; (4) depression is biologically transmitted; and (5) depression impairs parents’ childrearing styles. Greater progress has been achieved at documenting maltreatment’s likely consequences for children’s social development and at examining both transmission processes (i.e., mediators) and conditions that are likely exacerbate versus buffer the effects of abuse (e.g., moderators). Novel avenues of investigation include investigators’ efforts to specify and document the role of biologic agents (e.g., genetics, endocrine processes) as mediators or moderators of maltreatment.

Direct Parental Influences It has been proposed that parents “manage” various aspects of their children’s social lives whether they intend to or not and, as a heuristic tool, parents’ management behaviors have been classified into four “roles”: parent as designer, as mediator, as supervisor, and as advisor or consultant (Ladd and Pettit, 2002). Each of these roles is considered here, as is the possibility that parents engage in multiple forms of management simultaneously or contingently.

Parent as Designer Parents act as designers when they seek to control or influence the settings in which children meet and interact with peers. As designers, parents may influence children’s access to peers through their choice of neighborhoods, schools, childcare or after-school care arrangements, and community activities.

Choice of Neighborhood Neighborhoods, unless dangerous or bereft of families, provide places (e.g., yards, playgrounds) for children to meet and interact with peers (Bradley, 2002). Children have more peer contacts and larger peer networks in densely populated as opposed to as rural neighborhoods (Medrich, Roizen, Rubin, and Buckley, 1982; van Vliet, 1981) and in safer as compared to dangerous neighborhoods (Cochran and Riley, 1988). Neighborhood features also have been linked with adolescents’ social competence and peer relationships. Caughy et al.(2012) found that neighborhood physical disorder (e.g., presence of graffiti, litter, abandoned vehicles) correlated negatively with adolescents’ social competence, and neighborhood economic disadvantage (i.e., poverty) was linked with adolescents’ social aggression. In contrast, adolescents were less socially aggressive when their neighborhoods exhibited greater social capital (e.g., positive ties among residents; care and protection of youth and property). These associations were partly mediated by family process or structural variables. The association between neighborhood economic disadvantage and adolescents’ social aggression, for example, was entirely mediated by lower levels of family cohesion. Mothers’ nurturance, in part, accounted for the link between neighborhood 294

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physical disorder and adolescents’ social competence. These results imply that the neighborhood’s role in creating social advantages or disadvantages for adolescents may, in part, stem from the impact it has on their families.

Choice of Childcare and Early Schooling Higher-quality preschool environments have been linked with gains in peer sociability (Finkelstein, Dent, Gallagher, and Ramey, 1978) and the development of stable friendships (Howes, 1988) more so than have lower-quality programs (Vandell, Henderson, and Wilson, 1988). The benefits of preschool experience also appear to vary with the stability of children’s enrollment and the consistency of their playmates. Mueller and Brenner (1977) found that boys who became familiar with their playmates developed more sophisticated play skills than boys who did not. Similarly, Howes (1988) found that children who entered preschool at earlier ages and remained in stable contexts developed more sophisticated play skills and had less difficulty with peers. The potential benefits of preschool are also illustrated in studies of children’s adjustment to grade school. Ladd and Price (1987) found that preschoolers’ prosocial skills predicted their peer acceptance in kindergarten. Further, Ladd (1990) discovered that children who maintained friendships across the transition from preschool to kindergarten tended to develop more favorable attitudes toward grade school.

After-School Care Arrangements When investigating nonparental care, researchers have tended to focus on children’s level of involvement in differing arrangements, or on program quality and time use within particular arrangements. Pettit, Laird, Bates, and Dodge (1997) found that higher self-care (i.e., without adult supervision) in grades 1 and 3 was associated with lower teacher-rated peer competence with peers in grade 6. These relationships were significant after controlling for kindergarten peer competence and SES, and were consistent with prior findings (e.g., Steinberg, 1986). How children spend their after-school hours also has implications for their peer relationships and competence. Pierce, Hamm, and Vandell (1999) found that the flexibility of after-school programs was positively related to boys’ social skills, and Posner and Vandell (1994) reported that school-age children’s antisocial behavior increased in self-care arrangements but decreased in formal, adult-supervised arrangements. Similarly, Pettit, Laird, Bates, Dodge, and Criss (2001) found that adolescents’ unsupervised peer contact was associated with externalizing behavior problems, but only when parental monitoring was low and preexisting behavior problems were high. These findings suggest that developmentally appropriate, adult-supervised after-school experiences foster children’s social competence.

Participation in Community and After-School Activities Evidence indicates that children’s use of peer-oriented community settings (e.g., parks, libraries, pools) and community activities (e.g., clubs, scouting, sports) is associated with their social competence (Bryant, 1985; Ladd and Price, 1987). Similarly, school-age children’s participation in extracurricular activities (e.g., scouts, music lessons, organized sports) has been linked with social and school adjustment (Eccles and Barber, 1999). McDowell and Parke (2009) examined the number of children’s after-school activities and the frequency of their peer interactions in their neighborhoods and found that a composite of these measures positively predicted children’s social competence one year later. Thus, available evidence concurs with the premise that parents who “design” children’s physical and social surroundings are creating opportunities for children to meet and engage in constructive activities with agemates. Such activities may become an important staging area for the development of social skills, peer relationships, and interpersonal competence. 295

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Parent as Mediator Parents function as mediators (Ladd and Pettit, 2002) when they create opportunities for children to meet, interact, and form relationships with peers. Often the mediator role takes the form of helping children meet peers, arrange “play dates,” and build a social network.

Initiating Informal Peer Contacts Ladd and Golter (1988) found that children whose parents initiated peer contacts, as compared to those who did not, had a larger number of playmates and more consistent play companions in their preschool peer networks. After the transition to kindergarten, boys from these same families tended to become better liked by their classmates, suggesting that boys benefited more than girls from this form of parental management. In another study, Ladd and Hart (1992) found that parents who performed more initiations had children who displayed more prosocial behavior and less nonsocial behavior at school. Similarly, Krappman (1986) found that grade-schoolers whose parents took an active role in arranging and organizing their peer relationships developed more harmonious ties with peers. By late preschool, it appears that parents share the responsibility for arranging informal peer contacts with their children. Bhavnagri and Parke (1991) and Ladd and Hart (1992) found that older as compared to younger preschoolers initiated more of their own play dates, and Bhavnagri and Parke (1991) found that older preschoolers also received a larger number of play overtures from peers. Further, parents who involved children in the process of arranging informal play activities tended to have children who initiated more of their own play dates (Ladd and Hart, 1992). Some parents, it would appear, do more than simply arrange play activities—they also scaffold the interpersonal skills children need to manage their own peer activities.

Sponsoring or Involving Children in Informal Play Groups There is some evidence to suggest that parents’ sponsorship of informal play groups improves children’s social competence. Lieberman (1977) assessed preschoolers’ experience in informal peer groups and found that this experience correlated positively with their social competence in laboratory play sessions. Other findings (Ladd, Hart, Wadsworth, and Golter, 1988) suggest that the relation between children’s play group experience and their social competence was more closely linked for preschoolers than for toddlers. In sum, more is known about some aspects of parental mediation (e.g., parental initiation of informal peer contacts) than others. Further research is needed to clarify when children profit from this type of parental assistance and how parental mediation affects specific forms of child competence (e.g., prosocial skills, friendship formation).

Parent as Supervisor Supervision is defined as parents’ efforts to oversee and regulate children’s interactions, activities, and relationships with peers. Thus far, researchers have drawn distinctions between the parent’s involvement and participation in children’s peer interactions as a means of identifying three basic types of supervision: interactive intervention, directive intervention, and monitoring.

Interactive Intervention Lollis, Ross, and Tate (2016) defined interactive intervention as the parent’s attempts to proactively supervise children’s peer interactions from within the play context (e.g., as active play participants) and argued that this style of supervision benefits the social novice. Bhavnagri and Parke (1991) compared 296

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toddlers’ social skills when mothers were present to facilitate peer play and when children played alone with a peer. They found that toddlers’ skills were more advanced when mothers were present to guide them and that mothers’ skillfulness as supervisors correlated positively with toddlers’ competence. Similarly, Lollis (1990) observed child–peer interactions during brief separations from their mothers after they had first participated in a play group where mothers were discouraged from providing interactive supervision, or in a group in which mothers were encouraged to interact with children. After their mother’s departure, children in the interactive intervention condition were less distressed and spent more time playing with peers. Bhavnagri and Parke (1991) extended these findings by showing that fathers and mothers were equally effective as supervisors and that toddlers benefited more from parents’ interventions than did preschoolers. In summary, parents’ interactive interventions appear to facilitate children’s competence at initiating and maintaining peer interactions. As participants in children’s play, parents are in a position to “scaffold” even the most basic aspects of social interaction, such as maintaining children’s interest in peers, shaping overtures toward peers, or preventing conflicts. Younger more than older children appear to derive greater benefit from this form of supervision.

Directive Intervention Parents who utilize this form of supervision typically operate from outside the context of children’s play (e.g., as observers, not participants) and intervene only sporadically in children’s interactions. Lollis and colleagues (2016) conceptualized directive interventions as reactive rather than proactive forms of supervision that parents use to address children’s social difficulties. Levitt, Weber, Clark, and McDonnell (1985) examined mothers’ directive interventions and toddlers’ sharing behavior in situations where toddlers could monopolize or share toys with an unfamiliar peer. Mothers were told not to intervene until their child had played with the toys for several minutes, and then only if the child had not spontaneously shared with the peer. Children did not share toys prior to maternal intervention, but those who did in response to their mothers’ prompts were more likely to receive similar bids from peers. Ross, Tesla, Kenyon, and Lollis (1991) observed pairs of unfamiliar toddlers during play sessions in which mothers were encouraged to supervise but not participate in children’s play. Mothers’ intervened primarily to deflect conflicts and directed overtures more to their child than the playmate. Research on directive intervention has also been conducted with older preschool samples. Finnie and Russell (1988) paired children with differing peer reputations (e.g., popular, unpopular, average) with average-status partners for play sessions and asked mothers to supervise (intervene) the children’s play. Mothers of low-status children were more likely to avoid the supervisory role and, compared to mothers of high-status children, less likely to implement interventions that might improve the quality of children’s play. Using a telephone-log methodology, Ladd and Golter (1988) found that children whose parents typically used directive interventions tended to develop higher levels of peer acceptance in kindergarten than those whose parents tended to rely on interactive interventions. Based on these findings, Mize and Ladd (1990) speculated that, whereas interactive supervision may benefit toddlers, it might interfere with preschoolers’ ability to develop autonomous and self-regulated play skills.

Monitoring Monitoring refers to parents’ knowledge or awareness of children’s whereabouts or activities. In studies conducted with children, researchers have assumed that parents are close enough to children’s social lives to assess their peer activities directly (e.g., through observation; talks with teachers, siblings, etc.). Those who study adolescents, in contrast, see parents as having less access to their offspring’s peer activities because those activities typically occur outside the parents’ purview. With this age group, 297

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therefore, monitoring tends to be construed as a process in which parents gather information about peer activities from the adolescent (see Kerr and Stattin, 2000). In studies with children, researchers have found that lesser maternal monitoring correlates negatively with peer acceptance (e.g., Baker, Barthelemy, and Kurdek, 1993; Dishion and McMahon, 1998) and that higher maternal monitoring correlates positively with the quality of children’s friendships. Simpkins and Parke (2002), for example, found that monitoring correlated negatively with friendship conflict and, for girls, correlated positively with favorable friendship qualities. Lesser monitoring has also been linked with conduct problems, particularly in boys (Crouter, MacDermid, McHale, and Perry-Jenkins, 1990). Other evidence suggests that the relation between parental monitoring and children’s competence is moderated by contextual factors, such as neighborhood safety (Coley and Hoffman, 1996). In high-crime neighborhoods, children with lower social skills tend to be monitored more closely than children who exhibit higher levels of competence. In studies with adolescents, parental monitoring has been differentially construed and measured (see Brown and Bakken, 2011; Fletcher, Steinberg, and Williams-Wheeler, 2004; Stattin and Kerr, 2000), and indices include “knowledge” (e.g., information parents obtain from adolescents) and “monitoring” (e.g., adolescents’ estimates of parents’ monitoring). Whether these measures tap similar dimensions remains a matter of debate because a number of factors (e.g., parents’ parenting styles, sex of parent, sex of adolescent, lying by adolescents; see Brown and Bakken, 2011) have been linked with the quality and accuracy of adolescent monitoring data. In studies where monitoring has been defined as parental information seeking and knowledge, evidence shows that fluctuations in monitoring are linked with changes in adolescents’ deviant behaviors (e.g., Laird, Criss, Pettit, Bates, and Dodge, 2009; Reitz, Prinzie, Dekovic, and Buist, 2007; Tilton-Weaver and Galambos, 2003). However, there has been some variability in the consistency and direction of the reported relations. Tilton-Weaver and Galambos (2003), for example, found that parents were more likely to seek information about adolescents’ peer activities when adolescents had problematic friendships or engaged in deviant behaviors. These investigators concluded that parents tended to react to adolescents’ deviant behaviors by increasing their monitoring of youth social activities. In contrast, Dishion, Nelson, and Bullock (2004) found that when adolescents engaged in deviant friendships, their parents were less likely to monitor their activities. In this study, however, a single item was used to index parental monitoring, and this measure was combined with measures of other, related parental behaviors. Kerr and Stattin (2000) collected questionnaire data from Swedish 14-year-olds and their parents and obtained information about parents’ solicitation of information, parents’ implementation of controls and restrictions, and teens’ disclosure of information. The latter was most strongly associated with parents’ “knowledge” and the teens’ adjustment. Of particular interest was the finding that only child disclosure was associated with teens’ reports of deviant friendships (i.e., teens with deviant friends were less disclosing). Additional findings reported by Stattin and Kerr (2000) showed that active parental solicitation of information—a strategy expected to underpin parental awareness and knowledge—was associated with adolescent maladjustment once child disclosure had been controlled. This finding suggests that parents’ efforts to extract information from teens about their activities and companions may have the unintended result of encouraging their involvement in antisocial activities. It also is possible, of course, that parents who engaged in high levels of solicitation did so, at least in part, because their teens exhibited adjustment problems. As was found for children, parents’ monitoring of adolescents has been linked with peer acceptance. Dishion (1990) assessed several aspects of parental monitoring, including whether the adolescents’ activities were supervised by parents, the adolescents’ perceptions of parents’ supervisory rules, and time parents and adolescents spent together on a daily basis. Analyses of a composite formed 298

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from these measures revealed that in two separate cohorts monitoring correlated positively with peer acceptance.

Rules Parents typically use rules to guide or control youth behavior in contexts where adults are absent. Thus, rules can be construed as an indirect form of supervision. Simpkins and Parke (2002) examined three rule types (i.e., peer behavior, supervision, and restriction rules) and found that differences in mothers’ rule use were associated with preadolescents’ social competence. Mothers who reported more supervision rules (i.e., rules about play permission and whereabouts) had sons who tended to be more prosocial. Peer rules (i.e., rules either prohibiting negative or encouraging positive play behaviors), in contrast, were reported more often by mothers of shy boys and aggressive girls. Although available evidence points to age-related differences in parents’ supervisory behaviors, additional longitudinal investigations are needed to clarify this relation. As in research on monitoring, the question of whether the impetus for parents’ supervisory behaviors lies in the parent or the child (or both) deserves further empirical scrutiny.

Parent as Advisor and Consultant Parents act as advisors (Ladd and Pettit, 2002) or guides (Mounts, 2011) when they provide children with guidance about peers or peer relationships. Advising can occur when peers are present, but for older children, it often occurs in the absence of peers (e.g., after school, in the car, etc.). Lollis et al. (2016) referred to this type of management as “decontextualized discussion.” Such conversations may be proactive or reactive in nature—that is, aimed at preparing children for future challenges or focused on past or present peer experiences. Consulting, in contrast, refers to problem-solving discussions (Ladd and Pettit, 2002) and tends to be more instructional in nature (Mounts, 2011). Parents may be relatively didactic, such as giving “expert” advice or solutions to peer problems, or they may serve as a “sounding board” by listening to children’s concerns or solutions (Kucznksi, 1984). Consulting may be parent- or child-initiated, but often occurs in response to a problem that the child is experiencing.

Advisor or Guide Cohen (1989) found that parental advice correlated positively with adaptive interpersonal outcomes for third- through sixth-grade children, especially when it was administered by supportive, noninterfering mothers. In contrast, advice given by either intrusive or disengaged mothers was associated with children’s interpersonal difficulties, such as social withdrawal. In a subsequent study, Russell and Finnie (1990) first asked mothers to advise their child before she or he played with unfamiliar peers, and after mothers observed the session, they asked how else mothers might have advised their child. Mothers’ advice varied with children’s status in their preschool peer groups. Post-play data showed that mothers of popular and neglected children, as compared to mothers of peer-rejected children, were more likely to give advice that was contingent on their child’s actual play behavior. Using telephone logs, Laird, Pettit, Mize, Brown, and Lindsey (1994) found that half of sampled mothers reported discussing peer relationships with their child on an every-other-day basis and indicated that these conversations tended to be initiated by the child and were more common between mothers and daughters than between mothers and sons. A subsample of the participating mothers and children was also observed in a laboratory play situation, and in this context, conversations about children’s emotions and problem-solving were the most common forms of guidance, and these discussions often centered on relationship issues. Children’s peer competence correlated positively with the 299

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frequency of mothers’ advice, even after controlling for other features of the parent–child relationship (e.g., maternal involvement, support). Contrary to these findings, however, McDowell, Parke, and Wang (2003) found that two features of parents’ advice giving—higher quantity and quality—correlated negatively with third-graders’ social competence. The investigators noted that advice can be administered both proactively and reactively and concluded that their findings fit the latter direction of effect. In a second study conducted with both mothers and fathers McDowell and Parke (2009) obtained similar results with fourth-grade children. With adolescents, researchers have tended to rely on youth perceptions of their parent’s advice giving and study the role of guidance in the selection and maintenance of peer associates. Although some have studied this role to determine whether parents’ advisory activities are meant to discourage adolescents’ contacts with risky or deviant peers (see Youniss, DeSantis, and Henderson, 1992), others have sought to determine whether this aspect of parental mediation is related to adolescents’ social skills and peer relationships. Mounts (2004), for example, found that parental guidance was associated with positive qualities of adolescents’ friendships, and in a subsequent study (Mounts, 2011) reported that this form of parental guidance was associated with adolescents’ assertiveness within peer relationships.

Consultant Mize and Pettit (Mize and Pettit, 1997; Pettit and Mize, 1993) examined mothers’ social “coaching” in relation to preschool-aged children’s social competence and peer relationships. Mothers and their children watched videotaped vignettes depicting standard peer relationship conflicts and challenges, and mothers’ coaching was scored in terms of mothers’ framing of the social events (e.g., suggesting the child adopt a resilient, bounce-back attitude), the quality of the strategies mothers endorsed, and the extent to which mothers helped the child to attend to relevant social cues. Mothers’ social coaching predicted children’s peer acceptance and social skills independently of either nonsocial coaching or mother–child interactional style. Consulting, as a parental role, has also been examined with adolescents. Vernberg, Berry, Ewell, and Abwender (1993) examined parents’ consultations with adolescents about forming new friendships after a change in the family’s residence. Whereas parents saw themselves as “consulting,” adolescents perceived parents as using direct forms of facilitation (i.e., “mediating” or trying to arrange friendships). Estimates of the frequency of parents’ friendship-facilitation strategies predicted adolescents’ successes at making new friends and attaining certain friendship features (e.g., intimacy). Mounts (2004) also found that parent consulting was related to the quality of adolescents’ friendships. Tilton-Weaver and Galambos (2003) investigated three aspects of parents’ peer-related communications with adolescents (i.e., communicating preferences, disapproval, supporting friendships). Parents were more likely to gather information and express disapproval about peer activities when they saw their adolescents as engaging in deviant friendships or pursuing deviant activities. Unfortunately, of all the processes that fall within the category of direct parental influences, the linkages between parental advising and consulting and children’s peer competence have received the least attention. Further investigation is needed to clarify how, when, and why parents act as interpersonal advisors with their children and to explicate how the frequency, form, and content of parental consultation is related to youth social development.

Confluence of Direct Parental Influences Especially during middle childhood or adolescence, it would appear that parents use a range of direct parenting processes to facilitate children’s peer relationships (Vernberg et al., 1993). Yet even when considered in this broader context, it may be the case that some forms of direct facilitation are better for achieving certain socialization goals than are others (e.g., fostering friendships vs. mitigating peer 300

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influence). Illustrative of this point are the procedures used by Mounts (2000, 2011) to gather information about three different types of parental management practices. In one study of ninth-graders (Mounts, 2000), data were gathered on three types of peer management strategies, which were conceptualized as guiding, monitoring, and prohibition. Concurrently, guiding was associated with lower friend delinquency and drug use and higher GPAs and school attitudes, with prohibiting showing the opposite pattern. Monitoring was essentially unrelated to these friend characteristics. Only guiding predicted these same friend characteristics one year later, controlling for earlier friend characteristics. In another study with seventh-graders, Mounts (2011) examined two forms of parental management: guiding and consulting. In this case, higher levels of parental guidance were associated with specific social skills, such as adolescents’ assertiveness within peer relationships. McDowell and Parke (2009) also investigated multiple forms of direct social facilitation by gathering data concurrently on parents’ advice giving and provision of opportunities for peer interaction. The study was conducted with fourth-graders, and the findings showed that both forms of peer management were independently related to children’s social competence. These findings implied that parents engaged in two forms of peer management simultaneously and that each type of management was positively and distinctly associated with children’s social competence. Overall, research on direct parental influences indicates that sizable differences exist across families in the extent and quality of parents’ management of children’s peer relationships. Much remains to be learned about direct parental influences as possible antecedents and consequences of children’s peer competence, the relative importance of differing direct influences for children’ social development, and the extent to which direct influences co-occur or are contingent on other family processes (e.g., indirect influences) and sociodemographic factors. In the sections that follow, we consider how research on both direct and indirect parental influences might be elaborated and extended so as to achieve a better understanding of the mechanisms that link the family and peer systems.

Family–Peer Relationships: Advances and Agendas Although the parenting processes reviewed here were partitioned into indirect and direct linkages, it is unlikely that these processes operate independently in real-world contexts. Yet with a few notable exceptions, it would appear that researchers’ efforts to conceptualize and investigate these influences have proceeded exactly along these lines; that is, researchers tend to examine indirect and direct linkages independently. The need to consider both indirect and direct linkages within the same study provides a focal point for considering the discipline’s progress and future directions.

Indirect Parenting and Family Processes The available evidence suggests that most, if not all, of the broader indirect parenting constructs considered here, including aspects of parenting relationships, interactions, dynamics, disruptions, and dysfunctions, are associated with children’s peer competence or relationships. However, within each of these broader constructs, a range of mechanisms has been proposed to account for influences exerted on children’s social competence and peer relationships. Multiple processes, for example, have been proposed to explain how parent–child attachment affects children’s social development, including attachment status (subtypes), the child’s emergent autonomy, and the child’s internal working model. All of these processes are thought to have some bearing on child’s interpersonal actions and reactions in the children’s peer relationships or friendships. Although substantial progress has been made toward specifying mediating processes that correspond to the broader indirect parenting dimensions, considerable work remains to explicate the nature of these processes, their interrelations, and the conditions under which they are likely to transmit their effects. Among the potential mediators that appear to deserve further attention are children’s internal 301

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working models and interpersonal schema, emotional and regulatory processes, self and peer perceptions, and biological underpinnings. Moderators of indirect parenting processes also have also been studied, but we still know little about the conditions that may strengthen or weaken the impact of indirect parenting processes. In particular, investigative attention should be focused on factors such as differing parent or child characteristics (e.g., age, gender, ethnicity, personality) and variations in rearing environments or conditions (e.g., social class, cohort or generation, single-or two-parent, extended families, differences in parent’s socialization objectives, ages, educational levels, etc.).

Direct Parenting Processes Like the indirect constructs reviewed here, extant findings imply that most, if not all, of the direct parenting constructs, including parents’ roles as designers, mediators, supervisors, and consultants, are significantly related to children’s competence or relationships in the peer domain. Unlike their indirect counterparts, however, it not as clear whether parents’ managerial roles are best conceptualized as singular or unitary constructs and their effects understood as transmitted through mediators or varying as a function of moderators. For some of the managerial roles (e.g., “designer”), it seems unnecessary to posit underlying processes or intervening psychological constructs. For others, however, it might be quite reasonable to posit mediating or moderating factors. For example, when in the mediator role, some parents not only enlist the child’s assistance when arranging play dates, but they also encourage the child to act as host during home-play sessions (Ladd and Hart, 1992). In such cases, it may be less the parent’s managerial role (i.e., sponsor of play dates) and more the processes they invoke when enacting this role (e.g., asking children to initiate play dates, make necessary arrangements, care for peers’ needs and preferences, etc.) that fosters children’s peer competencies. It may be just as important to consider mediating or moderating variables for managerial roles in which parents serve as relationship model, coach children, monitor their peer relationships, and so on. Although some have speculated about processes that might underlie specific managerial functions, much theoretical and empirical work remains. Potential candidates include parents’ peer histories (e.g., Putallaz, Costanzo, and Smith, 1991) and a host of other biopsychosocial factors that might underlie parents’ motives, skills, and performance of peer management activities.

Confluence of Indirect and Direct Parental Influences Another investigative task, given the scope and diversity of parenting processes that have been linked with children’s social development, will be to (1) map the assortment of indirect and direct parenting processes that regularly co-occur in the context of family life and (2) evaluate the relative importance of co-occurring parenting processes in relation to specific dimensions of children’s social development. Unfortunately, few models exist to guide researchers’ efforts to investigate these objectives, and fewer still have been evaluated.

Multiple Indirect Parenting Processes Conceptual models incorporating multiple indirect processes are noteworthy because they have produced discoveries. One is Gottman et al.’s (Gottman and Katz, 1989; Katz and Gottman, 1993) proposition that martial discord’s effects are mediated through unresponsive and permissive parenting styles. Another is Cummings and colleagues’ (Cummings and Davies, 2002; Davies and Woitach, 2008) proposal that marital discord’s effects are mediated through attachment and the alternate hypothesis that secure parent–child attachment offsets marital conflict’s adverse effects on children’s peer relationships (Frosch and Manglesdorf, 2001; Kaczynski et al., 2006). In the future, a more complete exposition of 302

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the potentially complex relations among multiple indirect parenting processes might be achieved if researchers investigated them within additive, mediated, or moderated explanatory models.

Multiple Direct Parenting Processes Just as it is possible that many indirect family processes operate simultaneously or contingently, it is likely that parents engage in multiple forms of direct social facilitation to influence their children’s peer competence and relationships. Attempts to explore this possibility remain sparse, although some progress has been achieved. Here, illustrative paradigms include those developed by Mounts (2000, 2011) to simultaneously investigate multiple types of parental management practices and by McDowell and Parke (2009), who gathered data concurrently on parents’ advice giving and provision of peer interaction opportunities. Results based on both of these paradigms revealed that parents simultaneously engaged in more than one form of management, and each was distinctly associated with children’s social competence.

Multiple Indirect and Direct Parenting Processes Efforts to examine both indirect and direct parenting processes in the same investigation are extremely rare. A likely reason for this lacuna is that few models have been developed to guide researchers’ hypotheses about how constructs or constituent processes from each domain might operate jointly or contingently. McDowell and Parke’s (2009) strategy and findings represent an important step in this direction. These investigators found that each of three forms of parenting (one indirect, two direct processes) were independently (additively) related to children’s social competence, suggesting that not one, but many, parenting processes contribute to children’s social competence. Clearly, it will be important for researchers to study the confluence of multiple parenting processes if they wish to achieve a richer understanding of how complex parenting environments contribute to children’s social development.

Direction of Effect In an earlier appraisal of this area of investigation, Ladd and Pettit (2002) acknowledged the need to consider the changing roles that parents and children play in each other’s lives and recommended that researchers examine cyclical, transactional patterns of influence. The authors argued that shifts in the direction of family–peer influences are likely and concluded that even though scientists had begun to recognize more multifaceted and complex effect patterns, they had seldom investigated the transactional nature of family–peer influence. It would appear that this criticism is nearly as true today as it was more than a decade ago. Particularly in the realm of model development, there is now greater consideration of complex causal pathways. However, these hypotheses have not always migrated into investigators’ research objectives and designs. This is unfortunate because researchers have never been better equipped, methodologically and analytically, to address these questions. Advances in longitudinal research design and data analyses have made it possible to examine time-varying linkages between variables, alternate across-time variable relations (e.g., cross-lagged contrasts), reciprocation, interdependence among growth trajectories, and other data patterns that may help researchers corroborate or falsify premises about causal relations.

Conclusions Evidence from several decades of investigation reveals that the qualities of the relationships that parents develop with children are associated with the ties that children form with peers. Among other features, secure, responsive, nonintrusive, playful parent–child relationships have been linked with 303

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children’s relational competence, whereas asynchronous, harsh, stressful, and disordered parent–child and parent–parent interactions have been associated with children’s peer difficulties. These findings are consistent with the conclusion that the parent–child relationships are, for children, the proving ground for “learning what relationships are about” (e.g., relationship templates, expectations, etc.) and for “learning how to do relationships” (e.g., acquire the relationship formation and maintenance skills). Also consistent with this premise are data indicating that conflictual, dysfunctional, and disrupted parent–child relationships do not encourage children to develop healthy or adaptive relationship models and skills. Parental stress, marital discord, and divorce appear to impair children’s competence and disrupt their peer relationships. Likewise, marital discord is linked with a range of maladaptive child behaviors, including aggression and externalizing problems that can damage children’s peer relationships. Even minor stressors (e.g., daily parenting hassles) appear to exact a toll on the parent–child relationship and children’s relationships with peers. The proposition that parents directly socialize children’s peer competence has also received considerable support. Research on children’s social ecologies buttresses the argument that parents’ choice of residence, neighborhood, and after-school activities shapes children’s opportunities to interact with peers and develop peer competence and relationships. Further, it would appear that parents’ mediational, supervisory, and consulting activities promote several forms of peer competence and relationships. Still, much remains to be learned about the role that families play in the development of children’s social competence. A large number of premises about how families influence children’s social development has been proposed, and a host of family factors and associated mediating and moderating variables has been implicated in the development of children’s social skills and peer relationships. Many researchers are still engaged in model development, but few have expanded their paradigms to incorporate multiple parenting constructs, mediators or moderators of parenting–peer linkages, and opposing, transactional, or cyclical patterns. Finally, determining biology’s role in children’s social development and understanding its contributions relative to socialization, and parenting processes in particular, remains an important objective. This review, and much of parenting research in general, has been framed from the perspective that families influence children’s social behavior and relationships. Accordingly, much of the accumulated evidence has been interpreted from a socialization perspective and has perpetuated the view that (1) the antecedents of peer competence can be found largely within the family and (2) that the parenting processes that occur within this context are primarily responsible for their successes or difficulties within the peer culture. Such conclusions, however, must be tempered in light of theory and evidence about the biological underpinnings of children’s behavior—the most basic of which is the child’s genotype. Although still at an early stage, the study of gene–environment relations as it pertains to parenting and children’s social development has produced some provocative findings. Caspi, McClay, Moffitt, Mill, Martin, Craig, Taylor, and Poulton (2002) proposed that the effects of parental maltreatment on children might be influenced by the child’s genetic susceptibility to that particular stressor. The investigators chose to focus on the MAOA gene, which, as part of its function, breaks down various neurotransmitters that have been implicated in the transmission and impact of stress. Their specific hypothesis was that the activity level of the monoamine oxidase A (MAOA) gene would moderate the effects of maltreatment on children’s antisocial behavior, such that children with low-activity MAOA would develop higher levels of antisocial behavior than those with high-activity MAOA. Findings showed that the MAOA genotype moderated the link between child maltreatment and each of four forms of antisocial behavior (i.e., conduct disorder, convictions for violent crimes, self-reported disposition toward violence, symptoms of antisocial personality disorder), all of which were measured in adulthood. 304

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Child rather than adult outcomes were examined in a subsequent study that was predicated on the same hypothesis (Kim-Cohen, Caspi, Taylor, Williams, Newcombe, Craig, and Moffitt, 2006). This investigation was conducted on 7-year-old boys, some of whom were maltreated. Four mental health indices, including parent- and teacher-reported antisocial behavior, attention deficit hyperactivity, and emotional problems, were assessed during childhood rather than in adulthood (i.e., proximate to children’s maltreatment). As an overall measure of adjustment, the investigators created a mental health composite by averaging scores from the four indices. Results paralleled the findings of Caspi et al. (2002) in that abused boys with low-activity MAOA scored significantly lower on the mental health composite than abused boys with high-activity MAOA. However, analyses of the individual mental health variates showed that these differences were statistically significant on only one of the four measures—the attention deficit hyperactivity criterion. Although several other investigators have replicated these findings (see meta-analyses in KimCohen et al., 2006), principally by examining MAOA as a moderator of maltreatment’s link with adult adjustment, some have not. Nikulina, Widom, and Brustowicz (2012), for example, did not find that MAOA activity differences moderated the link between childhood abuse and three types of adult mental health problems (i.e., dysthymia, major depressive disorder, and alcohol abuse). They did, however, find evidence of this particular gene by environment interaction when they analyzed their data by gender and ethnicity. These contrasts revealed that for females only, high-activity MAOA was associated with greater risk for adult dysfunction (i.e., dysthymia only). Further, when analyzed by ethnicity (i.e., whites vs. nonwhites), low-activity MAOA emerged as a protective factor for whites, whereas high-activity MAOA was found to a protective factor for nonwhites. These findings differ from those reported by Caspi et al. (2002) and others by implying that the patterns of gene by environment interactions, at least for MAOA’s role in buffering or exacerbating the effects of early maltreatment, might vary depending on the participants’ gender, ethnicity, and type of dysfunction examined. Collectively, these findings represent important first steps toward understanding the roles that genes play in the expression of human behavior, and the modulation of social experience in particular. Along with the findings, the investigative strategies and methodologies attest to the complexity of genetic research and underscore the challenges associated with explicating gene functions (singular or in combinations), documenting gene variations (e.g., differences in activity levels), and detecting and interpreting the effects of a specific gene across a spectrum of participant characteristics and ages. As promising as these findings are, the database from which they have been gathered is not large, and the scientific enterprise that has produced them is still young. At present, the observed genetic effects do not appear large or consistent across variations in gender, ethnicity, or adjustment criteria. Further, although this research begins to illuminate one pathway by which genes may influence the outcomes of children’s socializing experiences (i.e., genetic susceptibility to an environmental stressor), it does not speak to other pathways (i.e., genotype-environment correlations; rGE) that potentially account for effects that have been attributed to parenting processes, including passive rGE, evocative rGE, and niche seeking. Further, the extant findings have not taught us much about the genetic underpinnings of children’s social competence or peer relationships. Rather, the principal explanatory focus of genetic research has been antisocial behavior and, to a lesser extent, children’s mental health problems. It might be argued that antisocial behavior is a form of social incompetence, but those who have probed its genetic contributions largely have measured adult forms of antisocial behavior, such as conduct problems, violence, and criminality. In one of the few studies (Whelan, Kretschmer, and Barker, 2014) where MAOA was examined as a moderator of maltreatment’s effects on a conceptually similar aspect of children’s peer relationships (i.e., bullying behavior), the results proved to be nonsignificant (although a marginal effect was found for victimization). Perhaps as human genomics research matures, stronger and more pertinent findings will emerge. 305

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There is much to be done to extend our understanding of parenting processes that are linked with children’s peer competence and relationships and the mechanisms and effect patterns (i.e., mediation, moderation, causal priorities) responsible for them. As of yet, the discipline has not achieved a stage where some frameworks or paradigms achieve prominence over others because they provide the best fit with extant data patterns. Continued investigation, especially systematic evaluation of competing perspectives, may show us that some of the parenting processes researchers have targeted are more powerful explanatory variables than others, allowing us to narrow the search and concentrate our efforts on a few key linkages. These developments may also allow researchers to devise more encompassing frameworks that represent variation in the conditions under which family processes are most likely to affect children’s social competence and peer relationships. As researchers pursue these conceptual and empirical refinements, they likely will spawn many new areas of investigation and, undoubtedly, make a number of important empirical discoveries.

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Children’s Peer Relationships Vandell, D. L., Henderson, V. K., and Wilson, K. S. (1988). A longitudinal study of children with day-care experiences for varying quality. Child Development, 59, 1286–1292. van Vliet, W. C. (1981). The environmental context of children’s friendships: An empirical and conceptual examination of the role of child density. In A. E. Osterberg, C. P. Tiernan, and R. A. Findlay (Eds.), Proceedings from the 12th annual conference of the Environmental Design Research Association (pp. 216–224). Washington, DC: Environmental Design Research Association. Vernberg, E. M., Berry, S. H., Ewell, K. K., and Abwender, D. A. (1993). Parents’ use of friendship facilitation strategies and the formation of friendships in early adolescence: A prospective study. Journal of Family Psychology, 7, 356–359. Vittrup, B., and Holden, G. W. (2010). Children’s assessments of corporal punishment and other disciplinary practices: The role of age, race, SES and exposure to spanking. Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology, 31, 211–220. Weintraub, S., Prinz, R., and Neale, J. M. (1978. Peer evaluations of the competence of children vulnerable to psychopathology. Journal of Abnormal Child Psychology, 4, 461–473. Weiss, B., Dodge, K. A., Bates, J. E., and Pettit, G. S. (1992). Some consequences of early harsh discipline: Child aggression and a maladaptive social information processing style. Child Development, 63, 1321–1335. Whelan, Y. M., Kretschmer, T., and Barker, E. D., (2014). MAOA, early experiences of harsh parenting, irritable opposition, and bullying-victimization: A moderated indirect effects analysis. Merrill-Palmer Quarterly, 60, 217–237. Xu, Y., Farver, J. A. M., and Zhang, Z. (2009). Temperament, harsh and indulgent parenting and Chinese children’s proactive and reactive aggression. Child Development, 80, 244–258. Youniss, J., DeSantis, J. P., and Henderson, S. H. (1992). Parents’ approaches to adolescents in alcohol, friendship, and school situations. In I. E. Sigel, A. V. McGillicuddy-DeLisi, and J. J. Goodnow (Eds.), Parental belief systems: The psychological consequences for children (pp. 199–216). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc. Zahn-Waxler, C., Cummings, E. M., McKnew, D. H., and Radke-Yarrow, M. (1984). Altruism, aggression, and social interactions in young children with a manic-depressive parent. Child Development, 55, 112–122. Zahn-Waxler, C., Denham, S., Iannotti, R. J., and Cummings, E. M. (2016). Peer relations in childhood with a depressed caregiver. In R. D. Parke and G. W. Ladd (Eds.), Family-peer relationships: Modes of linkage (pp. 317–344). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates (Original work published in 1992). Zahn-Waxler, C., Duggal, S., and Gruber, R. (2002). Parental psychopathology. In M. H. Bornstein (Ed.), Handbook of parenting, Vol. 4: Social conditions and applied parenting (2nd Ed.). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

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PART II

Parents and Social Institutions

11 CHOOSING CHILDCARE FOR YOUNG CHILDREN Alice Sterling Honig

Introduction On the first day of her new part-time job, the 22-year-old mother woke up early, leaving her three children, 4, 2, and 2 months, with her boyfriend of six months, who was unemployed. Soon after the woman left, the infant awoke, fussy. She rejected a bottle and could not be soothed with holding or music. When the 2-year-old knocked over a pan, the boyfriend screamed at her and the baby cried louder. Enraged, the man shook the baby and threw her on a bed. When the mother returned four hours later, the infant was bluish and her breathing erratic. The baby was rushed to the hospital, but died within hours. The emergency-room doctors said the baby showed signs of shaken-baby syndrome: Massive hemorrhaging in the eyes and brain, causing severe brain damage. (Baurac, 1993, p. 8)

This scenario represents an extreme, tragic, and mostly rare outcome of the struggle many families experience as they choose childcare with little time or knowledge for making satisfactory choices. The supply of public pre-K programs and private childcare venues and the availability of those that accept children with disabilities varies dramatically in some communities. Several million U.S. children are abused or neglected annually. Helping families to choose high-quality care might well decrease the extent of this social trauma. In addition, for children under 6, 40% (11.5 million) live within 200% of the federal poverty level and 25% (6 million) live at or below that level (National Center for Children in Poverty, 2013). Children living in poverty are more vulnerable to a variety of mental, emotional, and physical difficulties and threats to their well-being and are particularly in need of high-quality childcare. This chapter will look at a variety of aspects related to childcare choice, including structural as well as process variables and their intersections as these affect parent choices and affect researcher attempts to analyze and assess effects of childcare. Specific illustrations of parent choices and child responses in this chapter reflect the author’s personal experiences and observations.

How Urgent Is Parental Need for Quality Childcare? Children are a family’s most precious treasure. U.S. Census figures indicate that 12.5 million children under the age of 5 need some form of childcare arrangement each week (New York State Council on Children and Families, 2011). Yet parents face many problems in finding, affording, and keeping quality care (Honig, 1992). This can be particularly acute for parents of infants and toddlers for whom, despite increased vulnerability, National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) observed quality of care is often lower than that for preschoolers (Sosinsky et al., 2016). 319

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Economists are among those increasing their focus on childcare. Nobel Economist James Heckman has asserted that the annual rate of return on investments in high-quality preschool programs for disadvantaged children can deliver a 13% return on investment. Specifically, he cites better outcomes in education, health, sociability, economic productivity, and a work force better prepared to deal with the challenges of rapid technological changes (Early Care and Learning Council, January 27,2017). The 2017 Federal Reserve System Community Development Research Conference focused on the economic future of young children in communities and policy considerations for subpopulations. Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen’s keynote address highlighted how promoting child development and education strengthens communities and the economy.

Federal Efforts to Enhance Childcare Quality May Broaden Parent Choices In 2015, only about 10% of federal spending benefited children’s programs and services. Despite families’ often desperate needs for childcare (and the need for caregiver training and services to families), total federal spending reflected only 2.6% of the gross domestic product (GDP) in 2015, and this was an almost 3% decline from the previous two years (Zaslow, Barton, Klein, and Nemeroff, 2016). Among children under 3, 60% are in nonparental care (Adams, Tout, and Zaslow, 2006). For over 50 years, the U.S. federal government has funded Head Start, providing free care for more than 1 million low-income infants and preschoolers in 50 states. Revised Head Start Performance Standards strongly support an academic curriculum (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 2016). An elaborate study of Early Head Start (EHS) outcomes surveyed low-income mothers and children in three groups: European Americans, African-Americans, and Mexican Americans. The study featured videotaped parent–child interactions with toys, as well as detailed histories of childcare experiences over time from birth (Fuligni, 2016). A pattern of high and stable maternal supportiveness was associated with child higher vocabulary and lower problem behavior at age 5. Benefits of high-stable supportiveness were 2–5 times stronger than the effect of socioeconomic status within this low-SES sample. EHS intervention had a positive effect on supportive parenting behaviors especially among African American families. (p. 235) In 2014, President Obama signed the Childcare and Development Block Grant (CCDBG) into law, reauthorizing federal childcare. However, the regulations do not apply to church-run centers nor to family childcare serving fewer than three children. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Administration for Children and Families (ACF) new quality and safety federal standards aim to ensure higher-quality care for children. For the 70,000 childcare settings that participate in the federal childcare program, the new rules: • require all staff have mandatory criminal background checks • enhance health and safety by requiring ongoing staff training in key topics including administration of medication and first aid • provide information for parents to help them choose child care, through an accessible website, and • mandate center monitoring at least annually to ensure children’s health and safety. (Early Childhood Advisory Council, 2016)

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Effects of Childcare Programs Longitudinal research has shown the benefits of quality early childhood education (ECE) programs. Controlling for family background, a prospective longitudinal study of 214 children found that more preschool experience in center care was related, at age 18, at the end of high school, to higher class rank, admission to more selective colleges, and, for females, less risk-taking and more impulse control. Higher-quality care predicted higher later academic grades (Vandell, Burchinal, and Pierce, 2016). CARE, a collaborative project with Utrecht University, provides an extensive review of hundreds of international research studies on the effects of ECE on child development (Melhuish et al., 2015). Among their entries, the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) study noted that ECE attendees gained about a year more of school achievement in comparison with children who had not attended pre-primary programs. These reports from many countries emphasize the strong effects of quality ECE programs. They also emphasize that low level of ECE quality results in negligible effects, lowering the achievement gap between poor and nonpoor children by only 5% (Pianta, Barnett, Burchinal, and Thornbug, 2009). A plethora of structural and process variables enter the operational definition of “quality care” (Phillips and Howes, 1989). Parents can access standards and best practices specified by the National Childcare Information Center (Mitchell, 2005). Some programs focus on helping children achieve executive skills defined as working memory, inhibitory control, and ability to shift attention for goal completion (Troller-Renfree et al., 2017). Self-control and attentiveness to tasks predict better school outcomes (Child Care and Early Education Research Connections, 2017). There is an enormous gap between quality programs—characterized by a buzz of purposeful activities, with children choosing from a rich variety of choices and with plentiful positive teacher encouragement, suggestions, and supports—and much less optimal settings. In poorquality programs, even with certifications and/or licenses, routines and commands are more frequent than creative choice and encouragements (Krip, 2017). Providers compromise quality when attention to chores predominates over loving, personalized interactions. In one infant classroom well supplied with toys, one teacher was busy washing items at a sink. She called out to her assistant, while nodding in the direction of each baby: “Has that one had a bottle? Was this one changed?” During that half-hour, no adult engaged with or caressed the little ones quietly sitting on the floor. The philosopher Martin Buber might have called this an “I-It” relationship rather than an “I-Thou” relationship! A parent seeking care, but with little time to stay and observe, may only notice the supply of toys and good carpet and low child–caregiver ratios available. How are parents to choose? Research is scarce on the basis on which parents make decisions (Sonnenstein, 1991). Unclear is “whether it is handed down from their parents, whether choice is made at a ‘gut’ level, or whether there is an informed choice” (Long, Wilson, Kutnick, and Telford, 1996, p. 51). National Childcare Survey researchers asked what type of childcare parents first considered and why it was not selected (Hofferth and Phillips, 1991). They also asked why the last arrangement ended, whether through parent initiation, perhaps to find more age-appropriate care, or provider-initiated, as when a family day care worker closes a home facility. “The childcare search and selection process is a dynamic one, consisting of identifying a ‘preferred’ type of care, searching for it, encountering one or more barriers (price, availability, accessibility, etc.), and modifying preferences to accommodate what is available” (Prosser and McGroder, 1992, p. 50), rather than what they would prefer. Controlling for income and education level, when parents consulted Resource and Referral (R&R) agencies, 91.1% visited two or more providers. Only 56.8% of parents who did not use such services made two or more visits to choose a care provider. A majority (55.4%) of the R&R group spent about seven hours looking for childcare compared with 41.2% of parents who had not used the service (Fuqua and Shiek, 1989).

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Research Evidence Could Help Guide Parental Choice Longitudinal examination of different aspects of care for 733 children (ages 4 to 8 years) reported that quality indices in classrooms predicted children’s cognitive and language scores, and teacher–child closeness had the strongest effects on children’s social skills. Quality indicators were strongest for children most at risk (Peisner, Burchinal, Clifford, Culkin, Howes, Kagan, and Yazejian, 2001). Quality indicators enhance peer play interactions as well as child learning (Bulotsky-Shearer, Bell, Carter, and Dietrich, 2014). Extensive reviews of hundreds of childcare research reports are available and constantly updated online (Research Connections, 2016; Research Reports, 2016). However, working families may have neither time nor knowledge to scroll through thousands of research articles on differential effects of care practices (Galinsky and Bond, 1998). They may only look for one criterion: licensure. One family, who had lost their toddler in a family day care fire, confided in sorrow that they had simply asked whether the home was licensed (it was). Busy professionals, the parents had never inquired whether the provider smoked (yes), took heavy medications (yes), or had had any child development training (no). The provider had given her used-up cigarette lighters as toys for the little ones. One child, pushing a lighter across a rug, sparked a fire that then took the lives of half of the toddlers. Subtle factors influence care outcomes and have interacting effects (NICHD, 2002). Longitudinal findings from research-based intervention childcare projects serving low-income children provide examples of high-quality childcare programs (Price, Cowen, Lorion, and Ramos-McKay, 1988). The Abecedarian program focused on cognitive skills, beginning with infancy care (Ramey and Ramey, 1999), and decades later reported gains in school grades and decreases in delinquency (Campbell, Ramey, Pungello, Sparling, and Miller-Johnson, 2002). Weikart’s High/Scope project carefully followed low-income African-American program preschoolers and their controls for 40 years. Program graduates reported earnings greater than controls; significantly fewer lifetime arrests; and fewer drugs, property, or violent crimes. More of the program group were employed (76% vs. 62 %), had higher median incomes, and paid more taxes. More of the program males reared their own children (57% vs. 30% for controls) (High/Scope Resource: A Magazine for Educators, 2005). The Syracuse Family Development Research Program (FDRP), following youth ten years after program children graduated to elementary school, found reductions in criminal justice costs. Juvenile delinquency rates for FDRP youth were 7.7% vs. 48.1% for carefully matched controls. Delinquency recidivism rates were 1.5% among FDRP youth and 11.1% among control youth (Honig, 2004b; Lally, Mangione, and Honig, 1988). A pragmatic concern is that some excellent research-based childcare programs may not be easily “scalable” across communities with few resources for ongoing teacher training or program quality monitoring. The High/Scope program hired only teachers who had bachelor degrees and certification in education. The FDRP program annually provided days of intensive training and weekly support for home visitors.

Different Children May Flourish With Different Program Emphases In Portugal, data analyses from the Infant Toddler Environment Rating Scale (ITERS-R) and other interaction scales indicated that space and material use and smaller classroom groups were positive predictors, but teacher training showed the most robust relationship to process quality (Barros et al., 2016). Convincing families that professional expertise relates strongly to specific child development training may be a challenging task for social agency and support personnel offering advice on childcare choices to families. Helping parents to monitor ongoing program quality may also pose a challenge, although it is crucial, considering the numbers of facilities that offer low-quality programs. 322

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Omnibus research-based programs, like FDRP, include more than childcare and are based on principles—of Piaget, Erikson, and other developmental theorists (Honig, 2000). The FDRP included a toy lending library and weekly home visits over the years by a cadre of highly trained paraprofessionals who began home visits prior to the baby’s birth (Lally et.al., 1988). Pinpointing the proportion of each factor responsible for child outcomes presents challenges.

Home Visitation Some families prefer home visitation rather than group care. Home visitors carry out an impressive and lengthy array of activities to gain family trust (Honig, 1979). Home visitors replenish parental energy so parents can be more responsively present, patient, and nurturing with their children. Highly trained home visitors contribute to the quality of parental childcare (National Survey of Early Care and Education Project Team, 2015). Home visitation services for high-risk, high school dropout adolescents with infants computed savings in county foster care costs following from parental abuse and neglect six years later (Honig and Morin, 2001). Program costs were $3.83 per family per day; foster care costs were $23.75 per child per day. This program also found surprising effects depending on when the program began. Home visitation started either several months prior to childbirth or a few months after birth (randomly, depending on staff availability). Program dropout rates as well as later county-confirmed abuse/neglect rates were significantly lower when home visitation had begun prior to the infant’s birth. The result was significant for county savings in foster care costs. At several sites in the United States, Olds carried out randomized controlled trials of home visitations by skilled nurses starting prior to birth for high-risk mothers and continuing for several years. Decades later, enduring program effects included decreases in maternal smoking during and after pregnancy, child abuse and neglect, and children’s criminal and antisocial behaviors (Olds et al., 2010). With adolescent parents, a home visitor provided information plus interpersonal supports by using “reflective listening.” Adolescent parents come to reflect more on their own childhoods and months later have significantly more nurturing relationships with their babies (Brophy-Heb and Honig, 1995). Home visitors help families by providing books for preschoolers. The newsletter motto of the home visitation Parent–Child Home Program (founded by Levenstein) is “Soaring to success through books and play” (www.parent-child.org). One program finding was that parents completed more home visits and reported greater library use when home visitors themselves had been in the program or had many years of experience in their work. For the nearly 6 million children who live immigrant families, home visitors who speak the family’s native language provide links to childcare services that families might otherwise not know how to access. Early reading at home contributes to school readiness (Forget-Dubois, Lemelin, Perasse, Tremblay, and Boivin, 2009). Home visitors teach family members how to support emergent literacy. FDR home visitors helped young mothers obtain library cards so they could take out books to read with their little ones. This was not always easy. One young mother confided that she was fearful because her brother had taken out a library book many years ago and never returned it; she believed she could be arrested if she ever went to the library with her toddler.

Research Studies: Helpful for Childcare Choice? Findings from studies are not always the most useful guides for families. External validity may be questionable when research focuses on only one special group, such as children living in isolated rural areas or only on children in high-quality centers; findings may not be applicable to other care situations. Additionally, researchers need to consider many aspects that potentially affect both parental choice and care quality; interactions among variables affect outcome findings (NICHD, 2002, 2005). 323

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Choosing outcome variables to assess seems straightforward. Yet for programs serving children with certain difficulties, such as autism, focus on enhancement of specific interpersonal skills may deserve paramount emphasis.

Information Sources for Parents Searching for Childcare Parents seeking childcare are consumers needing help to choose (Cryer and Burchinal, 1997). Local librarians can help parents access materials that inform their search for care. In addition, they help parents find books to further young children’s emergent literacy skills and “kindness quotient” (Honig, 2004a), for example, with Dr. Seuss books about Horton the Elephant who is faithful 100% of the time. Easy-to-read, inexpensive print materials include checklists (Honig, 2014) with explanations describing specific positive caregiver–child interactions that can guide choices (Honig, 1982, 1996, 2002; Honig and Brophy, 1996). Book companies serving the ECE field provide free catalogs with descriptions of excellent books for ECE teachers; parents can browse these catalogs to learn more about quality aspects of care. National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC), the premier organization for childcare teachers, offers college educators free copies of their magazines for providers. To request 100 copies or more, contact the editorial group at NAEYC. Many preschools print email or snail-mail newsletters for parents. These outreach strategies increase school partnership with parents. Early fall mailings, school–parent compacts, home visits, and open-house events increase parent involvement in the quality of their children’s education and care (Office of Educational Research and Improvement, 2000).

Computer Help for Choosing Care Increasingly, parents access computer information and support sites about aspects of childcare. Libraries offer online services for families that cannot afford computers. Parent consumers need to be careful, because some sites promote commercial care chains rather than offering quality information to inform choices. A variety of sites provides information for parents and providers. “Baby Talk,” a monthly listserv hosted by the Frank Porter Graham Child Development Institute at the University of North Carolina, gives suggestions for optimal infant/toddler care. Community Playthings’ site provides practical ideas: one suggests teaching 4-year-olds to finger knit—and explains how this activity builds small muscle hand dexterity and strength, encourages eye–hand coordination, and promotes large muscle relaxation so that even highly active youngsters can enjoy finger knitting as they chat with peers. Exchange Magazine for childcare directors provides frequent emails to promote quality care, and the Bright Horizons’ site offers specific tips such as “Fostering a sense of wonder and joy in your children.” Free webinars address specific topics such as positive discipline for toddlers. One NAEYC Webinar (March 2017) offered “Books Matter: Getting Children to Love Reading.” Early Childhood Investigations provides a webinar site, and The Frank Porter Graham Child Development Institute offers webinars on a wide variety of childcare issues. Topics include support for positive development for young children with challenging behaviors and the positive effect of participation in inclusive settings for children with and without disabilities (Child Care and Early Education Research Connections, 2017). Their online available research includes trends in classroom quality and selected teacher characteristics between 2006 and 2014 based on data from the Head Start Family and Child Experiences Survey (FACES), as well as research on the impact on children of variations in teacher instructional book reading style and emotional quality while reading. 324

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Multiple Variables Affect Childcare Choices and Outcomes The number of structural and process variables involved in parental choice and in elucidating the effects of childcare choice is daunting. Families need “flexibility solutions” to find the best care for their situation (Emlen, 2010). Variables to consider cluster in four domains: family, care providers, children, and public agencies.

Family Variables Family choices for childcare depend on dozens of factors, many of which are inextricably interwoven. Some factors are more salient for families; some are more specific. A nursing mother may focus her search for a center that provides a comfortable rocking chair in a quiet corner where a mother can visit over her lunch hour and nurse her baby. Following are some of the factors families must grapple with in their search for childcare. Cost of quality care is paramount for some parents and, grotesquely, may even be higher than family annual income (Shulman and Adams, 1998). This is in sharp contrast to some European countries where parental paid leave and governmental supports for early care are substantial. For families with higher incomes, cost may not be a problem; choice of a nanny (chosen after dozens of careful interviews) may be that family’s primary preference. “My Nanny Circle” is a grassroots group that aims to increase knowledge and morale among nannies. The National Domestic Workers Alliance estimates that in New York State alone there are 17,000 nannies caring for young children (Satow, 2017).

Social Class, Culture, Language, and Care Preferences Many minority families express a preference for parental rather than group care in infancy (Rose and Elliker, 2010). In some non-Western cultures, families prefer children, mostly between 5 and 10 years old, as caregivers for infants and toddlers (Zukow-Goldring, 2012). In low-income families, culture and dominant language both affect parental preferences (Howes, 2010). When compared with Latino families where English was the dominant language, low-income Latino language minority children under 3 were less likely to be in any nonparent care, had fewer transitions in care, and had fewer different caregivers. Despite these positives, these children may lag behind peers in experiences to prepare them for school readiness (Fuligni, Wishard Guerra, and Nelson, 2013). The LA ExCELS program illustrates how complex intertwining variables can be. In each lowincome Los Angeles program (including Head Start, public school–based preschools, prekindergarten programs, and licensed family childcare), up to four children per classroom, who would be eligible for kindergarten in two years, were randomly chosen and compared with carefully selected nonprogram children. Extensive classroom observations revealed two different types of settings. In “High Free Choice” settings, children spent 60% of the day engaged in free-choice activities. In “Structured/Balanced classrooms,” children spent 32% of the day in adult-directed small- and large-group activities. In the former classrooms, children spent more time outdoors and in gross motor activities and fantasy play. In the latter classrooms, teachers read more and scaffolded their interactions more with the children. “Children in the Structured/Balanced classrooms showed higher vocabulary scores than those in the High Free Choice classrooms, but no difference in math or self-regulation outcomes at the end of the school year” (Fuligni, 2016, p. 241). Attention to multiple variables in this study permitted the researchers to determine carefully the extent to which degrees of poverty and child ESL (English as Second Language) conditions affected outcomes. The poorest families could not afford play materials or children’s books. Verbal supports at home were more important for dual-language children than availability of toys and books. Higher 325

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PPVT scores (a preschool language test) for children from monolingual families correlated with the presence of material supports. When three levels of poverty were determined, then families’ provision of material supports for learning was more predictive of PPVT scores than children’s attendance in preschool, but applied problems scores were predicted by both the provision of material supports in the home and children’s attendance in preschool programs at age 4. (p. 243) Attendance in a pre-K program, as well as maternal verbal inputs, were more predictive of school readiness for ESL children at age 4. In contrast, for monolingual children, poverty level plus home material supports were somewhat more likely to predict PPVT scores. Complex analyses of childcare variables seem crucial for determining how best to customize program choices. Research findings pinpoint more specifically the kinds of supports families may need. Home visitors working with extremely poor families that cannot afford toys or children’s books may emphasize, model, and support rich verbal interactions between parents and young children. They may organize events to spur community donations of toys and books for young children in poor families.

Family Crowding and Housing Problems Families in crowded quarters with several young children needing care experience fewer options. When families require care for more than one child, then fees may be prohibitive, even with subsidies.

Urban and Rural Families Geography limits parental choice. In rural areas, pre-K or center programs may not be available, but providing supports for families is crucial. One mother was told her child would be dropped from the program if she arrived late one more time. Yet traffic glitches on the long ride to the center were not under that parent’s control. Some urban areas are fortunate to have “Resource and Referral” (R&R) agencies that provide multiple services. In Syracuse, New York, an R&R agency, “Child Care Solutions,” offers parents specific information on locations of center and family care. Staff help providers start a childcare business, provide low-cost training for Child Development Associate (CDA) credentials, and help family childcare providers get paid for meals (www.childcaresolutionscny.org).

Family Values and Beliefs Affect Choice Values influence choice (Hollingsworth and Winter, 2013) as well as beliefs about many childcare issues, such as co-sleeping with infants or when to initiate solid foods or toilet learning. Some families favor grandparent care as a special way to nurture family closeness and to keep costs negligible (Fuligni et al., 2013). Some parents prefer faith-based care. Although girls in faith-based compared with secular centers were more prosocial, boys showed no differences in frequency of observed peer prosocial or aggressive behaviors (Honig, Douthit, Lee, and Dingler, 1992). Parental implicit beliefs and theories about child development, what tasks young children need to master, and what children need to grow well are embedded in cultural values that guide their care choice (Bornstein, 1991; Klysz, 1995; Okagaki and Sternberg, 1993). Parents who chose less academic preschools for their children believe their children need to learn more independence and initiative rather than academics; parental beliefs are congruent with choice of care facility (Stipek, Milburn, Clements, and Daniels, 1992). Highly desirable is the situation of compatibility between parent and provider philosophy. However, this is not always the case. Sometimes parent demands are not congruent with state standards or 326

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caregiver comfort. A parent advised: “Switch her on the legs if she has a toileting accident.” Providers explained gently that teachers were forbidden to hurt children in any way. When this toddler did have a peeing accident, she cried out, fearing physical punishment. A parent informed a home care provider that if she enrolled her toddler and that child was not toilet trained in a few weeks, then the parent would remove that child. The family childcare was the provider’s sole source of income. She knew that helping a child get used to a new setting and to learn toileting skills often take more time.

Ethnicity Ethnicity is sometimes the predominant factor in care choice. Latino parents are more likely to select informal childcare rather than center based or preschool arrangements and less likely to choose any form of out-of-home care. Compared with 75% of African-American families and 69% of European-American families, only 59% of Latin American families with children age 3 to 5 years chose some form of nonparental care (West, Hausken, and Collins, 1993). African-American parents are more supportive of formal centers than other ethnic groups in accessing subsidized preschools, including Head Start Centers (Fuller, Holloway, and Liang, 1996). Low-income Mexican-American, Chinese-American, and European-American mothers all preferred to have their 3-year-old children cared for in their own homes by spouses, relatives, neighbors, or friends. However, when long-term arrangements were necessary, then European-American and Chinese-American parents preferred formal care, whereas Mexican-American families preferred informal care (Becerra, 1992). Preferences of urban Zimbabwe mothers in choosing preschools differed by income level. Lowincome mothers most frequently reported looking for good food (or a balanced diet), caring teachers, facility (good physical structure and adequate space), and preparing the child for school. Moderateincome mothers mentioned the facility and its convenience of location and child school preparation. The highest-income mothers cited hygiene, good food, qualified and loving teachers, and facility. Regardless of whether their child attended a preschool, 63% of the women felt that a female servant would be their primary choice, but the other respondents preferred sisters, grandmothers, and aunts as a childcare option (Johnson, Dyanda-Marina and Davimbo, 1997). Russian mothers, when questioned about childrearing goals most important in influencing their choices, cited conformity to rules, concern with “spoiling” children, and belief in adult control. These beliefs were stronger for less educated mothers. Mothers with more education were more likely to believe in the importance of talking to infants. Ispa (1995) suggested that it takes time for more democratic goals for childrearing to emerge after a culture has lived for a long period under a totalitarian regime. Locally, the philosophy of an available facility may differ markedly from maternal care. Some French day care center time schedules were far more rigid than at home. It was frequent “to see a quiet and submissive child in the day care center become very demanding as soon as the mother arrives” (Balleyguier, 1990, p. 55). Parents aware of such strict demands in childcare can be alert to possible acting out in emotional release once the child is back at home.

Parent Education and In-Home Practices: Congruent or Not? In the National Household Education Survey (which controlled for parental education and household income) of 4,380 parents of 3- and 4-year-olds, parents who chose nonparental care engaged in more academic types of activities, such as reading to children. Their children watched less television than did children whose parents who did not choose any outside care (Kimmerly, 1998). How the home functions as a learning environment relates to parental childcare choice. 327

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Family Stress and Childcare Choice Family stresses include frequent change of residence, parental job loss, spousal/partner abuse, few social supports, divorce/separation battles, multiple romantic partners coming into the home, and intergenerational squabbles. When stressed, parents may hastily choose a neighbor or friend for care rather than center-based care. A teen mother, still in school, was unable to tell the full name of the neighbor who watched her toddler. Low-income, single-custodial fathers and mothers, as well as custodial grandparents struggle with daily tasks with little time or energy to learn about or access quality childcare.

Mental Health Issues Overwhelmed, some families suffer with mental health issues, including violence, opioid and other drug abuse, alcoholism, and personality disorders. Perry (2002) trains clinicians in his Neurosequential Model in Caregiving to provide trauma-focused interventions in community-based service provision settings. Maternal depression inflicts worrisome child delays in cognitive and language development (Sohr-Preston and Scaramella, 2006; Tronick and Reck, 2009). Maternal postpartum depression has long-term effects on children when depression begins prior to birth, is long-lasting, or requires maternal hospitalization (Gold, 2017). Other maternal factors influence the emotional well-being of children in childcare. Mothers who have lost a fetus during a previous pregnancy sometimes feel hidden terror that the current, healthy-born child may not live. Then the mother may not be able to provide nurturing closeness for the new baby (Gold, 2017), and the quality of care that nurturing other adults can provide is crucial.

Child Abuse and Neglect Affect Child Adjustment Social workers supporting families with such issues may try hard to locate childcare spaces so parents are able to attend to their own special medical and mental health needs as well as increase child chances for well-being.

Homelessness Homelessness and shelter living affect availability of childcare. In Boston, Bright Horizons, a for-profit childcare company with hundreds of centers across the United States and Europe, donates a nurturing childcare facility for infants of homeless parents.

Parents Serving in Military Combat Zones When a parent is serving in the armed forces and stationed abroad in a war zone, then family worries and child tensions escalate. Special training helps staff to cope empathically with child nightmares, somatic symptoms, and worries. The Military Child Education Coalition has expressed concern with child relocations and victimizations at school. Anxiety, stress, and behavior disorders increased 9% for 3- to 8-year-olds when parents were deployed (Wadsworth, Bailey, and Coppola, 2017).

Caregiver and Facility Factors Facility Availability High-quality university programs may be half-day and have long waiting lists. A family home provider may suddenly close in an emergency when her own grandchildren in another city need care. Parents are forced to re-choose care. A director, who generously kept a slot open for a family who 328

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had gone to visit relatives, experienced worrisome financial loss when the family never made contact again.

Directors Set the Tone of a Center Parents need to ask about directors’ knowledge and skills. At a resort center with a large childcare program, the director had strong accounting and computer skills but no child development or ECE courses or experience. The facility was bright and clean, yet babies were left in infant swings for hours.

Personalized Care Parents should inquire about whether each child is assigned to a specific caregiver, rather than staff rotating among groups or stationed at different learning centers. Special assignment fosters closer caregiver–child relationships. This practice anchors the work of West-Ed’s Program for Infant/Toddler Care (PITC): “In a primary care system, each child is assigned to one special caregiver who is principally responsible for that child’s care” (Lally, 2013, p. 113). Parents notice when caregivers greet each special little person intimately each morning. On arrival, babies need to be nestled from one set of loving arms to another. Rituals help. A parent gratefully told how comforted she felt when the caregiver each day lifted her baby up to the window to wave “bye-bye” to mommy as the parent went outside to her car.

Provider Reflectivity: A Priceless Resource Parents need to notice whether providers show sensitive reflectivity. Do teacher actions reveal that they reflect on the possible reasons for a child’s problematic behaviors? It is not enough that some state laws forbid shaming or physical punishment of children. Families described as “restrictive and stressed” chose less adequate care than families described as “nurturing and supportive” (Howes and Steward, 1987). Reflectivity enhances adult ability to figure out what is the meaning of that behavior for this child (Gold, 2017). What is the meaning of compulsive behavior, inability to relax into sleep at center naptime, throwing a tantrum prior to leaving for care, or having a “meltdown” at parent pick-up time? Insightful caregivers can give parents the gift of reflectivity! A child’s unique needs may increase stress, yet young children rarely have words to let adults know of their distress. Instead, their bodily responses show their feelings and worries. Parents need supportive help from caregivers to gain insights into how distressed infants and toddlers can become when parents make “casual and unfeeling plans for baby-sitting” as we learned superbly from Selma Fraiberg (1988): When she took part-time work at one point, Mrs. March made hasty and ill-thought-out sitting arrangements for Mary and then was surprised, as was Mr. March, to find that Mary was sometimes “cranky” and “spoiled” and “mean.” [The therapist] tried in all tactful ways to help the Marches think about the meaning to Mary of her love for mother and her temporary loss of mother during the day. She met a blank wall. Both parents had known shifting and casual relationships with parents and parent substitutes from their earliest years. The meaning of separation and loss was buried in memory. . . . One morning . . . Mary had just lost one sitter and started with another. Mrs. Adelson [the therapist] wondered aloud what this might mean to Mary. Yesterday she had been left, unexpectedly, in a very new place with a strange woman. She felt alone and frightened without her mother, and did not know what was going to happen. . . . She was only a baby, with no words to express her 329

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serious problem. Somehow, we would have a find a way to understand and to help her with her fears and worries. (p. 112–113) One mother complained bitterly that her twin toddlers behaved so well in childcare and were so “naughty” at home. I explained how much they missed her and felt such a relief that they trusted her that they could act out all their feelings when they were with her. This insight as to how precious she, a single working mother, was to her children helped her to act far more gently with her twins despite her tiredness at the end of a workday. Howes (2016) emphasized the importance of caregiver attunement to children’s dispositions and communicative ability. Quality caregivers regulate their own emotions and remain calm and reassuring when children are distressed. Professional development programs need to emphasize the importance of responsive caregiving in addition to practical logistics. Informed choices are more likely when parents observe teachers model reassuring attunement rather than exasperation or withdrawal when children act out.

Child–Teacher Ratio and Group Size NAEYC has set clear standards for optimal ratios of infants, toddlers, and preschoolers per caregiver (Copple and Bredekamp, 2009). Group size affects how much individual attention a child receives. Yet at day’s end, some little ones “wilt.” They need holding and soothing. When there are too few providers per group, this nurturing may not be available. Size of facility affects child behaviors. In a large center, one preschooler bit peers daily, despite teachers’ creative attempts: they used perioral massages, pinned an easily accessible rubber “biter” for his use safely to the child’s outer clothing, and gave attention to that child every five minutes. An irate parent of a bitten child even threatened to sue the center’s board of advisors (a good reason for center boards to have insurance). Resettled in a small home care facility, the child’s biting decreased substantially.

Facility Hours of Operation and Transition Plans Hours when care is available in facilities may not meet parental employment needs if a parent begins work during early morning hours. In a western state, a large gambling facility provides nighttime childcare for casino workers. Patching together care venues is a challenge. After hours, a designated center employee waited outside with a child for her taxi to a “babysitter.” The parent worked until evening hours. Looking worried, the child said anxiously that she had to go pee, although she had gone to the bathroom just before center closing. Transitions worry young children. When they graduate to a new group, young children thrive better when moved with familiar peers.

Staff Access to Professional Help Parents feel reassured when staff create avenues for cooperation with other professionals. One preschooler had worrisome green nasal mucus for days. The parent could not take time off to go to a doctor. A kind pediatric resident volunteered to examine the child, who amazingly had stuck some stuffing material that he had somehow managed to pluck from underneath a couch way up in his nostril.

Teacher Responses to Parent Separation Problems A parent of a 4-year-old quit his job and stayed in the center every day for weeks. The child would not eat lunch with peers or participate in activities, but stayed close to that parent. The director resolved this problem by amending the parent handbook specifically to exclude all-day parental presence after 330

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the first week in care. Providers then could engage the child in activities. Clear guidelines and empathy are both needed for a parent who has strong separation anxiety.

Staff Stability In their search for quality care, parents need to ask about staff turnover rates, which are often quite high (Wells, 2015). The Maryland Committee for Children (2006) reported that in one year, onethird of caregivers had left their jobs. Staff stability increases chances for positive child attachment to caregivers (Honig, 2002). Stability is critical when centers provide wrap-around care (“continuity of care”) for infants and toddlers from early months until 3 years of age. Continuity allows teachers to get to know more deeply the infants and toddlers they serve (McMullen, Yun, Mihal, and Kim, 2016). Some center directors serving infants were asked about initiating wrap-around care; they seemed unaware of it. No attempt to follow up on their possible implementation was possible, because phone calls a few months later revealed that many directors had left for other jobs. Director turnover has worrisome implications for caregiver well-being, which can affect children’s comfort in care and worry parents too. Research on reasons for staff leaving a facility reveal four personal factors—marital status, age, experience, and education—that have a significant impact on caregivers’ decisions to remain in the field. Educators cite availability of benefits as more significant than salary in a decision to leave the field (Holochwast, 2009). Head Start teachers who resigned during their first year cited working conditions as important reasons for leaving (Wells, 2015). Optimal working conditions for providers include a rest area for “breaks.” Staff need stress-busters in their lives too (Honig, 2010). A written “staff handbook” increases caregiver clarity as to their working conditions and responsibilities.

Staff Qualifications Rating systems allow frequent monitoring of staff quality. A 17-state interview study of childcare administrators and Quality Rating and Improvement System (QRIS) directors reported that environment improvement was most frequent. In contrast, attention to language, emergent literacy, and early math was less frequent (Smith, 2010).

Teacher Training Teacher training encompasses many domains (Honig and Lally, 1981). Teachers need to know and carry out strict health requirements for handwashing, diapering, and playground safety. Cleanliness, health care, and nutrition provisions are priorities in state standards. An outbreak of hair or body lice or some diarrheas can shut down an entire facility for many days—a difficult situation for parents (Aronson, 1991). Knowledgeable parents seeking care inquire about how many providers have attained their CDA and how many have taken ECE and child development coursework. In infant classrooms, researchers administered the Infant Toddler Environment Rating Scale (ITERS-R) and the Classroom Assessment Scoring System-Infant (CLASS-Infant). The most robust relations to child thriving were process qualities identified as teacher sensitivity with babies and use of space and materials (Barros et al., 2016). In a hospital care setting, specific training in ECE and child development was more associated with positive staff–child interactions than number of provider years of education or work experience (Honig and Hırallal, 1998). Ongoing mentoring enhances teacher skills and insights and decreases possible burnout. The Boston pre-K program included educational coaches for teachers. Children achieved significant gains in literacy, math, and language (Weiland and Yoshikawa, 2013). Teacher training can include learning to 331

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use screening tools to identify learning readiness in high-risk preschoolers (Abenvoli, Greenberg, and Bierman, 2017). Teachers need knowledge of specific developmental milestones. This knowledge promotes caregiver insights about when to worry, whether to wonder, or whether to provide additional learning opportunities. A kindergarten teacher asked for a parent conference when a 5-year old could not use a pair of scissors to cut paper. Her parents explained that they had been too afraid to let her ever use scissors. Soon after the teacher provided a pair of safe scissors, the child quickly developed dexterity in cutting paper pieces to paste for a collage. For each developmental milestone, a teacher needs to find out from the family what the experience of the child has been. One 15-month-old infant could not pick up Cheerios from his highchair table with just thumb and forefinger (superior pincer pretension) despite frequent opportunities provided at snack time. This was worrisome for the teacher, because babies usually achieve this milestone before 12 months. This skill acquisition has a “narrow window.” Another skill, such as toileting, has a “wide window” for learning (some males may not finish toilet learning until preschool age). Thus, wide variability for this skill timetable may not cause a teacher to worry. One 4-year-old who was alternating living with each parent after a contentious divorce was still in diapers. Quite articulate, he explained that his daddy liked to change his diaper and so he was not eager to comply with urging toward toilet learning. One family, frustrated by total lack of success in toilet training their toddler at home, complained to the care provider they were about to employ. The parent was surprised when the caregiver asked whether this child could tell when he felt that pee or poop was about come. The parents had not realized how important proprioceptive body cues are (as well as patience to sit on a potty and words for “pee” and “poop”) before a child can learn toileting skills (Honig, 1993). Quality providers treat each child as a unique little person and learner and are aware of prerequisites and different timetables for the acquisition of different skills.

Embedding Child Learning in Daily Routines Creative adult skills are required to embed socioemotional learning and cognitive curricular goals into ordinary daily care routines. While snacking on Cheerios, preschoolers can learn to count as they munch their snacks. The diapering table is a one-on-one language lesson locale par excellence!

Fostering Emotional Maturity Some programs focus strictly on academics. Others put a strong emphasis on assisting youngsters with impulse control, patience, and the ability to think about responses before lashing out or melting down. These skills have strong implications for emotional maturity and for preschooler academic achievements. For one summer, between preschool and kindergarten, children were assigned to different school readiness programs. At post-intervention and six months later, only the children in the program that included self-regulation and socioemotional training modules improved in academics, emotional knowledge, regulation, and executive functions (Graziano and Hart, 2016). For preschoolers from chaotic home situations, caregiver effectiveness in modulating hyperactivity, impulsivity, and inattention is especially urgent. Poor executive control (EC) in childhood relates to, and in some cases, precedes, a variety of difficulties with behavior regulation, including problems with hyperactivity, impulsivity, and inattention . . . and [poor] EC has been implicated as one of the core neuropsychological deficits that precede the onset of ADHD. (Nelson, James, and Espy, 2016, p. 96) 332

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Intervention has helped traumatized children in foster care (Troller-Renfree et al., 2017). Focused, innovative play therapy activities decrease troubles for stressed or traumatized children (Schaefer, 2010).

Infant Massage: A Stress-Relieving Tool Young infants respond well to relaxing massages. Care providers learn from workshops and from videos how to massage while playing soothing lullaby music. Teaching parents how to provide infant massage has proved a valuable way to improve early infant growth and development (Field et al., 2004).

Staff Well-Being and Career Development Ladders “On average childcare workers . . . earn . . . less than amusement park attendants, car washers, and pest control workers” (Hall, 2008, p. 70). NAEYC’s admirable Worthy Wages campaign has unfortunately not yet led to higher childcare salaries nationally (Whitebook, Phillips, and Howes, 2014). Teacher career development ladders, based on key dimensions of professionalism, including high levels of competency, knowledgeability, and professional practice, improve staff morale and salaries (Willer and Bredekamp, 1993). Staff can look forward to a “menu of professional benefits” while working up the career ladder (Bloom, 1993, p. 70).

A Written Curriculum With Varied Activities Is Available and Displayed for Parents Families feel more knowledgeable when staff posts a written curriculum that allows parents to feel more included in a child’s daily experiences. Parents note that a facility provides a wide variety of choices for children—small muscle activities, including pegboards and puzzles; sensory experiences, including water and sand table play; literacy/writing opportunities; art/music activities; and safe play spaces available indoors and outdoors for large muscle play (Lally et.al., 1988).

Teachers Limit Television Time Quality care implies a strict limitation on television hours per day for children, particularly for infants and toddlers, because the American Pediatric Association has recommended no TV for children under 2 years. Some families with the TV on perpetually at home may be surprised to learn that too much television can be detrimental to physical and mental development of the very young.

Staff Is Proactive in Creating Positive Partnerships With Parents Teachers in some programs make home visits before a child is enrolled. Others phone parents or send a note when a child delights with a positive new skill or behavior. Sometimes there are disagreements between parents and providers (Lurie and Newman, 1980). When parents disapprove of “child play” and insist that more time be spent in learning activities, then educators need to explain how important rich pretend play is for children’s learning. Discipline techniques differ. After many gentle dialogues, one parent finally agreed that center staff should not physically punish her child, because she, the parent, was primary and that was right for her only. Rather than centers expelling young children from a program, collaboration with parents about challenging behaviors may ease the situation and create thoughtful plans for ameliorating child stress/ distress. One 4-year-old frequently hit peers in center play. The director then would call the foster 333

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mother to come and take the preschooler home—difficult for a working parent. One time, the child asked her foster mother why she did not live with her mommy if she had “grown in my mommy’s tummy” as the child explained. Once this perceptive and gentle foster parent explained how the mother, because of addiction troubles, could not keep the child safe as she was now with her foster mother then hitting others in childcare decreased dramatically.

Staff Supports for Language Enrichment A director responsible for several community-wide urban pre-K programs animatedly asserted that enhancing teacher language was her most difficult challenge in furthering an optimal classroom climate. By 30 months of age, the velocity and trajectory at which a child gains new words predict their later literacy skills (Rowe, Raudenbush, and Goldin-Meadow, 2012). Early language skills predict success in elementary school! Children struggling with reading skills by third grade are more likely have troubles learning curricular materials and are more likely to drop out of high school. Emergent literacy and pre-reading skills nurtured by care providers are crucial for later school success in learning to read (Christopher et al., 2015). Vocabulary patterns differ remarkably by social class (Hart and Risley, 1995). In-home observers over a 2½ year period recorded a gap between the number of words parents used per hour if on public assistance (600), working class (1,300), or professional (2,100). Care providers need to be on the front lines of providing rich and varied language experiences for those children with fewer opportunities at home to gain language prowess. In one study, teachers rarely read with infants and spent barely over one minute reading with toddlers (Honig and Shin, 2001).

Staff Can Prioritize Rich Language Interactions Cooks and other staff in the FDRP program had training to support language. The center bus driver emphasized outdoor words on field trips to parks where grass, flowers, tree bark, insects, birds, and other nature experiences provided a treasure trove of new words. Nature experiences impel new language learning, while giving kids freedom to run, jump, climb, build with twigs and sticks, or joyously discover grasshoppers, acorns, and earthworms (Honig, 2015). Strong environmental influences (in contrast to lesser genetic influence) affect four of five major preschool aspects of language competence: print knowledge and conventions (knowing the difference between print and words and that written letters correspond to oral phonemes and that in English words are read from right to left), phonological awareness, vocabulary (naming pictures, providing definitions for words, and using words correctly), and verbal memory (repeating sentences accurately; repeating nonsense words from two to five syllables). These aspects of competence accounted for children’s later language skills post-first grade and post-fourth grade (Christopher et al., 2015). Codefocused and dialogic reading with at-risk preschoolers promotes emergent literacy skills (Lonigan, Purpura, Wilson, Walker, and Menchetti, 2013).

Provider Ideas About Parent Choice Interviews with care providers reveal their theories about parental choices. Family day care providers surveyed with open-ended questions as to why they thought parents had chosen their facility responded with the following characteristics: family-like setting and personal relationships (94% had children of their own), fewer children served than in a center (from two to six children), lower cost of childcare, greater flexibility of hours, personal characteristics of the provider, and quality of care offered. The providers rated themselves highest in meeting parents’ needs by the reliability and stability of care they provided, their openness for parents to visit, and the longer hours and greater number 334

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of days their facility was available to parents. Providers served children from early infancy through third grade, although toddlers comprised the largest age grouping. This wide age range better suits some families’ needs for care for several siblings (Atkinson, 1991). Family day care providers identified themselves as professionals, small business owners, teachers, and substitute parents and babysitters. They felt their experience and liking children were more important than formal training. Mothers said they wanted personal relationships in a small group with a family atmosphere and in a convenient, low-cost setting. Parents did not consider family day care choice important as an opportunity for parents to meet other parents, to receive help in parenting, or to participate in family day care activities. Parents considered informal training for caregivers as appropriate. Thus, support for professional caregiver training will have to consider parent and provider satisfaction with informal training and devise ways to accommodate such perceptions. “Babysitting” as a caregiver role seemed acceptable to many families. Some parents overestimate the quality of their children’s programs and are “unaware that they are not obtaining high quality with respect to those aspects of quality that they value most highly” (Cryer and Burchinal, 1997, p. 54). Contrasting parent ratings of quality of care with those of trained observers, these researchers commented, “[T]he concept of parents as consumers who can make informed choices about childcare is controversial” (p. 35). A challenge remains on how to inform families about high-quality care.

Child Variables in Choosing Childcare What variables affect whether a child blossoms and flourishes or fares less well in a childcare?

Child Age Early researchers on infant care reported negative outcomes for infants in long hours of nonmaternal care (Belsky and Rovine, 1988). Later studies showed this was more likely when infant care was poor quality and mothers were not sensitive (NICHD, 2002, 2005). Other studies showed mixed findings: children with more aggression and higher cognitive scores (Park and Honig, 1991). The CARE summary of European and U.S. findings reported low-quality care was a risk factor for cognitive, language, and social development for children under 3 in low-income families (Melhuish et al., 2015).

Length of Time in Childcare Each Day Child age at entry into group care and length of day care hours are intertwined in affecting outcomes. The consensus from hundreds of multinational CARE research studies was that for preschool children 2 to 3 years and older, ECE was beneficial for educational and social development but that care for infants was more problematic based on care quality and daily length of time in care.

Child Gender Care quality affects children differently. Boys are more vulnerable to caregiver attentiveness (Bornstein, Hahn, Gist, and Haynes, 2006). By age 5, some girls are already overly concerned about being “fat.” Caregivers need to address any body image issues gently. By 6 years, little girls are less likely to believe that girls are smart; they begin to avoid activities they consider are for children who are “really smart” (Bian, Leslie, and Cimipian, 2017). These beliefs affect how some little girls might respond to teacher attempts to engage them in preschool science/math activities. Some caregivers, and indeed some parents, may not feel at ease with children who are more boisterous. Other caregivers relish and cherish children with high motoric needs who remind the adults of how energetic they themselves once were in early childhood. 335

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Gender-typed behaviors detected in preschoolers 3.5 and 4.75 years predict adolescent sexual orientation at age 15 years (Gu, Kung, and Hınes, 2017). Thus, child gender factors may have to be considered. These could be problematic for peer acceptance if a male preschooler insists on wearing dresses or pink clothing in the group. Perceptive parents may have early clues that their child prefers to dress like or identify with another gender. Parents need to be careful in selecting a childcare setting that is accepting and nurturing of all children—including those whose preferences indicate discomfort with their biological gender.

Child Temperament Styles Clinicians cluster child temperament styles as flexible, fearful, or feisty. Temperament affects how teachers interact with children in childcare. High-activity children attract teacher attention. One quiet 10-month-old sat rocking compulsively back and forth in the room. Skillful providers know how to interact with children who might be quite shy or quite feisty and help them into enjoyable participation in appropriate activities (Goh, Pasco Fearon, van IJzendoorn, Bakerman-Kranenburg, and Roisman, 2017). One child needs an adult to hold hands and accompany him to engage in a new activity. In contrast, a highly active toddler knows just where to find and vigorously ride that bouncy horse his thoughtful teacher has judiciously placed in a corner of the room. Temperament is not destiny (Honig, 2016/2017). Caregivers puzzle whether to label a high-energy child as “ADHD.” Gold (2017) explains that some children do have a gene variant associated with low serotonin. But the expression of this gene depends strongly on how adults respond. A child living with stress, conflict, and criticism has a higher risk for an ADHD diagnosis: “There is no ADHD gene” (p. 138). As providers teach the child selfcalming skills to decrease stress, that child is not likely to be diagnosed with ADHD. Children with ADHD or on the autism spectrum present challenges for teachers (Baker, 1993; Nelson et al., 2016). A cheerful preschooler with ADHD gave his teacher a vigorous “high-five” hand slap that knocked her off balance. Ever on the move, that child caromed from one side of the classroom to another. A creative caregiver, during singing time, gently took the child’s wildly drumming fingers and cheerfully helped the child move his hand in rhythm with the music. Some children exhibit differential vulnerability. This “differential susceptibility” increases a child’s chances of problematic behaviors if care is inconsistent or of low quality. Happily, in high-quality care, children with difficult temperaments scored low on problem behaviors and teacher–child conflict and higher on reading scores (Pluess and Belsky, 2011).

Attachment Security Decades of child development research on intergenerational effects of secure versus insecure attachment in infancy reveal the impact of attachment quality on later social development. A massive metaanalysis of quantitative studies specified that early attachment security “has enduring significance for children’s socioemotional (mal) adjustment” (Goh et al., 2017, p. 73). Attachments with parent(s) affect relationships with teachers (Sroufe and Fleeson, 1998). Infant–mother attachments at 12 months predict later teacher–child and peer preschool social patterns. Preschoolers who had been rated Avoidant/Insecure as infants now bullied peers who had been rated Ambivalent/Insecure in infancy. “Highly trained preschool teachers who knew nothing of the children’s early attachment scores showed the least attention and highest expectations toward those children who had been securely attached in infancy. Teachers treated the formerly ambivalent insecure children more indulgently. Teachers were sharpest and showed anger only toward those preschoolers who had been rated Avoidant/ Insecure in infancy” (Honig, 2016/2017, p. 5). 336

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Optimally, when infants have insecure attachment relationships due to parental vulnerabilities and emotional troubles, then nurturing teacher–child relationships buffer a baby who forms a secure attachment with a loving caregiver (Honig, 2002; Sabol and Pianta, 2002). When maternal sensitivity is low but childcare provider sensitivity is high, children show higher levels of social-emotional competence than when both are low (Vesely, Brown, and Mahatinya, 2013). Multiple placements affect young children. Children who have already experienced multiple caregiver changes since infancy and have not had a chance to develop a secure attachment to any caregiver require extra observation and nurturance. Families can help by letting providers know about previous multiple care experiences.

Immigrant Children Immigrant status affects children in care. Children of immigrant families who have fled war and torture require extra caregiver sensitivity and insights. Their welfare also may depend on “experiential diversity” available in their neighborhoods (Sanders and Wishard Guerra, 2016, p. 267). Childcare problems are more acute for immigrant families, because nearly 70% of children living in ESL homes live in poverty; 44% of ESL children’s mothers have not graduated from high school and are less likely to read daily with their young children. Thus, ESL children are likely to flourish with providers who offer rich daily reading experiences (Cannon, Jacknowitz, and Karoly, 2012). One baby, reared in Mandarin by his parents, cried for weeks. Center staff phoned with great concern. A nurturing Mandarin-speaking graduate student volunteered his time for some days to cuddle that child and talk in soothing tones in Mandarin until the baby adjusted to his new care environment.

Child Stress Stress affects child adjustment to care, has many causes, and takes many forms (Honig, 2010). How caregivers respond to children with higher levels of difficult behaviors affects children’s stress levels. Nurturing caregivers, generous with bodily affection and warm reassuring voice tones, ease children’s stress. Among 60 teachers and their preschool children assigned randomly to different groups, some teachers received training in dyadic interventions to enhance close emotional relationships, whereas teachers in other classrooms served as controls. As the end of the school year, there was a significant decline in children’s stress levels, measured by salivary cortisol—an index of stress in the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis—but only in children whose teachers had learned more sensitive ways to decrease children’s stressed behaviors (Hatfield and Williford, 2016).

Child Learning Difficulties Children with special learning needs need special teacher compassion, patience, and skills. Peers may avoid a child who cannot play games with “their” rules. A provider confided that one child could not pronounce initial consonants; peers avoided her. The teacher lovingly made extra efforts to understand and support this child.

Sensory Integration Issues Children with severe sensory sensibilities cannot bear certain food tastes, smells, or clothing textures. Even a tag on a cotton T-shirt aggravates some children. Loud, cheerful child screams during gym playtime were so aversive that one preschooler climbed high up on mats to escape; worried teachers could not reach him to get him down! The director reserved a quiet space in her office during gym time rather than force the child to participate. 337

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Health Problems Health issues affect frequency of attendance and peer relations in care. Loneliness may ensue if children are frequently absent due to physical health problems, including asthma, otitis media, and heart murmur limiting rough and tumble play, or mobility restrictions. In one center, teachers encouraged the children to try using a new peer’s wheelchair and see how it worked. After that, they were more likely to approach and play with the new child (Keller and Honig, 1993). Quality care helps. Children at risk for disabilities enrolled in Early Head Start were less likely to have cognitive delays (Peterson, 2010). Families can use special help in choosing childcare that will nurture their children’s special needs (Bernstein, Wonderlick, and Madden, 1997).

Emotional Issues Children with frequent nightmares, strong aggressions toward peers, and other worrisome emotional troubles increase parent concerns in choosing care. Teachers need a varied and flexible tool kit of techniques to use. With some preschoolers, they need to consider children’s feelings of shame (attributing a “bad” behavior as an aspect of the self ) or guilt (feelings when one has hurt another). Shame issues predict far more serious later life difficulties (Muris, 2015). Teachers handle some conflicts more readily with ICPS (interpersonal cognitive problem-solving skills) (Shure, 2015). When children’s emotional troubles affect adult well-being, teachers themselves need to try new ways: learning a new skill, mindfulness exercises, yoga, journaling, and other creative ways to renew their dedication and energy to serve children and families (Honig, 2010).

Child Jealousy of a New Baby A new baby in the family sometimes creates a crisis in a slightly older sibling. Older toddlers may regress to bedwetting, soiling, sleep disturbances, and demands for a bottle. Such behaviors exacerbate angers in sleep-deprived parents—anger that may be reflected in worrisome child behaviors in the care setting. Together parents and providers need to nurture the older sibling to weather these negative emotions. Bibliotherapy helps when adults read stories about how special older siblings are.

Child Bereavement Death of a beloved family member can cause problematic behaviors in childcare. At the Syracuse Children’s Center, one preschooler took a child into a closet and “humped” over that child. Teachers were perturbed and puzzled. They found out later that the child’s grandfather had died recently. No one had told either the home visitor or the teachers. That grandfather had been a significant figure and source of nurturance in the child’s life. Parent communication with providers helps ease such a situation.

Sibling of a Severely Ill Child When a very sick child requires long parental hospital visits, then the sibling in childcare may act out feelings of being neglected by preoccupied, overburdened parents. Parent/staff communication can promote a more intensive focus on solace for both child and family.

Bullying by Peers Bullying can be subtle and is already a problem for some preschoolers (Abenvoli, Greenberg, and Berman, 2017). Negative consequences last for decades (deLara, 2016). Teachers called one child a “crybaby”; peers pushed him off a teeter-totter or took away his toys. Alert adults will notice and 338

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address bullying aggravating a young child (Honig, 2016; Honig and Zdunowski-Sjoblom, 2014). Swiss kindergarten teachers tackled bullying successfully through a classroom-wide approach (Alasker and Gutsviller-Helfenfinger, 2010).

Political, Business, Community, and Agency Supports How well do political, business, and community efforts support parental choice of childcare? The Federal Interagency Day Care Requirements were discarded in 1982 after much bitterness and disagreement nationally. Regulation of childcare services is now reserved to the states, which vary dramatically in regulations, funding, and support for quality childcare. Licensure laws vary widely by state (Hayes, Palmer, and Zaslow, 1990). States also differ in allowing corporal punishment. Caregivers may be required to (1) be above 18 years of age, (2) take tuberculosis (TB) tests or measles shots prior to employment, (3) have an annual chest x-ray, and (4) undergo a fingerprint test for possible prior conviction for child abuse. Other state specifications include the minimum number of square feet per child a center provides and required purchase of liability insurance. The U.S. Office of Personnel Management established work-site parenting support groups. Employee surveys assess the extent to which employees have parenting responsibilities or concerns and would like help in addressing them. The U.S. Department of Labor (1998) created collaborations between business, unions, community groups, and nonprofit organizations to improve care quality and availability. Thus, at participating health care facilities in New York State, the AFL-CIO, the National Health and Human Service Employees Union, and 17 health care employers assess union member childcare needs, run an R&R service, select childcare offerings from a menu, and contribute to parent fees through a childcare fund. Partnerships increase chances for quality care. The goal of Early Head Start—Child Care Partnerships (EHS-CCP) grants through the federal Office of Head Start and the Office of Childcare in the Administration for Children and Families is to “partner on activities such as training and technical assistance, professional development, management, and the delivery of comprehensive services” (Sosinsky et al., 2016, p. 15). Private-sector initiatives have arisen inspired by employee surveys (as at GM) that “almost half the workers cited childcare as a reason they could not work overtime, and more than one-third missed 2 to 4 days of work over a 3-month period because of child care problems” (U.S. Department of the Treasury, 1998, p. 20). The American Business Collaboration for Quality Dependent Care (ABC), headed by 22 major corporations, “is the largest and most comprehensive private sector initiative specifically designed to improve the quality and expand the supply of dependent care” (U.S. Department of the Treasury, 1998, p. 19). Bright Horizons (Mason, 2000) builds centers to serve family needs and works toward accreditation of every childcare facility built. The Family and Work Institute documents the prevalence of work–life support in nationally representative samples of leading companies (Freedman and Galinsky, 2000). Other corporations have search-and-find contracts with community agencies that find care for skilled employees relocating into a community (Kagan, 1994). However, such services are of little help to families living in poverty and searching for childcare. Many states do not regulate (1) the number of years of formal education required of caregivers, (2) availability of support for staff advancement on a career ladder, (3) provision of staff health insurance or paid holidays, and (4) the number of annual parent–staff conferences. These are among quality indicators identified by Head Start, NAEYC, and the Child Welfare League of America (Meadows, 1991). Some states require 15 to 18 annual training hours (Azer and Elliott, 1998), which may include workshops unrelated to specific child development knowledge. Quality is neither high nor uniform. However, if elaborate licensure requirements were implemented, more totally nonregulated care might flourish in an “underground” market, and some high-quality facilities might not be able to afford the additional fees and bureaucratic paperwork required. 339

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Conclusions Finding professionals to care for young children when parents are employed can prove even more difficult and frustrating than the search for a reliable car repair person. No single governmental agency or community resource can help improve the supply of high-quality childcare, nor be responsible for increasing the effectiveness of family choices. The National Research Council of the National Academy of Science (Hayes et al., 1990) after an in-depth and extensive investigation of childcare in the United States urged that “responsibility for meeting the nation’s childcare needs should be widely shared among individuals, families, voluntary organizations, employers, communities, and government at all levels” (p. 291). Public education institutions, particularly high schools, need to be proactive in offering courses on child development and early education that include practica in high-quality centers. Such experiences can increase adolescent awareness of optimal care. Positive communication techniques offered in such courses boost young families’ ability to cope with the stress of a new baby and other interpersonal stresses in their lives. Media specialists in radio, newspapers, and television play an important role. Public television continues to offer shows with endearing prosocial characters, like Clifford the Big Red Dog. and Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood, for preschoolers. Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) programs and prenatal clinic personnel can alert families, discuss quality care options, and distribute pamphlets. Pediatricians can display materials in waiting rooms. Florida State University (2003) offers a one-page list of ten high qualities based on NAEYC standards. Barbershops and beauty parlors can post fliers with R&R agency information. Parental childcare decision-making may improve if more ECE researchers begin to write in appealing ways to “give away” their knowledge to low-literacy families. Attention to parent literacy level could enhance quality care choice (Honig, 1982; Kagan and Cohen, 1997). Employers can help by allowing flexible work hours for families with young children. Large companies can consider building childcare spaces on site so that parents can visit their children during lunch hours and have less travel time to work. System reforms in funding early childhood services can increase “collaboration and empowerment” (Kagan, 1994, p. 17) and widen choices to include emergency care and 24-hour care. More funds are necessary to increase Child Development Associate (CDA) training in states. Federal funds support CDA credentialing. Since its founding in 1975, this competency-based model has graduated over 125,000 caregivers in 25 years (Council News and Views, 2000). Accreditation efforts need wider support (Herr, Johnson, and Zimmerman, 1993). By 2001, there were nearly 8,000 NAEYC-accredited centers. The National Childcare Staffing Study (Whitebook, Phillips, and Howes, 1993) described the overwhelmingly (95%) positive response of directors seeking NAEYC reaccreditation. They felt accreditation was a “seal of quality,” and staff became more sensitive to the importance of high-quality interactions. “Evaluation processes improved in some programs, communications between staff and parents improved, and parents increased their understanding of what constitutes high-quality childhood programs” (Herr et al., 1993, p. 34). Directors believed that the accreditation process reflected professionalism, positively affected staff and parent morale, and increased parental pride in having a child attend an accredited center. However, in 2000 only 7% of centers in the United States were NAEYC accredited, and currently only 6.5% % are accredited (NAEYC, 2017). In summary, empowering parents to make wise choices and to demand options for quality care takes the concerted, multifaceted and multipronged efforts of many societal groups. There is much more work to be done—educationally, politically, in research programs, in the business world, and in media channels to enhance the quality of childcare and to clarify and customize family options and choices for finding care that will ensure that young children flourish as caring persons and passionate young learners. 340

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Additional Resources Baby Talk: [email protected] Bright Horizons: [email protected] Early Care and Learning Council: [email protected] Early Childhood Advisory Council: [email protected] Early Childhood Investigations webinar site: [email protected] Exchange magazine: [email protected] The Frank Porter Graham Child Development Institute: [email protected] National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC): [email protected]. Neurosequential Model in Caregiving: [email protected]

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12 PARENTING AND CHILDREN’S ORGANIZED ACTIVITIES Deborah Lowe Vandell, Sandra D. Simpkins, and Christopher M. Wegemer

Introduction Although less studied than schooling and families, participation in organized activities during the after-school hours is common for children and adolescents in many parts of the world (Larson and Verma, 1999; Vandell, Larson, Mahoney, and Watts, 2015). These activities include participating in sports teams, performing arts groups, and service clubs, as well as attending after-school programs housed in schools and at community centers. These activities share some common features: (1) they are typically led by adult staff who are responsible for organizing the activities and ensuring children’s safety, (2) they provide opportunities for young people to interact with peers in supervised settings, and (3) they meet on a regular basis (daily, weekly, monthly, seasonal). In the last 20 years, there has been a growing recognition that these various organized activities are an important context for young people because they offer developmental affordances that differ from home, school, and free time (Eccles and Gootman, 2002; Mahoney, Vandell, Simpkins, and Zarrett, 2009). Like school, organized activities occur in institutional settings that are supervised by adults, but they differ from schools in that participation is traditionally voluntary and youth have much greater voice in the activities (Larson, 2000). Organized activities also are more likely to focus on the development of physical skills (dance, sports, exercise), arts (music, theater, visual arts), and/or social-emotional learning (community service and civic engagement) than the typical school day. Some programs, especially those serving adolescents, emphasize the importance of youth autonomy, choice, and leadership within the context of the organized activity (Larson and Angus, 2011). Although some organized activities provide academic enrichment in areas such as math, science, and literacy that are central to the mission of schools, the approach to those topics differs. Organized activities tend to emphasize hands-on projects and value high levels of youth engagement. The focus of this chapter is on the ways in which parents and parenting are an important part of their children’s organized activities. In the first section, we examine the theoretical frameworks that have guided much of the research investigating the role of parenting in relation to their children’s organized activities. In the second section, we describe the various methodological strategies that researchers have used in their studies of parenting and organized activities. In the third section, we place the research within a sociocultural frame that underscores the roles of gender, social class, ethnicity, immigration status, neighborhoods, and schools in shaping children’s out-of-school time in the United States and other countries. In the fourth section, we consider the role of parental beliefs in relation to children’s participation in different types of activities. We then turn to research that has

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investigated parental behaviors that support or undermine youth participation in organized activities, followed by consideration of a special case of parental involvement in which parents serve as leaders or coaches of their children’s activities. In the seventh section, we examine the research evidence about the effects of organized activities on child developmental outcomes to address two questions: Are parents’ beliefs about the benefits (and costs) of organized activities consistent with the research evidence, and are effects of organized activities on child developmental outcomes moderated by family circumstances, parenting beliefs, and/or parenting behaviors? In the final section, we highlight directions for future research. In the conclusion, we summarize central themes identified in the previous sections.

Theoretical Frameworks for Studying Parenting and Children’s Organized Activities Research investigating connections between parenting and children’s organized activities has been guided by several theoretical frameworks: (1) ecological systems and bioecological theories, (2) relational developmental systems (RDS) paradigm, (3) expectancy value theory, and (4) social and cultural capital theories and conceptualizations of concerted cultivation.

Ecological Systems Theory and Bioecological Theory Ecological systems and bioecological theory, developed by Bronfenbrenner (1979; Bronfenbrenner and Morris 1998, 2006), provides the grounding for much of the research in this area (see reviews by Simpkins, Fredricks, and Lin, in press; Vandell et al., 2015). Central to this work is the conceptualization of organized activities within a system of nested relationships. At its core is the microsystem, which Bronfenbrenner (1979, p. 22) defined as a “pattern of activities, roles, and interpersonal relations experienced by the developing person in a given face-to-face setting with particular physical and material features.” Drawing on this definition, researchers have described the patterns of activities that occur in after-school programs and extracurricular activities (Pierce, Bolt, and Vandell, 2010; Vandell and Posner, 1999). This research also has described the roles and identities that young people assume in organized activities, as well as the quality of their interactions with adult staff and peers (Kataoka and Vandell, 2013). Particularly relevant for relations between organized activities and parenting, ecological systems theory highlights the role of mesosystems, or “the linkages and processes taking place between two or more settings containing the developing person. . . . In other words, the mesosystem is a system of microsystems” (Bronfenbrenner, 1979, p. 227). The focus in this current chapter is on the mesosystem (or linkages) between children’s organized activities microsystem and their home microsystem. Informed by ecological systems theory, researchers have studied how children’s participation in an organized activities microsystem is affected by their home microsystem, including their parents’ beliefs about the value of the activities for their children, the parents’ financial and social resources, and the parents’ perceptions of their child’s needs and competencies. In addition, ecological systems theory predicts that organized activity microsystems likely influence what happens in the home microsystem, including parent–child interactions, family activities, and family routines. As will be described in later sections of this chapter, there is considerable evidence of a bidirectional mesosystem linking children’s organized activities and home microsystems. According to ecological systems theory, other linkages occur in exosystems, which refer to relations between microsystems in which one of the microsystems does not include the developing child (Bronfenbrenner, 1979). An example of an exosystem is linkages between organized activities and parents’ workplace: families often use organized after-school activities for childcare while parents are at work (Kleiner, Nolin, and Chapman, 2004; Smith, 2002). Similarly, the amount of time spent at the activity is affected by parents’ work schedules. In some cases, young people are not able to participate 348

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in activities because they need to care for younger siblings while parents are at work (Hultsman, 1992; Telzer and Fuligni, 2009). Ecological system theory, and recognition of the role of exosystems, has helped to bring these types of cross-setting linkages into focus. Finally, Bronfenbrenner (1979) highlighted the importance of the macrosystem, or “the overarching beliefs and value of the society as reflected in culture, religion, and the socioeconomic organization.” A crucial point is that the macrosystem is not separate from young people’s immediate environments. Rather, it influences what happens in the micro-, meso-, and exosystems. Later in this chapter, we describe how aspects of the macrosystem reflected in parental beliefs and behaviors have profound effects on children’s organized activities.

Relational Developmental Systems The study of children’s organized activities also has been influenced by a relational developmental systems paradigm in which individual by context transactions are emphasized. Within this theoretical perspective, the focus is on ongoing transactions or processes between the individual and the contexts in which he or she lives (Overton, 2015). Here, the young person is an active agent engaged in activities that include “observing, manipulating, exploring, symbolizing, languaging, . . . and feeling.” (Overton, 2015, p. 54). Activities are not something that happen to the child, but rather something that the child is doing. An application of RDS is evident in a longitudinal study of 4-H clubs, a youth-serving organization funded as part of the U.S. Department of Agriculture (Lerner, Lerner, Bowers, and Geldhof, 2015). Although the 4-H program was initially established to support the development and education of rural youth, the contemporary program has a broader mission that “recognizes, utilizes, and enhances youth’s strengths; and promotes positive outcomes for young people by providing opportunities, fostering positive relationships and furnishing the support needed to build on youth’s leadership strengths” (United States Department of Agriculture, 2017). Over eight waves of data collection that involved more than 7,000 youth and 3,500 parents, Richard and Jacqueline Lerner and their colleagues have examined five aspects of positive youth development (competence, confidence, character, connection, and caring) within the context of youth participation in 4-H programs (Gestdottir and Lerner, 2007; Jelicic, Bobek, Phelps, Lerner, and Lerner, 2007; Lerner et al., 2015). Consistent with the relational developmental systems paradigm, these researchers assessed the social, cognitive, and behavioral skills (strengths) that youth exhibited within the 4-H context that contributed actively to their positive development. These competencies also influenced parental expectations, beliefs, and support for their children’s engagement in organized activities. Their findings reflected individual by context transactions that involved the active engagement of the youth, as well as ongoing co-actions with parents, peers, and program staff. Research conducted by Urban, Lewin-Bizan, and Lerner (2009) also utilized a RDS approach to study relations between adolescents’ strengths, their organized activities, and community contexts. Youth with the greater capacities to self-regulate benefitted more from involvement in extracurricular activities, compared to their peers with less capacity to self-regulate. In addition, consistent with a RDS perspective, within the context of lower-asset neighborhoods, children with greater capacity to self-regulate benefited the most from extracurricular activity involvement. This study did not include parenting within their transactional model, but this would be a valuable extension of the work.

Expectancy Value Theory A third theoretical framework guiding the study of organized activities is expectancy value theory (Eccles and Wigfield, 2002). This theory focuses on the interplay between youth motivational beliefs and achievement-related choices. The theory posits that parents’ beliefs and expectations influence 349

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parents’ behaviors and the kinds of support (role modeling, encouragement, activity-related materials, and activities) that they provide their children. These behaviors, in turn, communicate to young people the value that parents attach to particular endeavors, which then play a role in shaping youth’s skills, self-concepts, values, and activity participation. According to expectancy value theory, parental beliefs about the importance of a particular activity for their child and their perceptions of their child’s ability in a particular activity influence their children’s activity choices and the children’s subsequent persistence in those activities, which in turn strengthen the likelihood of youth being in settings in which their skills and competencies are strengthened. Expectancy value theory has been used in studies that investigated youth’s participation in specific types of activities such as sports and music (Eccles and Harold, 1991; Fredricks and Eccles, 2005; Simpkins, Fredricks, and Eccles, 2012). In other work, Simpkins, Delgado, Price, Quach, and Starbuck (2013) used the theory to guide research examining the organized activities of Latino youth.

Social Capital, Cultural Capital, and Concerted Cultivation Sociologists who study organized activities have often framed their research using social capital theory (Coleman, 1988). This work emphasizes the role of organized activities in expanding children’s access to knowledgeable and caring adults (Jarrett, Sullivan, and Watkins, 2005) and to positive peer groups who are actively engaged in school and extracurricular activities (Crosnoe, 2011), as opposed to peers and peer groups who endorse risk-taking and deviant behaviors (Gottfredson, 2010; Osgood, Wilson, Bachman, O’Malley, and Johnston, 1996). Parents are viewed as critical agents in their children’s development of social capital by their efforts to expose their children to experiences and people that foster skills to succeed in life (Dunn, Kinney, and Hofferth, 2003; Friedman, 2013; Parcel and Bixby, 2015). Other sociologists who have studied organized activities are influenced by Bourdieu’s (1986) conceptualizations of cultural capital, or accumulations of knowledge, skills, and behaviors that provide social status or standing. Lareau (2003, 2011), for example, drew on Bourdieu’s theory in her intensive observations and interviews of twelve 10-year-olds and their families. In Lareau’s analysis, parents in the low-income families emphasized their children’s natural growth by providing children with freedom to go outside and play with relatives or friends. In contrast, parents in the middle-class families emphasized concerted cultivation, and parents devoted much effort to providing their children with “a steady diet of adult organized activities” (Lareau, 2011, p. 3), in the belief that these would advance their children’s development and future life chances. Other scholars have argued that social class differences in youth’s activities do not reflect distinct underlying cultural preferences and beliefs, and that low-income and working-class parents also aspire to develop their children’s talents and skills (Bennett, Lutz, and Jayaram, 2012; Chin and Phillips, 2004; Duffet, Johnson, Farkas, Kung, and Ott, 2004; Simpkins et al., 2013). These researchers argue that limited financial resources and logistical hurdles are barriers restricting the out-of-school opportunities of working-class and low-income youth. These hurdles include parents’ inflexible work schedules, limited knowledge about available program offerings, and program fees, as well as more limited program options and concerns about neighborhood safety (Bennett et al., 2012; Duffet et al., 2004; McGee, Williams, Howden-Chapman, Martin, and Kawachi, 2006; McNeal, 1999; Outley and Floyd, 2002; Simpkins et al., 2013). Further work is needed to determine the extent to which financial resources and cultural beliefs are linked to youth’s engagement in organized activities. In later sections, we examine in more detail the growing body of research that investigates linkages between parenting and organized activities. Much of this research reflects issues and approaches identified by ecological systems theory, relational dynamic systems paradigm, expectancy value theory, and sociological conceptualizations of social capital and cultural capital. 350

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Methodological Approaches Used to Study Parenting and Organized Activities Researchers have drawn on multiple strategies to investigate linkages between parenting and children’s organized activities, including (1) nationally representative surveys, (2) questionnaires completed by convenience samples, (3) event sample and time diaries, and (4) various qualitative methods such as in-depth interviews and observations.

Surveys of Nationally Representative Samples Several nationally representative surveys conducted in the United States include items related to youth participation in after-school programs and extracurricular activities. One useful survey is the Beforeand After-School Programs and Activities Interview conducted by the U.S. Department of Education (see http://nces.ed.gov/nhes/questionnaires.asp) as part of the National Household Education Survey (NHES). This phone survey was administered in 1999, 2001, and 2005 to parents of children in grades kindergarten through eighth grade (roughly ages 5 to 13). Parents report amount of time (hours, weeks, months) that children in the targeted age group spend each week in the regular before- and after-school activities, the locations of these activities (e.g., school, church, etc.), the number of participants in the group, number of staff, costs, language spoken, transportation to and from the activity, and the specific kinds of programming that occurred. Parents also report their children’s informal after-school care arrangements by relatives and by nonrelatives, as well as how often the child typically cares for himself or herself. These NHES data can be used to create a picture of the prevalence, hours, and duration of organized activities in the United States. Because the survey includes information about family ethnicity and country of origin, as well as child grade level, receipt of special educational or social services, and the academic and behavioral functioning of the focal child, it is a rich resource for secondary data analyses on a wide range of questions about the bioecology of organized activities. It is limited in two respects: the survey is cross-sectional, so only concurrent associations can be studied, and all data were obtained from a single data source—parental reports. Drawing on this resource, researchers have determined that in the U.S. context children are more likely to attend after-school programs when their mothers are employed, when their mothers work more hours, when mothers work traditional “9-to-5” schedules, and when children reside in single-parent households rather than two-parent households (Capizzano, Tout, and Adams, 2000; Kleiner et al., 2004; Smith, 2002). A second nationally representative data set, the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study (ECLS-K) is publicly available at http://nces.ed.gov/ecls. Begun in 1999, the study utilizes multiple research methods and collects information from multiple respondents. The first round of data collection began when children were in kindergarten (1998–1999) and continued with the same participants when children were in first, third, fifth, and eighth grades. Parents answered questions about their children’s out-of-school activities in third, fifth, and eighth grades, including participation in specific types of activities (sports, clubs, dance, music, performing arts, and art). Trained research staff administered reading and math achievement assessments. Social and behavioral outcomes, such as approaches to learning, were reported by parents and by classroom teachers. In 2011, data collection for a new Early Childhood Longitudinal Study cohort was initiated. Restricted use and public-use files containing data for this new cohort are now available for analyses. A notable strength of the ECLS-K data sets is that investigators can employ numerous controls for family and school characteristics, in addition to controls for children’s earlier functioning. Investigators (Covay and Carbonaro, 2010; Dumais, 2006) used the 1998–1999 data set to study social class and ethnicity differences in extracurricular activity participation and to examine concurrent associations between activities, as well as cognitive and noncognitive outcomes in grade 3. Other 351

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aspects of this data set (e.g., studies of effects associated with cumulative participation in organized activities over time) have not been studied. The National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Harris and Udry, 2008) is a third nationally representative study that includes questions about organized activities. It is an interesting complement to the ECLS-K because it follows a nationally representative sample of adolescents in grades 7 to 12 (roughly 13 to 18 years). Begun in 1994–1995, adolescents answered questions about their extracurricular activities. The sample was assessed again in 1996, 2001–2002, and 2007–2008, and data collection was expanded to include interviews with parents, teachers, peers, and romantic partners as well as the adolescents themselves. Some of the data from this survey are publicly available, and other parts of the data set are available under restricted use to preserve confidentiality. Feldman and Matjasko (2007) used the Add Health data set to identify profiles of students who participate in extracurricular activities, and Daniels and Leaper (2006) investigated connections between activity participation, self-esteem, and peer acceptance. Simpkins, O’Donnell, Delgado, and Becnel (2011) used Add Health to study Latino youth’s selection into organized activities. Other nationally representative surveys also support secondary data analyses of the antecedents and consequences of organized activities. The Survey of Income and Program Participation (www. census.gov/sipp/top_mod/2004/topmod04rev.html) collected by the U.S. Census Bureau, focuses on organized activities within the broader context of the childcare needs of working families. The National Education Longitudinal Study (NELS) assesses extracurricular activities among adolescents. Lipscomb (2007) used the NELS to study extracurricular involvement and later academic achievement, and Dumais (2008) used the NELS to relate extracurricular involvement to math achievement and college expectations. Some large-scale, representative surveys have been collected in other countries. For example, McCoy, Byrne, and Banks (2012) utilized Growing Up in Ireland, a longitudinal study of 8,448 children, to examine out-of-school activities, social class, and gender in relation to children’s school engagement and academic achievement.

Questionnaires In other research, questionnaires designed by investigators to study specific issues have been used to study out-of-school time. An example of this approach is the Childhood and Beyond Study conducted by Eccles and colleagues to test Eccles’s expectancy value model (Fredricks and Eccles, 2005; Simpkins, Vest, Delgado, and Price). In this primarily European-American sample (n = 400), parental beliefs and adolescent extracurricular activities were measured longitudinally. Mothers’ beliefs about the importance of sports, music, and math positively predicted their behaviors in these areas one year later, which predicted youths’ self-concepts of ability and values in these domains over time (Simpkins et al., 2012). Another example of an investigator-developed questionnaire is the research by Anderssen and Wold (1992). In that study conducted in Norway, adolescents (n = 904) completed questionnaires about their parents’ and peers’ involvement in leisure-time physical activities. Adolescents also reported their perceptions of support received from parents and friends for physical activity. Adolescents’ reports of their parents’ and friends’ activities predicted higher levels of adolescent physical activity, as did parental and peer support of the adolescents’ physical activity, suggesting both parents and friends influenced adolescent physical activity. Questionnaires have examined other aspects of parenting and out-of-school activities. In one study conducted in Sweden, a representative sample of 539 adolescents and their parents reported the adolescents’ participation in after-school activities, parent–adolescent relationship quality, and adolescent depressed mood (Mahoney, Schweder, and Stattin, 2002). Adolescents who participated in after-school activities reported lower levels of depressed mood when they perceived high levels of support from 352

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their activity leaders compared to adolescents not participating in such activities. Support from afterschool activity leaders was particularly important for the subgroup of youth characterized by highly detached relations to their parents.

Experience Sampling Method (ESM) and Time-Use Diaries Researchers also have used experience sampling methods (ESM) and time-use diaries to study how young people’s experiences at organized activities compare to experiences in other settings (Larson, 2000; Vandell et al., 2005). In the ESM studies, adolescents report their location, activity, social partners, and subjective states at the moment they are signaled, and the adolescents typically provide multiple reports over several days. This method has the advantage of providing ecologically valid data in the moment, which reduces memory selectivity and retrospective bias. When collected longitudinally, ESM enable analyses of within-person patterns and processes over time, using statistically controlled multivariate analyses. Using this method, Vandell and colleagues (2005) collected 35 reports a week of after-school experiences during the fall and spring from a sample (n = 191) of ethnically diverse middle school youth. A total of more than 12,000 reports of after-school experiences were obtained. While at organized activities, the youth reported higher levels of engagement and more positive affect than the same youth reported when at home. Time-use diaries also have been used to study children’s out-of-school time, including their organized activities. Time-use diaries are typically collected at the end of the day or in the early evening, using a guided recall format. Posner and Vandell (1999), for example, used a standard set of questions to ascertain (1) the primary activity for each 15-minute interval during the after-school hours; (2) who else was present in the location; and (3) who, if anyone, was doing the activity with the child. In this study, the after-school activities of 194 low-income African-American and European-American children were studied longitudinally to determine relations between child, family, and contextual variables and children’s adjustment over time. Drawing on the time-use diaries, Posner and Vandell found that girls spent more time in academic activities and socializing after school, whereas boys spent more time in coached sports. Children (boys and girls) who attended after-school programs spent more time on academic and enrichment activities, whereas children in informal care settings spent more time watching TV and hanging out. Evidence of transactional relations between after-school activities and child adjustment was found. Time spent in organized activities between third and fifth grades was related positively to children’s academic and social adjustment in fifth grade. At the same time, consistent with the relational dynamic systems paradigm, children who had better academic grades as third-graders were more likely to engage in extracurricular activities as fifth-graders and were less likely to spend time in outside unstructured activities, controlling for third-grade activities, child gender, and family structure.

Qualitative Interviews and Ethnographies Qualitative methods also have contributed to understanding relations between parenting and children’s organized activities. These open-ended methods support discovery and allow researchers to identify pertinent language, concepts, frameworks, and questions that can then inform future research. Two general qualitative approaches, qualitative interviews and ethnographies, have proven to be particularly informative. Larson and colleagues have used in-depth interviews to understand the reasons that youth stay in or drop out of after-school programs (Larson and Walker, 2010) and to understand the role of after-school programs in adolescent–parent negotiations of adolescent autonomy and connections (Larson, Pearce, Sullivan, and Jarrett, 2007). In the study of parent–youth relationships, a total of 113 353

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high school–aged youth were interviewed 661 times, either face-to-face or by phone over a two- to nine-month period. These youth participated in 12 arts, technology, and leadership/service programs. The investigators’ interest in how programs affected adolescent–parent relationships emerged partway through the study, and they then added interviews with 43 parents to the study design. Initially interviews focused on why youth joined particular programs. Later interviews asked youth about how programs affected family relationships and household routines. In the final interviews, youth were asked about changes in parent–child relationships as a result of the program. For the majority of youth, parents supported the adolescents’ participation in programs as an arena for the youth to exercise autonomy and for granting youth new freedoms. For other families, the adolescents’ participation was a source of tension or conflict. In some cases, parents were opposed to the youth attending the program. In other cases, parents had forced youth to join the program, or the parents were overinvolved in the program. Ethnographies that combine intensive observations and interviews also have been used to study parenting and organized activities. Perhaps the best-known and widely cited ethnographic description of children’s out-of-school time is Lareau’s careful study (2003) of 12 families. Each child was observed about 20 times for a least three hours as they took part in various activities. Children growing up in working-class families spent much of their time after school and on weekends in unstructured leisure and play with relatives and friends, whereas the middle-class children in both European-American and African-American families participated in a complex array of organized activities—sports, choir, church groups, music lessons—that called for balancing time demands and performing before groups. Other ethnographies include Kremer-Sadlik and Kim’s study (2007) of 32 middle-class U.S. families during formal participation in organized sports (e.g., Little League), informal participation (e.g., backyard pick-up games), and passive participation in sports (e.g., watching televised athletic events). Their detailed analysis of parent–child interactions and conversations revealed sports activities as an arena in which parents sought to socialize their children to values and skills that went beyond the benefits of participation in athletic activities. The ethnographic data helped illuminate the function that sports have in family daily life as a socializing tool for culturally cherished skills and values. In a third example, interviews and fieldwork contrast extracurricular activities from the perspective of middle-class parents in Rome, Italy, and Los Angeles, California (Kremer-Sadlik, Izquierdo, and Fatigante, 2010). Both sets of parents perceived activities as important for children’s success, but the Italian parents considered activities part of the “children’s world,” downplaying intense involvement and performance, whereas the Los Angeles parents viewed activities as preparing children for adult life, emphasizing competition and accomplishment. Taken together, understanding of children’s organized activities and the linkages between those activities and family circumstances have been informed by multiple research methods that span quantitative and qualitative approaches.

Sociocultural Contexts of Children’s Organized Activities Organized activities are situated within broader sociocultural contexts. In this section, we consider ways in which organized activities are influenced by child gender, social class, ethnicity, and immigration status. We also examine ways in which organized activities vary within and across schools and neighborhoods.

Gender Child gender influences organized activities in a variety of ways. For example, boys rate their abilities higher in sports, place higher value on sports, and participate more often in sports compared to girls (Barnett and Weber, 2008; Fredricks and Eccles, 2006; Jacobs, Vernon, and Eccles, 2005; Kahn et al., 354

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2008). Girls, in contrast, rate their abilities higher in art/music, place higher value on art/music, and participate more frequently in art/music activities compared to male youth (Simpkins, Fredricks, and Eccles, 2015). These differences are present as early as kindergarten and persist at least through high school (Fredricks and Eccles, 2006; Jacobs et al., 2005; Simpkins et al., 2015). Gender differences also are evident in parents’ beliefs and behavioral support for different types of activities. In general, mothers and fathers place higher value on sports for their sons, and they provide more support for their sons’ sports activities compared to parents of daughters (Fredricks and Eccles, 2005; Simpkins et al., 2015; Welk, Wood, and Morss, 2003). The opposite pattern is found for music, with parents expressing stronger support for their daughters’ participation in music activities (Simpkins et al., 2015). These overall differences fail to address whether parenting has a similar effect on boys’ and girls’ development. For that, researchers need to test whether the relations between parenting and youth development vary by child gender. The existing work suggests that parents’ support has similar associations with boys’ and girls’ motivational beliefs and participation in sports and music (Fredricks, Simpkins, and Eccles, 2005; Simpkins, Davis-Kean, and Eccles, 2005; Simpkins et al., 2012; Simpkins, Vest, and Becnel, 2010; Simpkins et al., 2015; Simpkins, Vest, Dawes, and Neuman, 2010). In other words, parents’ support likely has a similar payoff for both boys and girls.

Social Class Substantial disparities in organized activities are linked to social class in the United States and Asia (Duncan and Murnane, 2016; Vandell et al., 2015). In the United States, the average price of a general after-school program was $113.50 a week in 2014, which reflected a $75 increase from 2009—a cost many low-income families need assistance to pay (Afterschool Alliance, 2014). In addition to costs, low-income families face further challenges, including fewer available options in their communities, safety concerns getting to and from the activity, inconvenient locations, and questionable program quality (Afterschool Alliance, 2014). Families with higher disposable incomes have more flexibility to find activity options outside of the school and take advantage of those options, whereas working-class and low-income families have more restricted options. Given the financial and logistic barriers, it is not surprising that participation in activities is lower for low-income and working-class families compared to middle-class families. For example, 10% of eighth-graders in working-class families did not participate in a single organized activity, whereas every eighth-grader in middle-class families participated in at least one activity (Bennett et al., 2012). In another study, youth in low-income or working-class families participated in 2.4 different activities per year, on average, whereas the average was double that among middle-class families (5 different activities per year). Youth from working-class and poor families also have less structured summers than youth from middle-class families (Chin and Phillips, 2004). Similar differences have been reported in Taiwan and China (Chu, 2017; Shih and Yi, 2014), where children in middle-class families are more likely than children in less prosperous families to participate in organized activities. Based on analyses of more than 1,200 participants in the nationally representative Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID), Weininger, Lareau, and Conley (2015) argue that limited financial resources explain only some of the social class disparities in youth participation in organized activities. Maternal education, which Weininger et al. viewed as a proxy for mothers’ cultural beliefs, also was related to higher levels of youth participation in organized activities.

Ethnicity According to the integrative model for the study of developmental competencies, ethnicity also influences families, the contexts in which families reside, and concerns about child health and 355

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safety (Garcia-Coll et al., 1996). The available work examining organized activities among AfricanAmerican youth has highlighted how parents utilize organized activities to support and protect their children (Burton and Jarrett, 2000; Furstenberg, Cook, Eccles, Elder, and Sameroff, 1999; Jarrett, Bahar, and Taylro, 2011). Jarrett and colleagues (2011), for example, found that parents’ “resilient management strategies” were particularly important in supporting youth participation in organized activities when families lived in communities that were considered dangerous and in which only limited activities were available. Other researchers have studied organized activities in Latino youth. As noted by Simpkins and colleagues (Lin et al., 2016; Simpkins et al., 2013; Simpkins, Vest, and Price, 2011), Latino families are diverse in terms of social class, cultural orientations, and immigration histories, as well as parents’ experiences with organized activities when they were growing up. Each of these factors is linked to Latino parents’ beliefs about the benefits of organized activities and their support of their children’s participation in activities. For example, Mexican-origin parents were more likely to think that organized activities helped youth learn Mexican cultural values if parents had a lower level of education, were oriented toward Mexican culture, and were first-generation immigrants compared to other Mexican-origin parents (Lin, Simpkins, Gaskin, and Menjívar, 2018). In contrast, whether Mexicanorigin parents participated in organized activities when they were young was not consistently associated with the benefits parents believe activities afford. Research with Asian-Americans also underscores how organized activities reflect parental beliefs and cultural values. Asian-American youth are less likely to participate in sports and more likely to participate in school clubs and music compared to their European-American peers (Chao, 2000; Chua, 2011; Darling, Caldwell, and Smith, 2005; Yao, 1985). These participation patterns align with Chinese parents’ goals for their youth to focus on academic and individual activities where they can perform and demonstrate their achievements (Chao, 2000; Chua, 2011; Yao, 1985). Among Chinese immigrants in the United States, many parents control how youth spend their time after school (Chao, 2000). It is common for Chinese parents to enroll their sons and daughters in language or music lessons (Chao, 2000; Chua, 2011; Yao, 1985), which align with Confucian ideals to focus more on a strong mind than a strong body (Yao, 1985). Future work is needed to examine children’s organized activities among diverse Asian ethnic groups. As highlighted by Bornstein (2017), there are likely differences associated with the culture of origin and their reasons for immigrating. Research also is needed to provide insight into the organized activities of other ethnic groups, such as Native Americans and Muslim-Americans, who have received little attention. A fertile area for future research is work that distinguishes between processes specific to ethnicity and processes confounded with ethnicity such as family income (Garcia-Coll et al., 1996). Much of the existing research of organized activities in underrepresented minorities is limited in that it focuses on poor or workingclass families so that ethnicity and social class are confounded. Moving forward, researchers need to be thoughtful about the families they recruit, their analyses, and the conclusions they draw to inform our understanding of the interplay between ethnicity and the organized activities that youth experience.

Immigration Research involving immigrants in the United States has found children’s organized activities to be affected by immigration status. Immigrant parents vary broadly in terms of their overall human capital (e.g., level of education, income), which helps to elucidate the mixed findings concerning participation in organized activities by first-, second-, and third-generation adolescents (Camacho and Fuligni, 2015; Okamoto, Herda, and Hartzog, 2013; Peguero, 2010; Simpkins et al., 2011). Some scholars find first-generation adolescents are more likely to participate in extracurricular activities than second- and third-generation adolescents (Simpkins, O’Donnell, 356

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et al., 2011), whereas the opposite pattern is reported in other studies (Camacho and Fuligni, 2015). One important difference among these studies is that they included different immigrant groups. Simpkins and colleagues focused on Mexican-American immigrants, whereas Camacho and Fuligni included Latino, Asian, and European immigrants. The variability among immigrant families in terms of resources (e.g., parent education, social networks) and understanding of the U.S. culture and school system (e.g., English language skills; Hernandez, Denton, and McCartney, 2007) helps explain these mixed findings. As noted by Bornstein (2017), the effects associated with immigration are complex, reflecting (1) reasons for migrating (voluntary or involuntary; temporary or permanent), (2) place (varies by country of origin and by country of destination and the relations between these countries), (3) specific experiences, and (4) relative status. For some families in the United States, parents’ perceptions of the risks of organized activities for the child and the family can be life altering. Simpkins and colleagues interviewed Latino families in Arizona when an immigration law was adopted. Some Latino adolescents in mixed-status families, where some family members are U.S. citizens but other members do not have documentation, worried that their participation could put family members at risk for deportation and splinter the family unit (Simpkins et al., 2013). Even when adolescents were U.S. citizens or had documentation, parents expressed concerns about ethnic profiling, specifically that their child will get stopped walking to and from the activity (Lin et al., 2016). In addition, within immigrant groups, there are differences in parents’ views about the value of organized activities depending on where they grew up and their experiences in their country of origin. Some Mexican-origin parents, for example, were highly involved in a variety of organized activities as youth, whereas other Mexican-origin parents lived in communities that did not have organized after-school or extracurricular activities (Simpkins et al., 2013; Simpkins, Vest and Price, 2011). Parents who grew up in communities without organized activities often first learned about these new opportunities for the children in the United States. Over time, parents gained more information and exposure to activities by their children bringing home the information or schools sending home information—an understudied form of cultural brokering (Simpkins et al., 2013; Simpkins, Vest and Price, 2011). Among these Mexican immigrant families, older children in the family helped to teach parents about activities and their benefits, not only enabling their participation but also paving the way for younger children in the family to participate in activities (Simpkins, Vest and Price, 2011).

Neighborhoods and Schools Neighborhoods and schools play a central role in youth’s after-school activities because they are the two primary settings in which activities are situated. These settings also are important because families’ willingness to utilize activities is influenced by the school and neighborhood location. For example, youth living in low-resource neighborhoods, as defined by lower neighborhood income, education, community resources, and higher crime rates, spend less time in organized activities compared to youth in high-resource neighborhoods defined by higher neighborhood incomes, education, and lower crime rates (Weininger et al., 2015; Wimer et al., 2008). Two central mechanisms for neighborhood effects have been suggested (Simpkins et al., 2013). First, not only do low-resource neighborhoods have fewer activities available, but parents are more likely to believe that the activities are unsatisfactory in terms of hours, program quality, and affordability (Duffet et al., 2004). Second, families in low-resource neighborhoods are concerned about children’s safety (Coulton and Irwin, 2009; Duffet et al., 2004; Outley and Floyd, 2002). Even when families find an affordable high-quality activity, there are concerns about children’s safety walking through the neighborhood to and from the activity (Larson et al., 2006; Simpkins et al., 2013). Neighborhood safety is a stronger predictor of participation compared to neighborhood poverty and ethnic composition (Coulton and Irwin, 2009). In fact, living in safe neighborhoods increased participation 357

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by 40% (Coulton and Irwin, 2009). When parents perceive neighborhoods to be dangerous or to lack activities, parents’ protective and promotive strategies become central to children’s participation (Jarrett et al., 2011). In some cases, parents need to locate resources in neighboring communities to enable their child’s participation (Jarrett et al., 2011). After-school and summer activities offered at school, especially if they are available free of charge, can “play an important equalizing role between [social] classes by offering activities,” though they sometimes do not function that way (Bennett et al., 2012, p. 132; Weininger et al., 2015). Adolescents’ participation is lower in larger schools (McNeal, 1999). High school academic requirements such as “no Fs and a C average or better” also limit participation by youth who are at risk of dropping out of school. Among adolescents, research also suggests different patterns of ethnic participation rates in high- versus low-SES schools (Okamoto et al., 2013). Evidence from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health) indicates that ethnic disparities in participation are more evident at high-SES schools than at low-SES schools. In high-SES schools, having a higher percentage of ethnic minority and immigrant students diminished these participation disparities. Although the disparities are smaller at low-SES schools, these schools often provide fewer activities and had lower participation. Moreover, school risk, which is often elevated within low-SES schools (e.g., high poverty or disorder), was associated with lower extracurricular participation (Wimer et al., 2008). Some Latino middle school students, particularly those who were the clear numerical minority among a predominately European-American student body, anticipated and endured ethnic discrimination and stereotypes in organized activities (Lin et al., in press). More attention is needed to the effects of school climate and school demographics on students’ participation in organized activities.

Organized Activities Outside of North America Although much of the research examining youth’s organized activities has focused on North America, there is a growing body of research in Europe, Australia, and Asia (Bae and Jeon, 2013; Blomfield and Barber, 2011; Lee, 2003; Mahoney and Stattin, 2000). Across these cultures and locales, there are variations in the specific types of organized activities that are available and valued (Larson and Verma, 1999; Kremer-Sadlik et al., 2010). For example, sports activities are more common among North American and European countries, whereas music and academic activities are more common among Asian nations (Larson and Verma, 1999). These activities are reflective of specific cultural norms and expectations. Over the last three decades, many Asian countries have experienced tremendous growth in the number and type of activities offered (Bae and Jeon, 2013; Kanefuji, 2015; Lee, 2003; Shih and Yi, 2014). For example, rates of organized activity participation in South Korea rose dramatically from 49.8% to 65.2% from 2007 to 2010 (Bae and Jeon, 2013). In Japan, the number of schools that offered organized activities rose 67% between 2007 and 2013 (Kanefuji, 2015). In South Korea, Taiwan, Japan, and China, youth have highly competitive university entrance exams. Youth experience a great deal of pressure from families and communities to do well on these exams (Bae and Jeon, 2013; Kanefuji, 2015; Lee, 2003; Nishino and Larson, 2003; Shih and Yi, 2014). Given the importance of these exams in these countries, it is not surprising that academic tutoring, cram schools, and other preparation programs (known as hakwon in South Korea, juku in Japan, and Bu-shi-bans in Taiwan) account for a good portion of youth’s after-school hours (Bae and Jeon, 2013; Kanefuji, 2015; Lee, 2003; Nishino and Larson, 2003; Shih and Yi, 2014). South Korean parents are willing to sacrifice a great deal, such as paying the high costs of private tutoring, given the “incalculable” value they place on a strong education (Bae and Jeon, 2013, p. 54). Other types of organized activity pursuits in South Korea are not seen as important compared to academics, and in some cases are seen as a “waste of time” (Lee, 2003, p. 17). In contrast, Japanese 358

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culture emphasizes the importance of both academic study and bettering one’s physical health. As a result, many Japanese youth also participate in sport (30% to 75% participate) and cultural extracurricular activities (17% to 22% participate), known as bukatsu (Nishino and Larson, 2003). Estimates from Taiwan show a similar balance as Japan, where approximately 73% of youth participate in academic programs and 79% participate in nonacademic enrichment programs (Chen and Lu, 2009). International work, which is cited throughout the chapter, highlights the cultural variability in the extent to which participating in organized activities is a typical childhood activity, as well as the level of parent involvement in these activities (Kremer-Sadlik et al., 2010; Mahoney et al., 2002; Persson, Kerr, and Stattin, 2007). Scholars have argued that the competitive and individualistic nature of mainstream U.S. American culture encourages the importance of children’s engagement, specialization, and success in activities at an early age (Friedman, 2013; Grolnick and Seal, 2008). Trophies and individual performance are valued in U.S. American and Chinese cultures but are less evident in other countries such as Italy (Chao, 2000; Chua, 2011; Kremer-Sadlik et al., 2010). The existing work on parents and youth’s organized activities also reveals some consistencies between U.S. and international samples. Lack of access and affordability are common barriers and may be more pronounced in countries where activities have not been part of their cultural fabric until recently, such as South Korea (Lee, 2003). Parents’ educational and financial resources are critical determinants in several countries, including England, Canada, South Korea, and Taiwan (Bae and Jeon, 2013; Bean, Fortier, Post, and Chima, 2014; Shih and Yi, 2014; Kay, 2009). Parents’ beliefs and behaviors explain relations between parental resources and youth’s participation in the United States and internationally (Shih and Yi, 2014). Across several countries, general parent–child relationship quality, as well as specific parenting behaviors, are linked to youth participation in specific activities (Mahoney et al., 2002; Mahoney and Stattin, 2000; Persson et al., 2007). In countries such as Italy, England, and Norway where sports are a central cultural pastime, parental support in the form of verbal encouragement, instrumental support, and volunteering are vital to youth’s sport participation (Bean et al., 2014; Kremer-Sadlik et al., 2010; Vincent and Maxwell, 2016). In summary, parental involvement, support, and encouragement of their children’s organized activities is embedded within the broader sociocultural contexts that children live. Parental encouragement and facilitation of activities vary for boys and girls, by social class, and by ethnicity, as well as by countries of origin and immigration status.

Parental Beliefs and Children’s Organized Activities Parental beliefs about the role of organized activities reflect their perceptions and views about the kinds of experiences that children generally need to succeed at school and in life, as well as their assessments of their children’s specific needs and skills. Parental beliefs about the “benefits” of organized activities are often balanced against parental concerns about the “costs” of these activities for family life and for parents’ work and personal needs.

Parents’ General Perceptions About Activities Youth activity schedules reflect parental beliefs about what is needed to raise “balanced, well-rounded, competitive, healthy children who will be prepared for the demands of adulthood” (Gutiérrez, Izquierdo, and Kremer-Sadlik, 2010, p. 643). Some parents have gone on to say that activities are a fundamental part of childhood and view their children’s participation as an indicator of “being a ‘good’ parent” (Trussell and Shaw, 2012; Vincent and Maxwell, 2016, p. 271). In one interview study, parents identified 99 distinct benefits of activities, including child safety, following the child’s own interests, personal development, academic benefits, and socializing (Barnett 359

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and Weber, 2008). These perceived benefits fell into five broad categories. First, parents viewed activities as a better alternative for children than hanging out unsupervised with peers or doing sedentary activities such as watching TV. Second, activities were seen as enabling children to spend time doing something they enjoy and honing skills at something the children are good at. Third, activities were seen as exposing youth to opportunities to develop general life skills that parents believe contribute to becoming a successful adult, including self-worth, discipline, making a commitment, respect for others, and teamwork. Fourth, parents believed activities helped the family and parent–child relationships by providing a forum that they can share, talk about, and do together. Fifth, parents’ views were aligned with cultural values. Among Latino families, this included respeto, familism, and bringing honor to the family. Among European-American families, perceived benefits reflected values of competition and effort. Among Asian families, perceived benefits included support for the family. These perceived benefits of organized activities were not mutually exclusive. Rather, the interviews indicated that parents believe youth derive multiple benefits from each activity and that benefits accrue across various activities. At the same time, parents believe that some benefits are linked to particular activities. Parents, for example, have highlighted scouting activities as an activity for learning the value of community service (Barnett and Weber, 2008; Dunn et al., 2003; Lin et al., 2016). Parents from diverse socioeconomic backgrounds report some similar benefits of activities for their children, although working-class parents placed greater emphasis on safety and social mobility than did highincome parents (Bennett et al., 2012; Duffet et al., 2004; Outley and Floyd, 2002). Parents’ decisions about activities are not based solely on the perceived benefits of participation. Parents typically weigh the benefits against what they view are the costs of these activities for the child and the family as they make decisions about various activities. For the youth who participate, the benefits typically outweigh the costs, or parents believe that the long-term payoff is worthwhile (Gutiérrez et al., 2010). On the costs side, parents express concerns about the loss of family time, complicated logistics, and negative impacts on parent work commitments or the parents’ own leisure time (Bean et al., 2014; Bennett et al., 2012; Dunn et al., 2003; Friedman, 2013; Gutiérrez et al., 2010; Kremer-Sadlik et al., 2010; Simpkins et al., 2013; Trussell and Shaw, 2012). Working-class parents have expressed concerns about whether activities would interfere with youth’s current grades and academic success (Bennett et al., 2012; Dunn et al., 2003). Additional concerns have emerged in countries that do not have strong cultural expectations for individual success and competition or an expectation that organized activities are what children “should do” after school (Friedman, 2013; Gutiérrez et al., 2010; Vincent and Maxwell, 2016). In Italy, for example, parents were concerned that activity expectations were too high and that youth need more time after school to relax (Kremer-Sadlik et al., 2010). Although it has not been studied, we expect that parents’ beliefs about activities are reflected in youth’s participation patterns. On the one hand, if parents view a primary benefit of organized activities is to provide a safe environment, it may not matter which activity a child participates in or whether she or he switches activities so long as the activity is safe. On the other hand, if parents believe the primary benefit of organized activities is skill mastery and life-skill development, their youth may participate in the same activity for multiple years. Indeed, middle-class parents are more likely to customize activities based on child interest or talent, whereas working-class parents are less focused on customizing, but rather on finding a safe activity for their child (Bennett et al., 2012; Duffet et al., 2004; Friedman, 2013).

Parental Values and Perceptions of Children’s Abilities in Specific Areas Parents’ beliefs are linked to the instrumental support they provide that enables their children to participate in activities that are valued by the parents or that they believe their child is good at. Parents who believe a particular organized activity, like soccer or piano, is a valuable experience are more 360

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likely to seek out that activity, enroll their child, pay the fees, and encourage the child’s participation. In retrospective reports, Canadian parents said their high value of sports prompted them to pay for sport activities for their child rather than setting that money aside for college (Bean et al., 2014). Preliminary work suggests that these types of parental support mediate relations between parents’ beliefs and youth’s competence beliefs and values in music and sports (Jodl, Michael, Malanchuk, Eccles, and Sameroff, 2001; Simpkins et al., 2012). Research examining parenting and children’s motivation has often focused on the importance that parents attach to particular domains that they believe their children have skills in. Within academic subject areas as well as music, sports, and other activities, parents’ perceptions of their children’s abilities are strong predictors of parent support, youth motivational beliefs, and youth participation (Jacobs et al., 2005; for a review, see Simpkins et al., 2015). For example, mothers’ and fathers’ perceptions of their youth’s ability in sports predict slower declines in youth’s sport competence beliefs from 1st to 12th grade (Fredricks and Eccles, 2002). In summary, parental beliefs about the benefits (and costs) of organized activities are linked to children’s participation in activities in both middle childhood and adolescence. These beliefs are influenced by what parents view as their children’s skills and interests, but they also are influenced by parents’ views of what children in their community need for healthy, successful development.

Parenting Behaviors in Relation to Children’s Activities Parenting behaviors, including general aspects of parenting style, emotional support, and engagement, are related to children’s participation in and enjoyment of activities. Research also has examined the role of parents’ logistical support of children’s activities.

Parenting Styles in Relation to Organized Activities Studies have considered how parental styles such as authoritative parenting are associated with activity participation. In one study involving more than 1,000 Finnish ice hockey players (Juntumaa, Keskivaara, and Punamaki, 2005), authoritative parenting was associated with higher satisfaction, less task-irrelevant behavior, and less norm-breaking behavior among the athletes. In other research, other components of parenting styles—warmth and behavioral accountability—were related to adolescents’ organized activities. Positive, warm parent–child relationships predicted higher levels of participation in organized activities and more sustained participation over time in both the United States and Sweden (Fletcher, Elder, and Mekos, 2000; Persson et al., 2007). Parental monitoring and trust also are linked to activity participation (Mahoney and Stattin, 2000). Affording youth autonomy and minimizing controlling parenting are linked positively to youth’s motivation and engagement in activities (Grolnick and Seal, 2008). In contrast, negative parent–child interactions are related to less participation in organized activities. Among Swedish families, high levels of parent–child conflict predicted lower participation and a higher likelihood of quitting or spending some time hanging out with peers compared to youth who had more positive relations with their parents (Mahoney et al., 2002; Persson et al., 2007). In the U.S. context, broad indicators of family risk, such as low emotional support and low cognitive stimulation, are associated with lower overall participation in activities, as well as lower participation in sports and service clubs specifically (Wimer et al., 2008). Although the specific mechanisms by which these overarching qualities of parent–child relationships affect youth’s activities have largely gone untested, scholars have identified adolescents’ self-worth and attributional styles as potential mediators of relations between positive family relationships and adolescents’ participation in organized activities (Bohnert, Martin, and Garber, 2007). 361

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Specific Parental Behaviors That Support Youth Participation in Organized Activities Parents actively promote their children’s participation in organized activities through specific behaviors that provide instrumental support and modeling of those activities (Simpkins et al., 2015). Instrumental support takes several forms. Parents play a key role in locating activities and determining their appropriateness (Dorsch, Smith, and McDonough, 2015; Friedman, 2013; Jarrett et al., 2011; Outley and Floyd, 2002; Turman, 2007). Some parents actively seek opportunities for their children that they did not have when they were young (Gutiérrez et al., 2010; Simpkins, Vest, and Price, 2011). Others seek out activities for their children that they did when they were young. Once an activity is located, parents complete permission forms, schedule necessary health exams, pay activity fees, purchase necessary equipment, and provide transportation (Bhalla and Weiss, 2010; Davidson, Howe, Moore, and Sloboda, 1996; Friedman, 2013). These types of instrumental support predict higher levels of youth’s participation in and motivational beliefs about activities (Camacho and Simpkins, 2018; Pugliese and Tinsley, 2007). Although instrumental support is often defined in terms of what parents do for their children, research on parent–child planning and decision-making highlights other ways that parents provide support within ongoing interactions with their children. Decision-making about activities is often shared by children and parents during elementary school, and decision-making shifts to a largely youth-driven process during middle school and high school (Brown, Nobiling, Teufel, and Birch, 2011; Duffet et al., 2004; Gauvain and Perez, 2005). This shift is influenced by adolescents’ increased voice and autonomy and by other parent, youth, and program characteristics. Parents continue to engage in the decision-making process even when it is largely driven by adolescents, by giving encouragement, by helping youth find a good program, and by gathering information (Kang, Raffaelli, Bowers, Munoz, and Simpkins, 2017). Adolescents viewed their parents’ most important role as providing emotional support and secondarily managerial support (locating programs, ascertaining registration dates, arranging transportation), whereas parents viewed managerial support as primary and emotional support as secondary (Kang et al., 2017). The ages at which children are given more voice in determining their activities have been found to vary. In one study, U.S. Latino parents felt children were not ready to have a voice in their organized activities until age 9 compared to age 7 reported by European-American parents (Gauvain and Perez, 2005). Simpkins, Vest, and Price (2011) found that actual decisions about joining activities were more likely to be driven by bicultural adolescents when parents were more oriented toward Mexican culture. Almost 50% of Mexican-origin seventh-graders reported that enrollment decisions were largely adolescent-driven. Parents continue to be actively involved after their children enrolled in an activity. Parents actively seek information, teachable moments, and opportunities to promote positive development (Simpkins et al., 2015). They talk to the coach to get feedback on progress and areas for improvement, talk to their child about the activity, and make sure their child practices outside of the activity/lesson (Davidson et al., 1996; Dorsch et al., 2015; Friedman, 2013; Turman, 2007). Through conversations, parents can help children see the value of an activity, handle positive and negative emotional experiences, interpret situations that did not go as they had hoped, and reinforce life lessons learned through the activity (Bhalla and Weiss, 2010; Dorsch et al., 2015; Friedman, 2013; Turman, 2007). Within the context of specific activities, parents teach children skills and work on areas for improvement. Such behaviors help keep youth motivated and push them to the next level (KremerSadlik et al., 2010; Simpkins et al., 2015). Indeed, meta-analytic results suggest co-activity and encouragement are associated with increases in children’s physical activity (Pugliese and Tinsley, 2007). Youth with more supportive parents (e.g., verbal encouragement, teaching skills, making sure children practice) have an increased chance to get into specialized music schools or continue their sport and

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musical interests into high school (Davidson et al., 1996; Simpkins et al., 2015). Parents’ reports of how frequently they engage in a variety of supportive behaviors, including encouragement, logistic support, and going to community events associated with the activity, predicts youths’ long-term activity participation (Simpkins et al., 2015). Moreover, youth’s motivational beliefs mediate relations between parent support with the time youth spend in activities and their psychological engagement in activities (Camacho and Simpkins, 2018; Simpkins et al., 2015). Last, parents’ own leisure pursuits and behavior influence youth through processes associated with modeling. For example, youth whose parents are more involved in the community are more likely to participate in a greater number of activities and show more consistent participation over time in these activities than their classmates (Fletcher et al., 2000; McGee et al., 2006). Similarly, parents’ music and athletic leisure pursuits are associated with youth’s participation in music and athletics, respectively (Simpkins et al., 2015). Parents model behaviors, such as sportsmanship, which predicts children’s positive and negative behavior. Among adolescent Finnish ice hockey players, parents’ attitudes about norm-breaking behavior in sports (e.g., it’s okay to cheat or hurt another player to win) predict youth’s actual norm-breaking behavior in sports (Juntumaa et al., 2005). In addition, researchers observed spectators’ sportsmanship and unsportsman-like conduct, including cheering on opponents and yelling at referees, at third- through sixth-graders’ sport games. The behaviors of spectators, most of whom are parents, predicted athletes’ sportsmanship behaviors (Arthur-Banning, Wells, Baker, and Hegreness, 2009). Parents’ interests and specific behaviors provide messages to youth about what is valued and appropriate (e.g., norm-breaking behavior in sports). In the United States, there are strong expectations that parents support their children’s activities by attending events and being attentive (Kremer-Sadlik et al., 2010). Many of these parent behaviors occur in public spaces, and parents are vulnerable to criticism if they do not live up to expectations and norms (Friedman, 2013; Trussell and Shaw, 2012). That is not the case in all countries. Indicators of children’s success and performance, such as trophies and medals, were prominent in U.S. homes but not in Italian homes (Kremer-Sadlik et al., 2010). The press for individual success and competition in U.S. culture may prompt U.S. parents to push for success more than Italian parents. U.S. parents go to lengths to switch activities and pay for additional professional coaching to advance their child’s skills and give them a competitive edge (Friedman, 2013). Others have studied parental support in the context of youth involvement in music. In one study (Davidson et al., 1996), interviews were conducted with the 257 parents and children who had studied a musical instrument but who differed in the extent of their mastery. The most successful children had parents who were highly involved in lessons and practice when the children first began their lessons. Children who failed to continue with lessons had parents who were, on average, less interested in music and who did not change their involvement with music over their child’s learning period.

Parents’ Activity-Specific Pressure and Negative Behavior Although many parents engage in supportive behaviors, athletic coaches estimate about 36% of parents engaged in behaviors that hurt their child’s development in the activity (Gould, Lauer, Rolo, Jannes, and Pennisi, 2006). Over 100 U.S. junior tennis coaches with an average of 17 years of coaching experience noted in questionnaires the range of negative behaviors they had seen from parents. Some cases of parents’ inappropriate and physically violent behavior at youth sporting events have become infamous in the popular press (Omli, LaVoi, and Wiese-Bjornstal, 2008; Shields, Bredemeier, LaVoi, and Power, 2005). Although the incidence of physical violence among spectators at youth sporting events is low (2% to 8%), these incidents are serious and set a poor example for youth’s sportsmanship (Shields et al., 2005).

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Within youth athletics, parents have yelled; told youth to break the rules to win; complained or swore; said mean things about the other team; argued with other parents, coaches, or officials; and gotten angry with their child for mistakes (Omli et al., 2008). Although 13% of parents said they have angrily criticized their child’s performance or yelled at an official during a competition, many more youth, parents, and coaches (35% to 75%) report having witnessed fans angrily yell at a player, coach, official, or other fan during a competition (Shields et al., 2005). Nearly half of fifth- to eighth-grade youth (43%) have been teased or yelled at by a fan (Shields et al., 2005). In response to these types of behaviors, some sporting leagues have developed agreements for parents to sign or policies, such as Silent Sundays, to help keep parents’ behavior positive at competitions (Omli et al., 2008). Although most youth want their parents to attend games (Omli et al., 2008), approximately 8% to 13% of youth do not enjoy their parents watching competitions (Shields et al., 2005). Youth report that they want their parents to provide unconditional support—to tell them that they did a good job, clap if their team did something well, say “good try” if they mess up, be empathic, and control their emotions (Omli et al., 2008; Omli and Wiese-Bjornstal, 2011). Some children worry their parents will be a “demanding coach” or “crazed fan” by arguing, criticizing, coaching from the sidelines, overemphasizing winning, blaming, disrupting, yelling, and fanatically cheering—all of which are upsetting and counterproductive for youth (Gould et al., 2006; Omli and Wiese-Bjornstal, 2011). Because some parents become emotionally invested or base their self-worth on youth’s activity outcomes, they need to learn how to handle their child’s mistakes and loses in a constructive manner (Dorsch et al., 2015; Grolnick and Seal, 2008). Youth are unsure their parents will be proud and worry about getting yelled at due to poor performance (Dworkin and Larson, 2006). Such parent behavior can lead to youth’s diminished enjoyment of sports, feeling discouraged, and sometimes quitting (Anderson, Funk, Elliott, and Smith, 2003; Grolnick and Seal, 2008; Gutiérrez et al., 2010). The majority of the studies of parents’ negative behavior has been studied within athletics, but negative behaviors also have been examined in other types of organized activities, such as performing arts and competitive chess (Dworkin and Larson, 2006; Friedman, 2013; Grolnick and Seal, 2008). In a qualitative study of 55 adolescents who participated in a variety of activities, adolescents reported that their parents would yell and pressure them to join/quit or to perform better (Dworkin and Larson, 2006). For example, one adolescent male noted that “if I ever quit something, my dad would probably scream my head off ” (p 10). Although 90% of youth agree that they need a push from parents now and again (Duffet et al., 2004), sometimes the pressure can be too intense, the focus on winning is too strong, or parents do not display good sportsmanship (Grolnick and Seal, 2008).

Complementarity of Maternal and Paternal Behaviors Although mothers’ and fathers’ support of their children’s activities are positively correlated, there are differences in the types of support they provide (Davison, Cutting, and Birch, 2003). Mothers typically carry the heavier burden when it comes to logistic support—activity enrollment, schedule organization, providing transportation, and purchasing equipment (Bean et al., 2014; Davison et al., 2003; Trussell and Shaw, 2012; Vincent and Maxwell, 2016). Fathers are more likely to model participation in sports activities and to coach youth sports, which aligns with the masculine gender stereotypes for sports (Bean et al., 2014; Davison et al., 2003). Those specific behaviors, namely mothers’ instrumental support (in the form of provision of equipment) and fathers’ modeling (in the form of coaching), were the strongest predictors of youth’s subsequent sport motivational beliefs among a variety of behaviors (Fredricks and Eccles, 2005). If mothers and fathers provide complementary supports, having support from both parents should be advantageous. Indeed, girls’ engagement in physical activities increased from 30% with no support from either parent to 70% with high support of both parents (Davison et al., 2003). This pattern 364

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suggests that although parent support is not a necessary condition, support from mothers and fathers is additive within the sports context. Other research examining the cumulative effect of maternal and paternal supports of organized athletic and music activities finds a similar pattern—essentially more support is associated with higher youth motivation and participation (Fredricks and Eccles, 2005; Fredricks et al., 2005). An important factor to consider is how researchers have analyzed parental support. When multiple indicators (e.g., modeling, encouragement, purchase of equipment) of parent support are simultaneously entered into an analysis to estimate their unique contribution, almost none is statistically significant in part because of collinearity. When researchers combined parent support into an overall promotive score, strong positive, linear relations emerged for both sports and instrumental music (Fredricks and Eccles, 2005; Fredricks et al., 2005). These findings corroborate the additive nature of parenting support of youth activities, and they underscore that no single parent behavior is the primary motivator for all youth.

Changes in Parenting Across Stages of Participation Parents’ beliefs and expectations about their children’s activities change as their children develop. They are more likely to select and guide the choice of organized activities in early childhood. During middle childhood, especially the upper elementary grades, children begin to exert a greater voice in which activities they want to do. During adolescence, activities are guided much more by adolescents’ interests and skills. In addition to changes associated with children’s ages, there is evidence that parental support is associated with youth’s and parents’ skill levels. Research conducted in music and sports suggests that parenting varies based on (1) youth’s stage of participation, (2) youth’s skill level, and (3) parents’ expertise in and value of the activity (Côté, 1999; Davidson et al., 1996; Dorsch et al., 2015; Harwood and Knight, 2009; Simpkins et al., 2015). Côté (1999), for example, detailed how parental behaviors changed across three stages of athletic participation: the sampling years, the specializing years, and the investment years. During the sampling years, parents take the lead in exposing their child to sports by selecting and enrolling in activities with the goal of sparking initial interest and with an emphasis on the child having fun. During the specializing years, youth focus their effort on a single or limited number of specific activities. The parents’ role shifts from “leading and directing” to “following and facilitating” (Côté, 1999, p. 406). It is during this stage that parents often have a growing interest in the activity and, as a result, their investments increase. During the investment years, adolescents move into elite, competitive athletic teams. Parents provide heavy investments during these years, but their role focuses on logistic support and providing advice to help youth deal with setbacks, such as injuries, fatigue, and loss of interest, as well as dealing with stress, balance, and anxiety. Coaches rather than parents provide advice on athletic skills. The substantial investments on the part of parents have emerged in other studies of elite athletes and musicians (Bean et al., 2014; Davidson et al., 1996; Dorsch et al., 2015). As youth participation advances, parents also acquire increased expertise in the activity that boosts their confidence and enables them to better support their child (Harwood and Knight, 2009). Although Cote’s work focused on athletic participation, it would be useful for researchers to examine the stages of support in other activity domains, including the visual and performing arts, chess, debate, and other youth activities. In summary, general aspects of parenting such as authoritative and emotional supportive parenting are related to children’s greater participation in organized activities. Parental instrumental support and modeling of specific activities such as athletics and music also are related to their children’s participation in specific activities. The quality of children’s experiences in these activities are shaped by their parents’ behaviors—for better and for worse. 365

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Parents as Activity Leaders In addition to providing logistical and emotional support for organized activities, parents serve as the leaders of youth activities, especially during middle childhood. These experiences have the potential of promoting positive parent–child relationships, but also have been linked to conflictual, negative relationships. One area in which parent-leaders are common is youth sports. In a national survey of almost 2,000 parents (Pew Research Center, 2015), three-quarters reported that their children, ages 6 to 17 years, had participated in organized sports during the previous year, and almost one-third of the parents indicated that they helped coach their child within the same period. Parent-coaches are more common for parents whose children are under the age of 13 compared to parents of adolescents, and fathers are more likely to serve as coaches (Pew Research Center, 2015). Others have found over 80% of parents reported that they had, at some point, served as a coach for their child’s team (Weiss and Sisley, 1984). Several qualitative studies have examined the dynamics of the interactions between the parentcoaches and their children and other team members. In one study, Weiss and Fretwell (2005) explored the nuances of these relationships. Six father-coaches who had been coaching their 11- and 12-yearold sons in soccer for at least one year were interviewed, along with their sons and two teammates. Both positive and negative aspects of the father-coach and player-son interactions were identified. The sons appreciated special attention, being involved in decision-making, and spending time with their father, but the boys also reported additional pressure, conflict, and unfair treatment. The responses suggested that conflict in sport settings between young adolescents and their fathers is exacerbated by developmental changes in the adolescent father–son relationship. Father-coaches expressed difficulty in separating roles as parent and coach. Other boys on the teams reported that the father-coaches showed differential treatment (usually favoritism, but also more criticism) toward their player-sons. In a second study of 89 young adolescent boys, the sons of parent-coaches did not differ in competition anxiety or participation motivation compared to their teammates who were not coached by their fathers (Baber, Suhki, and White, 1999). Other qualitative studies of parent-coach/child-athlete dyads examined individual sports. Teenage swimmers and their parent-coaches described their experiences as more positive when both the parent and child reported high levels of mutual dependence and low levels of perceived controlling behavior and conflicting interests (Jowett, Timson-Katchis, and Adams, 2007). Other investigators have noted gender differences in parent-coaches’ relationships with their children, with a particular focus on the challenges of father–daughter dyads. In a study of female tennis players and their father-coaches, Schmid, Shannon, Bernstein, Rishell, and Griffith (2015) found that participants emphasized negative aspects of the parent-coach relationship over the benefits. Challenges included difficulties in managing blurred boundaries, pressure to gain paternal approval, and enduring frequent conflicts. In other research, what father-coaches saw as encouragement was perceived by their adolescent daughters as indications that the daughters lacked competence (McCann, 2005). Girls also perceived higher levels of conflicts than their fathers did (Jowett, 2008). Daughters preferred democratic leadership and authoritative parenting approaches of their father-coaches (McCann, 2005). In addition to serving as their children’s coaches, parents serve as activity leaders in the youth organizations such as Girl Scouts and Boy Scouts (Pearlman, 2007; Rogoff, Topping, Baker-Sennett, and Lacasa, 2002). The majority of mothers of Girl Scouts donate time in some capacity, and mothers are largely responsible for overseeing and arranging the organization’s major fundraiser, the selling of Girl Scout cookies (Girl Scout Research Institute, 2012; Meijs and Karr, 2004). There has been little systematic research examining the processes and outcomes associated with parent-leaders on the quality of the scouting experiences for program participants—either for the parents or for the children.

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One notable exception is Rogoff ’s analysis of the shared planning and execution of cookie sales by two troops of Girl Scouts, their mothers, and members of the community. This observation (Rogoff et al., 2002) illustrates the potential value of examining parent-led organized activities as a promising developmental context. A fertile area for future multimethod and multirespondent research is a systematic examination of parenting in the context of parent-leaders’ interactions with their own children and other children.

Parent Characteristics as “Selection Factors” Participation in organized activities is influenced by multiple factors, including children’s interests and skills, neighborhood, and school resources, as well as parents’ beliefs, income, and work schedules. Identifying these factors is part of the general research agendum that uses quantitative analyses to determine factors that predict children’s participation in organized activities. Researchers have typically studied “selection effects” using quantitative analyses in which multiple factors are included in statistical models that predict the intensity, frequency, and breadth of children’s organized activities. The goal of these analyses is to identify the combined and unique effects of particular familial characteristics, such as parental education, income, and work hours, on children’s participation in organized activities. In this section, we focus on family circumstances and parent characteristics as selection factors.

Reasons for Studying Family Selection Factors Studies of selection factors are motivated by several research questions. The first is a substantive interest in understanding the impact of various family characteristics on the type, frequency, intensity, and duration of children’s organized activities. Several researchers such as Simpkins and colleagues (Simpkins, O’Donnell et al., 2011) have examined this substantive issue. The results of this body of research are noteworthy because they document sources of inequities in children’s access to organized activities. Others have studied family selection to identify family covariates to include in analyses that test links between organized activities and child developmental outcomes. Because factors such as parental education and family income are associated with both organized activities and child developmental outcomes, these family characteristics (and not organized activities) may account for obtained links between organized activities and child outcomes. Controlling for family selection lessens the likelihood that obtained program effects are the result of selection bias. Several research teams (Covay and Carbonaro, 2010; Dumais, 2006; Posner and Vandell, 1999) have studied family selection effects and organized activities in this way. A third group of researchers has focused on issues of family selection in an effort to identify why some activities are more successful than others in attracting and sustaining youth engagement in their offerings (see Pearson, Russell, and Reisner, 2007 for an example). This information is used to align program offerings to families and children they serve. Understanding these beliefs and preferences enables programs to identify factors that “pull” families to enroll their youth in some programs and to continue those activities over time, as well as to illuminate factors that “push” children and families out of activities. Collectively, these studies of family selection have uncovered several family characteristics that consistently relate to young people joining, persisting in, and dropping out of activities.

Maternal Education and Family Income Studies of family selection effects have considered a number of factors in relations to children’s organized activities. Several of these factors—maternal education, family income, household structure,

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and maternal employment—are consistent predictors of organized activities, even after controlling for other factors. Maternal education, for example, is associated with dramatic differences in participation in organized activities. Roughly three times as many children (ages 5 to 12 years) whose mothers have four-year college degrees are involved in sports, clubs, and lessons after school compared to their peers whose mothers did not graduate from high school (U.S. Census Bureau, 2009). Similar differences are evident for adolescents (ages 12 to 17 years). These differences mirror findings from earlier nationally representative surveys in the United States (Kleiner et al., 2004; Smith, 2002). In multivariate analyses that include maternal education and other family factors, mothers’ educational background continues to be a significant predictor of their children’s activities (Covay and Carbonaro, 2010). Family income predicts large differences in participation rates. Drawing on data from the Census Bureau, Duncan and Murnane (2016) found substantial differences in expenditures on enrichment activities for children in the lowest and highest income quintiles, differences that have dramatically increased over a 25-year period. In the 1972–1973 survey, high-income families spent about $2,850 more per year, per child on child enrichment than low-income families did. However, by the 2005–2006 school year, this gap had nearly tripled, to $8,000. These spending differences have been largest for enrichment activities such as music lessons, travel, and summer camps (Kaushal, Magnuson, and Waldfogel, 2011). Based on their analyses of the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, a nationally representative data set, Covay and Carbonaro (2010) determined that both parental education and family income predicted extracurricular activity participation during middle childhood, findings that have been replicated in other longitudinal research focused on adolescents (Feldman and Matjasko, 2007). Duncan and Murnane (2016) argued that differential access to such activities may help to explain the gaps in academic achievement and vocabulary between children from high-income families and those from low-income families, an area that we will examine in a later section.

Maternal Employment Other reports have focused on the effects of maternal employment on children’s participation in organized programs. Here, consistent findings are reported in several nationally representative surveys (Capizzano et al., 2000; Kleiner et al., 2004; Smith, 2002). Children are more likely to attend afterschool programs when their mothers are employed, when mothers work more hours, when mothers work traditional “9 to 5” schedules, and when children reside in single-parent households rather than two-parent households. For many working parents, organized activities in the form of both afterschool programs and extracurricular activities serve as childcare (Laughlin, 2013). In summary, studies of selection factors have underscored the roles of parental education, family income, and maternal employment as significant predictors of children’s participation in organized activities. Much of this research has occurred in the U.S. context. Further study of family selection effects in other countries is needed.

Effects of Organized Activities on Children and Parents Parental support of their children’s organized activities is influenced by their belief that these activities promote children’s psychosocial and academic competencies and limit children’s exposure to unsafe or risky environments. Are these beliefs consistent with empirical evidence? In this section, we consider the research that examined links between organized activities and youth developmental outcomes. We then consider studies that asked if relations between organized activities and child developmental outcomes are moderated by parenting. We conclude the section by examining effects of organized activities on parents and families. 368

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Linking Organized Activities to Child Developmental Outcomes There is a substantial body of research that has investigated associations between organized activities and the academic, socioemotional, and behavioral functioning of young people in middle childhood and adolescence. This research has been summarized in a number of reviews and meta-analyses (Farb and Matjasko, 2012; Mahoney et al., 2009; Roth, Malone, and Brooks-Gunn, 2010; Vandell et al., 2015). In this section, we highlight findings related to self-perceptions, attachment to school, positive social behaviors, academic achievement and performance, and reductions in problem behaviors. In a meta-analysis of 68 experimental and quasi-experimental studies of after-school programs serving children and adolescents, Durlak, Weissberg, and Pachan (2010) reported significant program effects on children’s (1) self-perceptions, (2) bonding to school, (3) positive social behaviors, (4) achievement test scores, (5) school grades, and (6) reductions in problem behaviors. In follow-up meta-analyses, Durlak and colleagues found substantially larger effects in higher-quality programs whose offerings were SAFE: that is, Sequenced—activities were connected and coordinated for skill development, Active—activities utilized “active” forms of learning, Focused—at least one component of the program was explicitly devoted to developing personal or social skills, and Explicit—the program explicitly targeted specific personal or social skills. Self-perceptions, positive social behaviors, school bonding, achievement test scores, school grades, and (reduced) problem behaviors were greater for youth who attended SAFE programs relative to youth who did not attend a SAFE program. A second meta-analysis (Lauer et al., 2006) focused on the effects of after-school programs on academic functioning. This analysis was restricted to experimental designs that examined program impacts on the academic functioning of low-income youth. Here, significant program impacts are found for both reading and math achievement. Follow-up analyses determined that positive program impacts on reading and math achievement were evident only when program attendance exceeded 44 hours in reading and 45 hours in math. Other research syntheses have examined links between participation in extracurricular activities and child developmental outcomes. Much of this research draws on nationally representative longitudinal surveys, not evaluations of particular after-school programs. Feldman and Matjasko (2005) summarized findings from 36 publications published between 1981 and 2004, and Farb and Matjasko (2012) summarized findings from an additional 52 papers published between 2005 and 2009. These reviews concluded that extracurricular activities are consistently related to higher grades, school bonding, self-esteem, psychosocial adjustment, positive peer networks, college plans, college completion, and adult employment. Participation in extracurricular activities also is linked to reductions in negative outcomes, such as tobacco, alcohol, and drug use; antisocial behavior; and truancy. Over time, these studies of extracurricular activities have become more analytically rigorous. They routinely incorporate controls for selection, including youth behavior at baseline. Fixed-effects analyses and replication across different data sets lend further credence to the findings. Collectively these findings are consistent with parents’ beliefs and expectations that organized activities are often “beneficial” and “supportive” of their children’s development, although these effects are conditioned by the quality of the activities, the children’s interest, and engagement in the activities.

Are Effects of Organized Activities Moderated by Parenting? Particularly relevant for the focus of this Handbook is the question of whether associations between organized activities and child developmental outcomes are moderated by parenting. Conceptually this moderation might take three forms: (1) a compensatory model in which organized activities are particularly beneficial for youth who receive low support at home, or (2) an accumulated advantaged model in which organized activities are particularly beneficial for youth who are advantaged because of family income or supportive parenting, or (3) a minimal threshold model in which parenting quality 369

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or organized activities need to reach particular thresholds before positive effects of organized activities are evident. These three models are not mutually exclusive. All three forms of moderation may occur, depending on children’s developmental status, the aspect of parenting being studied, and the developmental outcome being considered. Several studies have found evidence of parenting moderating the effects of organized activities during middle childhood. Covay and Carbonaro (2010) examined parenting as a moderator of organized activities in analyses of the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study—Kindergarten Cohort (ECLS-K). Consistent with the compensatory hypothesis, low-income children showed greater gains in noncognitive skills than higher-income children when they participated in extracurricular activities between kindergarten and third grade. In longitudinal analyses of the NICHD Study of Early Childcare and Youth Development, Auger, Pierce, and Vandell (2013) found evidence that pointed to low-income children deriving greater cognitive benefits of after-school activities. In that study, consistent with a compensatory role, organized activities appeared to be particularly beneficial for the math achievement of low-income children in both grade 3 and grade 5, relative to middle-income and high-income children. Similar differential effects associated with family income are reported in an Australian longitudinal study (Blomfield and Barber, 2011). Relations between extracurricular activities and self-concept and feelings of self-worth were larger for low-income students than for high-income students. There also is evidence that relations between out-of-school time and adolescent development are moderated by quality of parenting. In a longitudinal study of Swedish adolescents, positive and supportive parenting served a protective role when youth changed from spending time in structured activities to hanging out with unsupervised peers. When parenting was positive and supportive, unsupervised time was less likely to be linked to increased delinquency (Persson et al., 2007). These findings are similar to Steinberg’s (1986) U.S. findings in which adolescents whose parents knew their whereabouts or in which parents combined warmth and control were less susceptible to negative peer influences when unsupervised.

Effects of Organized Activities on Parents Parents face ongoing challenges balancing work and family demands, which are further complicated by the demands (and expectations) associated with organized activities. In households with more than one child, families report how children’s activities need to be coordinated in terms of transportation and cost to support the needs of all of the children in the family (Price, Simpkins, and Menjívar, 2017; Vandell et al., 2015). Parents utilize a variety of strategies for balancing these demands. In some cases, families limit their children to only one activity at a time to reduce scheduling conflicts and preserve some “family time” (Gutiérrez et al., 2010). And sometimes children participate in the after-school activities at their school or in the neighborhood so that parents are not needed to provide transportation (Parsad and Lewis, 2009). Families also turn to organized activities as a form of reliable childcare that enable parents to work (Kleiner et al., 2004; Vandell et al., 2015). Relatively little is known about such parenting decisions and the implications of those decisions for individuals’ adjustment and systems within families, including sibling relationships, parent–child relationships, and overall family functioning (Bean et al., 2014; Côté, 1999; Kay, 2009). Parents’ support of youth’s activities also needs to be balanced with other family needs. Families have finite resources in terms of time, energy, and monetary resources. Parents have to decide the extent to which those resources are invested in their children’s organized activities versus other family and individual pursuits, such as shared family dinners, family vacations, time devoted to schoolwork, or parent leisure-time (Gutiérrez et al., 2010; Trussell and Shaw, 2012). Parents are also trying to strike a balance between children’s unstructured free time at home when children may watch TV or hang out with friends and children’s time spent in organized activities. 370

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An issue that has received considerable attention is whether children (and parents) are exhausted and stressed from being overscheduled (Gutiérrez et al., 2010; Mahoney, Harris, and Eccles, 2006). Although support for the overscheduled hypothesis has not been found for the majority of youth in the United States (Mahoney et al., 2006), it is possible that it is parents, not youth, who feel overscheduled and stressed. In an era of high work expectations and high home expectations, many parents may be challenged to achieve a work–life balance (Voydanoff, 2002). Youth’s activities can add to this challenge. In order to accommodate these competing demands, some parents limit each child’s participation to one sport per season or a particular number of activities (Gutiérrez et al., 2010). Although a somewhat special case, parents whose families include elite athletes and talented musicians face particular challenges (Feldman and Andrews, 2019). Sibling jealousy is reported even when parents actively strive to treat and invest in each child equally (Kay, 2009). Jealousy is exacerbated by parents’ decisions to devote disproportionate family resources (time and money) to one child at the expense of their other children (Feinberg, McHale, and Whiteman, 2019). In summary, organized activities are linked to a wide range of outcomes that include effects on children’s academic, social, and behavioral well-being. Some of these effects are intensified by parental warmth and support and lessened by parental criticism and hostility. Although less investigated, there is some evidence of effects of organized activities on parents and families, as well as on the children themselves.

Directions for Future Research in Parent-Organized Activities Several promising directions for future research can build off the current research that has studied linkages between parenting and children’s organized activities. The first is a need for additional longitudinal study that examines the interplay between parenting and organized activities from middle childhood through adolescence, especially in diverse contexts. Large-scale surveys have described age changes in patterns of youth participation in organized activities (both after-school programs and extracurricular activities), but we know little about how these changes are negotiated between parents and youth in different ethnic groups and income levels. A relational dynamic systems perspective predicts reciprocal processes in which parents’ beliefs and behavior are influenced by their children’s interests, feelings, experiences, and skills, but these processes have not been studied in any detail, especially in different sociocultural contexts. Studies of these reciprocal processes can inform our growing understanding of parenting in this context. A second promising area of research is further consideration of the ways in which the effects of organized activities on child developmental outcomes are moderated by parenting and family circumstances. There is considerable evidence that organized activities are linked to academic, social, and behavioral development during middle childhood and adolescence, but additional research is needed to elucidate the conditions under which parental behaviors (warmth and support versus harshness and criticism) and family circumstances such as poverty may moderate these relations. A third area that warrants additional attention is research identifying the effects of children’s organized activities on parents and families. Qualitative research suggests that activities influence families in a myriad of ways, including parents’ work schedules, family meals, and vacations, but many of these potential influences have not been studied quantitatively. In addition, less attention has been given to how children’s organized activities influence how parents think about themselves or their children. Finally, although international research that examines organized activities is growing, much of this work has focused on the effects of programs and activities on child developmental outcomes. Relatively little research has considered the interplay between parenting beliefs, parenting behaviors, and youth-organized activities in these broader international contexts. 371

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Conclusions Although children’s organized activities are influenced by their own interests and skills, they also are influenced by parents—by the parents’ beliefs and behaviors, and by the families’ financial and social resources. In this chapter, we sought to bring together and integrate a growing body of research examining these processes in the United States and internationally. This research is part of a body of work that reflects a recognition of the importance of children’s organized activities as a developmental context and the central role that parents play in this aspect of their children’s lives even though parents are not physically present for much of the time. Advances in understanding the links between organized activities and parenting have been guided by several theoretical frameworks. Ecological systems theory highlighted the need to study the processes and social interactions within the organized activities microsystem and the family microsystem—and the links between these microsystems. The theory’s delineation of the mesosystem and the exosystem has informed research that examined the interplay between home and organized activities and between parents’ work situations and children’s activities. The relational developmental systems paradigm has yielded a complementary body of research that highlights the role of youth as active agents within the context of their activities. Expectancy value theory has been useful in guiding research that examines parents’ expectations about the perceived benefits versus perceived costs of organized activities and the effects of these expectations on parental behaviors, child motivation, and child achievement. Sociological theories highlighted the roles of social and cultural capital and concerted cultivation in describing the influence of social class and cultural beliefs on children’s organized activities. Research conducted in the United States and elsewhere in the world has demonstrated that organized activities are embedded in the sociocultural contexts in which children live. Social class, gender, ethnicity, and immigration status have pervasive impacts on children’s access and ongoing participation in organized activities. Although some after-school programs are specifically funded to provide activities for low-income children, most programs and activities are funded by fees paid by parents. Not surprisingly, given the financial pressures faced by low-and moderate-income families, children of high-income families are much more likely to participate in organized activities. Activities also are organized along gendered lines, with boys being more likely to participate in sports and girls more likely to participate in arts and music activities, differences that are aligned with parental beliefs and expectations about differences in their children’s interests and skills. In the United States, AfricanAmerican, European-American, and Asian-American youth are more likely than Latin American youth to participate in organized extracurricular activities, although the specific types of activities (sports, music, academic enrichment) tend to vary in different ethnic groups. Given the demands that organized activities place on family resources (time and money) and nostalgia for an era in which young people had more free time to play on their own to explore, studies of the links between organized activities and child developmental outcomes are relevant. Evidence from meta-analyses and research syntheses indicates that attending after-school programs (especially those that are of high quality) and extracurricular activities (of sufficient dosage) are associated with better academic outcomes (grades and test scores), reduced problem behaviors and misconduct, and more positive social outcomes (school boding and social competencies). There also is evidence that program effects are moderated by family income, with programs effects on cognitive and noncognitive functioning being larger for low-income children.

Acknowledgments Work on this project was supported by grants to Deborah Lowe Vandell from the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation, the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (P01HD065704, G. Duncan, PI), and the National Science Foundation (1519686, Gershoff 372

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and Crosnoe, PIs). The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily reflect the official views of the funding agencies.

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Deborah Lowe Vandell et al. Roth, J. L., Malone, L. M., and Brooks-Gunn, J. (2010). Does the amount of participation in afterschool programs relate to developmental outcomes? A review of the literature. American Journal of Community Psychology, 45(3–4), 310–324. Schmid, O. N., Shannon, V. R., Bernstein, M., Rishell, C., and Griffith, C. (2015). “It’s not just your dad, it’s not just your coach. . .”: The dual-relationship in female tennis players. Sport Psychologist, 29(3). Shields, D., Bredemeier, B. L., LaVoi, N. M., and Power, F. C. (2005). The sport behaviour of youth, parents and coaches. Journal of Research in Character Education, 3(1), 43–59. Shih, Y. P., and Yi, C. C. (2014). Cultivating the difference: Social class, parental values, cultural capital and children’s after-school activities in Taiwan. Journal of Comparative Family Studies, 55–75. Simpkins, S. D., Davis-Kean, P. E., and Eccles, J. S. (2005). Parents’ socializing behavior and children’s participation in math, science, and computer out-of-school activities. Applied Developmental Science, 9(1), 14–30. Simpkins, S. D., Delgado, M. Y., Price, C. D., Quach, A., and Starbuck, E. (2013). Socioeconomic status, ethnicity, culture, and immigration: Examining the potential mechanisms underlying Mexican-origin adolescents’ organized activity. Developmental Psychology, 49(4), 706–721. Simpkins, S. D., Fredricks, J. A., and Eccles, J. S. (2012). Charting the Eccles’ expectancy-value model from mothers’ beliefs in childhood to youths’ activities in adolescence. Developmental Psychology, 48(4), 1019–1032. Simpkins, S. D., Fredricks, J. A., and Eccles, J. S. (2015). Parent beliefs to youth choices: Mapping the sequence of predictors from childhood to adolescence. Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development, 80, 1–15. Simpkins, S. D., Fredricks, J. A., and Lin, A. R. (in press). Families and engagement in afterschool programs. In B. H. Fiese, M. Celano, K. Deater-Deckard, E. Jouriles, and M. Whisman (Series Ed). APA Handbook of contmeporary family psychology:Vol. 2. Applications of contemporary family psychology. Simpkins, S. D., O’Donnell, M., Delgado, M. Y., and Becnel, J. N. (2011). Latino adolescents’ participation in extracurricular activities: How important are family resources and cultural orientation? Applied Developmental Science, 15(1), 37–50. Simpkins, S. D., Vest, A. E., and Becnel, J. N. (2010). Participating in sport and music activities in adolescence: The role of activity participation and motivational beliefs during elementary school. Journal of Youth and Adolescence, 39(11), 1368–1386. Simpkins, S. D., Vest, A. E., Dawes, N. P., and Neuman, K. I. (2010). Dynamic relations between parents’ behaviors and children’s motivational beliefs in sports and music. Parenting: Science and Practice, 10, 97–118. Simpkins, S. D., Vest, A. E., and Price, C. D. (2011). Intergenerational continuity and discontinuity in Mexicanorigin youths’ participation in organized activities: Insights from mixed-methods. Journal of Family Psychology, 25(6), 814–824. Smith, K. E. (2002). Who’s minding the kids? Child care arrangements, spring 1997. Washington, DC: U.S. Census Bureau. Steinberg, L. (1986). Latchkey children and susceptibility to peer pressure: An ecological analysis. Developmental Psychology, 22, 433. Telzer, E. H., and Fuligni, A. J. (2009). A longitudinal daily diary study of family assistance and academic achievement among adolescents from Mexican, Chinese, and European backgrounds. Journal of Youth and Adolescence, 38(4), 560–571. Trussell, D. E., and Shaw, S. M. (2012). Organized youth sport and parenting in public and private spaces. Leisure Sciences, 34(5), 377–394. Turman, P. D. (2007). Parental sport involvement: Parental influence to encourage young athlete continued sport participation. Journal of Family Communication, 7(3), 151–175. Urban, J. B., Lewin-Bizan, S., and Lerner, R. M. (2009). The role of neighborhood ecological assets and activity involvement in youth developmental outcomes: Differential impacts of asset poor and asset rich neighborhoods. Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology, 30(5), 601–614. U.S. Census Bureau. (2009). A child’s day. Retrieved from www.census.gov/hhes/socdemo/children/data/sipp/ well2009/tables.html U.S. Department of Agriculture. (2017). 4-H and positive youth development. Retrieved from https://nifa.usda. gov/program/4-h-positive-youth-development Vandell, D. L., Larson, R. W., Mahoney, J., and Watts, T. (2015). Children’s organized activities. In R. M. Lerner (Series Ed.), M. H. Bornstein and T. Leventhal (Vol. Eds.), Handbook of child psychology and developmental science, Vol. 4: Child psychology in practice (7th Ed., pp. 305–344). Hoboken, NJ: Wiley. Vandell, D. L., and Posner, J. (1999). 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Children’s Organized Activities Bouffard (Eds.), New directions for youth development: No. 105. Participation in youth programs: Enrollment, attendance, and engagement (pp. 121–129). San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Vincent, C., and Maxwell, C. (2016). Parenting priorities and pressures: Furthering understanding of “concerted cultivation”. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 37(2), 269–281. Voydanoff, P. (2002). Linkages between the work-family interface and work, family, and individual outcomes: An integrative model. Journal of Family Issues, 23(1), 138–164. Weininger, E. B., Lareau, A., and Conley, D. (2015). What money doesn’t buy: Class resources and children’s participation in organized extracurricular activities. Social Forces, 94(2), 479–503. Weiss, M. R., and Fretwell, S. D. (2005). The parent-coach/child-athlete relationship in youth sport: Cordial, contentious, or conundrum? Research Quarterly for Exercise and Sport, 76(3), 286–305. Weiss, M. R., and Sisley, B. L. (1984). Where have all the coaches gone? Sociology of Sport Journal, 1, 332–347. Welk, G. J., Wood, K., and Morss, G. (2003). Parental influences on physical activity in children: An exploration of potential mechanisms. Pediatric Exercise Science, 15(1), 19–33. Wimer, C., Simpkins, S. D., Dearing, E., Bouffard, S. M., Caronongan, P., and Weiss, H. B. (2008). Predicting youth out-of-school time participation: Multiple risks and developmental differences. Merrill-Palmer Quarterly, 179–207. Yao, E. L. (1985). A comparison of family characteristics of Asian-American and Anglo-American high achievers. International Journal of Comparative Sociology, 26, 198–208.

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13 PARENTING IN THE DIGITAL AGE Rachel Barr

Introduction Parenting young children in the digital age provides a number of challenges and opportunities. Introduction to the digital world begins early (Barr and Linebarger, 2017; Barr, Danziger, Hilliard, Andolina, and Ruskis, 2010), and parents must navigate the introduction of media content, and a multitude of devices. They must gauge their children’s cognitive, social, and physical capability to operate, comprehend, and learn from multiple forms of media. They must also adapt to the child’s increasing knowledge and autonomy with media. At the same time, parents are navigating their own rapidly changing digital worlds. Not surprisingly, the consequences of parental media use and involvement are far reaching. At present, however, the long-term effects of early media exposure on social and cognitive development are largely unknown. The present chapter outlines current levels of exposure by both children and their parents, the role that parents play in supporting learning, and media factors that might interfere with the trajectory of typical development. Although most research has been conducted with television, the extant literature from newer media is also reviewed. The chapter highlights the convergence and divergence of effects between different media types. Finally, the opportunity for the development of effective parenting interventions capitalizing on technology is discussed. The chapter ends with a section on future directions.

Media Exposure During Early Childhood Television and Prerecorded Video During the 1970s, children were first exposed to television on a regular basis at approximately 2.5 years of age. By the 1990s, however, television programs and videos/DVDs started being produced specifically for infants. This new media content shifted the age of regular exposure downward. Using data collected during the early 1990s, Certain and Kahn (2002) reported that 17% of 0- to 1-year-olds and 48% of 1- to 2-year-olds watched television. A decade later, researchers reported that 40% of 3-month-old infants and 90% of 24-month-olds regularly watched television and DVDs (Zimmerman, Christakis, and Meltzoff, 2007a). Those 6- to 24-month-olds exposed to television regularly spent one to two hours per day “watching TV” (Mendelsohn et al., 2008; Rideout and Hamel, 2006), which accounted for approximately 10% to 15% of their awake time. 380

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In the late 1990s, a shift in the target audience of TV programming and DVDs resulted in new concerns regarding media and child development (Lauricella, Blackwell, and Wartella, 2017; Wartella and Robb, 2007). Infant-directed content (e.g., Baby Einstein) proliferated. The American Academy of Pediatrics (1999) recommended that parents refrain from allowing children under 2 years to watch screen media out of fear that parents would rely on these products too heavily, which would then displace important caregiver–child interactions. Despite this recommendation, 83% of young children used screen media in a typical day, and 74% of those under 2 had watched TV (Rideout, Vandewater, and Wartella, 2003). By 2005, children under 6 were spending nearly two hours per day with screen media (Rideout and Hamel, 2006). Parents consistently report that their children 8 years and under view an average of approximately two hours of media exposure per day (Barr, Danziger et al., 2010; Cingel and Krcmar, 2013; Goh et al., 2016; Lauricella, Wartella, and Rideout, 2015; Nikken and Schols, 2015; Przybylski and Weinstein, 2017b; Rideout, 2017). Common Sense Media conducted a census of media exposure using a U.S. nationally representative study of approximately 1,400 parents of children aged 8 and younger (Rideout, 2017). Although the amount of television content has remained constant, the way in which it has been viewed has not. There are multiple forms of content delivery (streaming video, DVDs, cable, broadcast television, DVR, YouTube) and multiple devices on which to present video content (television set, laptop, tablet, smartphone). Rideout (2017) defined television exposure as follows: Total TV/video time includes time spent watching TV or movies on a television set, watching DVDs or videotapes, or watching any type of online or streaming video, such as YouTube-type videos or TV shows or movies watched through a website or internet-based subscription service, whether on a computer or mobile device. (p. 10) By this definition, parents report that children under 8 are exposed to 1 hour, 40 minutes of televised content per day, which accounts for 72% of all screen time. Most families (75%) subscribe to a streaming service. Children under 8 years frequently stream video content (21% of viewing time) or view from sites like YouTube (17% of viewing time) either on family television sets or mobile devices (Rideout, 2017). Patterns of exposure are similar in Singapore (Goh et al., 2016) and Hong Kong (Fu et al., 2017). Although estimates of exposure in different countries have been reported, additional cross-cultural comparisons across content and context are needed. In early research, parents reported very low levels of television exposure, particularly during early childhood. Anderson and Pempek (2005) cautioned that parents may have misinterpreted questions such as, “How much time would you say your child spends watching television on a typical weekday?” (Certain and Kahn, 2002) by misconstruing the definition of an infant watching television. In particular, parents may have failed to report exposure to background television (i.e., television that the parents were viewing and was on in the room but that was not directed towards children), resulting in underreporting both the earliest age of exposure and of total media exposure (see the section on the effects of background television). Mendelsohn and colleagues (2008) confirmed this suspicion when they measured exposure to television, defined as when the baby was in the room and awake. They reported that 6- to 9-month-old infants from low-income Latin American families were exposed to approximately 50% child-directed and 50% adult-directed programs, but their average television exposure was twice as high as that of European-American children. They also reported that parents were most likely to interact with their 6- to 9-month-old children during educational programs and least frequently during background adult-directed television. Similarly, Barr, Danziger, and colleagues (2010), using the same definition of media exposure, examined parents with infants from 6 to 18 months of age. They found that during the first year of life, infants were exposed to higher levels of background television than during the 381

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second year of life. Parents reported that during the second year of life higher-quality programming was available for young audiences (Barr, Danziger, et al., 2010). That is, parents may perceive that their children attend to infant-directed and child-directed programming but ignore and are unaffected by background programming. Patterns of media usage change rapidly across development. In a study of approximately 2,600 8- to 18-year-olds, Rideout (2015) reported that tweens (8- to 12-year-olds) average 4 hours, 36 minutes of screen media per day and teens (13- to 18-year-olds) average 6 hours, 40 minutes per day. The majority of teens report using multiple devices simultaneously or multitasking (texting or viewing television or listening to music and completing homework). When adding together the time spent multitasking, media exposure rates are even higher. Furthermore, teens and tweens report that multitasking while completing homework does not change the quality of their work (Lauricella et al., 2015). Listening to music and viewing video content dominates screen time. Tweens and teens also develop different media-use profiles. Some spend most of their screen time reading or viewing video content, others spend the majority of their time on social networks or playing videogames. These preferences differ by gender, with boys generally preferring videogame consoles and girls preferring social media networks (Lauricella et al., 2015). Teens are more likely to have social media accounts (80%) than tweens (23%), and accounts were opened later in higher-income homes than in lowerincome homes (Lauricella et al., 2016). A small proportion of time (3%) is spent creating new media content (Lauricella et al., 2015). A study of ~120,000 15-year-olds from the United Kingdom’s Department for Education National Pupil Database showed similarly high rates of teen exposure to digital media and similar media profiles. Boys spent more time with videogames and girls more time with smartphones and social media (Przybylski and Weinstein, 2017a). Unlike other reports, however, size of the data set allowed the authors to examine nonlinear statistical models. Both the lowest and highest rates of exposure were linked to small, but more negative, mental health outcomes. Moderate rates of exposure were not. Przybylski and Weinstein (2017a) suggested a “Goldilocks effect” but argued that additional population-based data are needed to test more sophisticated statistical models.

Tablets and Smartphones The first iPhone was released in 2007, followed by the iPad in 2010. Since the introduction of the iPad, the cost of tablets has rapidly decreased, thereby increasing access. Since that time the biggest change in media usage patterns is in the widespread adoption of mobile technology. In the United States, virtually all homes (98%) have a tablet or smartphone (Rideout, 2017). Children’s exposure to mobile technology has increased dramatically; in 2013 parents reported that 38% of children under 8 years were exposed to mobile technology, and by 2017 parents reported that 84% of children under 8 have used mobile technology. The amount of mobile usage parents report differs as a function of the child’s age; parents of children under 2 years report an average of 5 minutes per day compared to parents of 5-year-olds, who report an average of 21 minutes per day. In another study parents reported that time spent using tablets or smartphones during early childhood does not typically exceed 30 minutes per day (Lauricella et al., 2015). These estimates vary by demographics and by device ownership. Pempek and McDaniel (2016) reported that ownership increased access. When parents owned a tablet, 50% of children 1 to 4 years of age had daily access to the tablet, suggesting that prior reports of relatively low average tablet usage may have underestimated higher usage by some children. In a questionnaire study with low-income, minority families, Kabali et al. (2015) found that of children currently under age 1, 92% had used a mobile device (e.g., smartphone, tablet), whereas only 40% of current 4-year-olds used a mobile device before 1 year of age. They also found nearly 77% of children used mobile devices on a daily basis by the age of 2. Young children’s widespread use of touchscreens also extends beyond the United 382

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States (Ahearne, Dilworth, Rollings, Livingstone, and Murray, 2016; Cristia and Seidl, 2015; Neumann, 2014). In a survey of parents of children aged 5 to 40 months in France, 75% of families used touchscreen technology such as tablets to view videos or photos, and 50% reported using tablet applications marketed as appropriate for babies (Cristia and Seidl, 2015). Smartphones are available in almost every home (Rideout, 2017). It is important to note, however, that although there is no longer a digital divide in access to mobile technology, low-income families still experience a digital divide in access to stable and high-speed Internet (Rideout, 2017). Lowerincome homes are less likely to have high-speed Internet (74%) relative to high-income homes (96%) and computers. Mobile technology may be an avenue for an opportunity to enhance learning but also a potential risk depending on the content and context of early media exposure.

E-Books Families with young children are increasing their use of e-books. A survey conducted by the Joan Ganz Cooney Center (Chiong, Ree, Takeuchi, and Erickson, 2012) found that 90% of parent respondents reported that print books remained their preferred co-reading medium, but surveyed parents noted that e-books were used in specific situations—such as when parents were unavailable to read to their children or when families were outside the home. The parents identified that the significant potential advantage of e-books is that they can be delivered directly onto mobile devices, including phones and computers, and are cheaper than paper books. This means that e-books could potentially expand the available literacy resources for many families. Daily combined levels of print book and e-book reading average approximately 21 minutes per day for children 2 years and younger, but parents report that only 1 minute is read via e-books (Rideout, 2017). The amount of parent-reported reading time per day increases to 30 minutes per day by 5 years, but e-book usage comprises 2% of that time (Rideout, 2017).

Video Chat Video chat, like Skype or FaceTime, allows people to both see and hear one another via a screen, and it is becoming an increasingly common experience in the lives of young children. Because video chat allows for both verbal and nonverbal (e.g., using gesture or facial expression) communication, it is a medium that is well suited to the developmental capabilities of young children. Researchers in the United States and Australia reported that about one-third of young children under the age of 6 use video chat at least once per week (McClure, Chentsova-Dutton, Barr, Holochwost, and Parrott, 2015; Tarasuik and Kaufman, 2017). The authors acknowledge that these samples were not representative and that video chat may be a high-frequency event for a relatively small number of families. Rideout (2017) reported in a representative U.S. sample that 6% of families reported frequently video chatting with relatives but that these families spent on average 21 minutes per day on this activity. Many parents view video chat as an exception to screen time/media rules, perhaps because video chat is often used to maintain and strengthen familial relationships, including those with remote grandparents (McClure et al., 2015). Parents of children 2 years and under were asked about their general media-use practices with their infants and also about video chat usage. Based on the answers from the general media usage questions, families were classified into two groups using a latent class analysis: one group was families whose babies were frequently exposed to media (52%), and the other group was of families whose babies were not frequently exposed to media (48%). Although a smaller proportion of parents in the low-media-usage group said that their children had used video chat than those in the high-device-usage group (92%), in families where the babies are exposed to very little media generally, 78% had used video chat with their infants. These parents who are typically restrictive about media use allowed video chat as an exception. 383

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How Parents Influence Children’s Media Exposure A number of factors are associated with the amount, content, and context of media exposure during early childhood (Barr and Linebarger, 2017).

Parental Screen Use Parents’ media usage on all devices (television, computers, smartphones, and tablets) is strongly associated with children’s screen usage from infancy to 8 years of age (Anderson and Hanson, 2017; Bleakley, Jordan, and Hennessy, 2013; Connell, Lauricella, and Wartella, 2015; Goh et al., 2016; Lauricella et al., 2015; Nikken and Schols, 2015; Pempek and McDaniel, 2016). Television is left on all the time in 42% of U.S. homes, and in those homes children spend more time watching on a family TV set (1 hour, 24 minutes) than do those who live in homes where the TV is hardly ever or never left on (26 minutes; Rideout, 2017). Higher overall media exposure in the household is associated with increased time co-using media with young children (Anderson and Hanson, 2017; Connell et al., 2015), as well as greater relative exposure to adult programming rather than children’s programming (St. Peters, Fitch, Huston, Wright, and Eakins, 1991). Parents of 8- to 18-year-olds spend 8 to 10 hours per day with screen media, including work time usage (Lauricella et al., 2015). Parents with higher incomes and education were exposed to less screen media, and African-American parents to more screen media. Parents of teens and tweens also reported high levels of multitasking listening to music or texting while at work (Lauricella et al., 2016). These patterns matched exposure patterns in children (Rideout, 2015, 2017). Despite high parental media usage, 78% of parents reported that they were good role models for the children (Lauricella et al., 2016). Lerner (2017) proposed guidelines for using media mindfully, arguing that parent’s own media use is a powerful model for how children come to use and engage with media.

Family Demographics, Structure, and Routine Patterns of television use differ across ethnicity and socioeconomic status. Low-income minority children are exposed to more television than are children from higher-income households (Anand and Krosnick, 2005; Calvert, Rideout, Woolard, Barr, and Strouse, 2005; Goh et al., 2016; Przybylski and Weinstein, 2017b; Wartella, Rideout, Lauricella, and Connell, 2014) Higher parental education and family wealth are associated with lower media usage, amounting to a difference of 30 minutes per day in children 0 to 8 years (Rideout, 2017) and ~2 hours per day for 8- to 18-year-olds (Rideout, 2015). The gap in exposure rates as a function of household income and parental education has widened since 2011 (Rideout, 2017). Overall, African-American children and youth have the highest rates of exposure (Anand and Krosnick, 2005; Rideout, 2015). Similarly, in a population-based study in the United Kingdom of almost 20,000 parents of children between 2 and 5 years of age, lower screen use was also associated with higher parental education and income (Przybylski and Weinstein, 2017b). Minorities and boys in the UK are also exposed to higher levels of digital media (Przybylski and Weinstein, 2017b). Although exposure rates may differ, media practices also differ by ethnicity. African-American and Latin American parents are more likely to discuss media content than are European-American parents (Lauricella et al., 2016). Latin American parents are more concerned about the risks of media exposure and more likely to set rules about media usage than EuropeanAmerican or African-American parents (Lauricella et al., 2016; Rideout, 2015). Children between infancy and age 5 in single-parent households watch more educational and entertainment-based television (Cingel and Krcmar, 2013). Having older or younger siblings increases the rate of media usage in preschoolers for both educational and entertainment media (Cingel and Krcmar, 2013). Siblings also influence patterns of media usage. During infancy, children with older 384

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siblings are exposed to higher proportions of child-directed programming relative to overall television exposure (Barr et al., 2010). These factors also overlap. For example, in families that experience a high number of risk factors, more exposure to educational programming and parental support is associated with better cognitive outcomes (Anderson, Huston, Schmitt, Linebarger, and Wright, 2001; Linebarger, Barr, Lapierre, and Piotrowski, 2014; Wright et al., 2001). In low-resourced families, it is important to consider that educational media (e.g., television, apps, e-books) may be providing an additional resource to parents, which may not correspond for higher-resourced families. Decreases in the cost of television sets led to increases in the number of sets in the home, including in the bedroom. A television in the child’s bedroom increases overall exposure times, decreases active mediation practices, and has been associated with poorer child sleep quality (Fu et al., 2017; Nikken and Schols 2015; Rideout and Hamel, 2006; Vaala and Hornik 2014). Frequency of televisions in children’s bedrooms differs across countries. For example, Rideout (2017) reported that 29% of children under age 8 in the United States had a television in their bedroom and 16% have a mobile device or laptop in their bedroom most nights. Fu and colleagues (2017) in Hong Kong reported that parents placed electronic devices (television, computer, gaming console) in 30% of preschoolers’ bedrooms, whereas Nikken and Schols (2015) noted that rates in a Dutch sample with children 0 to 7 years were much lower, at 12% with a television in their bedroom. Fu and colleagues (2017) reported that families with lower incomes were more likely to place a television in the child’s bedroom. Rideout (2017) reported that 49% of parents of children 0 to 8 years sometimes or often use media in the hour before bedtime. Media usage before bedtime increases steadily with age, with 24% of 0- to 2-year-olds, 49% of 2- to 4-year-olds, and 61% of 5- to 8-year-olds sometimes or often viewing media content in the hour before sleep. Early media diet may set the stage for subsequent use. In a study of parents of children ranging in age from 6 months to 5 years, parents most frequently reported that age of first exposure was between 6 and 12 months and that viewing had become part of the daily routine by 18 months of age (Cingel and Krcmar, 2013). Television usage in this study was correlated with parents’ need to get chores done. The authors reported that the earlier television became a daily routine, the higher the television use was at later ages. In one study, 44% of parents reported using mobile devices “sometimes” or “often” to occupy their children while running errands (Rideout, 2013). Some parents are concerned that it is difficult to get their child to stop using media, and this concern changes as a function of the child’s age; 20% in under 2s report it is difficult, 49% in 2- to 4-year-olds, and 40% in 5- to 8-year-olds (Rideout, 2017). The introduction of mobile devices introduces a measurement problem, as well as a general change in the ecology of the home. Parents are generally highly reliable at reporting educational media usage on a static family television set (Anderson, Field, Collins, Lorch & Nathan, 1985). Due to the intermittent usage patterns and lack of scheduled structure of usage, it is difficult for parents to track smartphone and tablet usage. In the mobile media environment, it will be important to consider how families utilize and mediate different media resources, how routines with multiple devices develop, and how mobile media-use trajectories develop across time.

Parental Mediation Strategies Parental mediation strategies have been studied quite extensively with three general categories emerging: (1) restrictive time and content limits, (2) active parental discussion of content, and (3) co-viewing for education and entertainment (Nikken and Schols, 2015; Piotrowski 2017; Uhls and Robb, 2018; Valkenburg, Krcmar, Peeters, and Marseille., 1999). Parental mediation guides how children learn the function of media, hardware device operation, and interpretation of the content (Nikken and Schols, 2015). Parents use restrictive media practices to limit inappropriate content and co-use and/or actively mediate educational content (Nikken and Schols, 2015). Nikken and Schols (2015) noted that new mediation practices have emerged with mobile technology. For example, parents may monitor 385

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online activities of older children by examining browser history, placing parental controls on electronic devices, and restricting forms of media content (e.g., use of the v-chip controls on television or Netflix parental controls on streaming media as well as parental controls on smartphones). Parental attitudes about media also influence mediation practices; negative attitudes are associated with restrictive mediation, and positive attitudes are associated with active mediation and co-use (Nikken and Schols, 2015; Piotrowski, 2017; Valkenburg et al., 1999). Parents of preschoolers and school-aged children tend to enforce rules regarding television use (Rideout et al., 2003; Stanger 1997; Vandewater, Park, Huang, and Wartella, 2005). Two-thirds of parents with children aged 0 to 17 years implemented rules regarding television use aiming to restrict both the content and amount of television exposure (Stanger, 1997; Vandewater et al., 2005). Parents who reported that they strongly enforced time rules regarding television use also reported lower levels of television viewing for children aged 0 to 6 years (Goh et al., 2016; Rideout et al., 2003; Vandewater et al., 2005). Fu and colleagues (2017) reported that parental time use restrictions moderated the negative association between television in the bedroom and poorer school readiness in preschoolers in Hong Kong. Parents with program content rules have more positive attitudes about television and co-view more with their children (Vandewater et al., 2005). In general, positive parental attitudes to media are also associated with higher screen usage in preschoolers and early elementary school-aged children (Lauricella et al., 2015). Connell and colleagues (2015) conducted a large nationally representative study of mothers and fathers who had children under 8 years of age to examine predictors of media co-use. Parents who used more media themselves were more likely to co-use media with their children. Co-use was higher both when parents spent more time at home with the child and when children were younger. Fathers tended to co-use computers and smartphones slightly more than mothers, and mothers favored co-using books more than fathers. Piotrowski (2017) examined parental mediation in parents with 3- to 8-year olds in the Netherlands. Active parental encouragement of specific media content was associated with the highest levels of educational content viewing. The authors concluded that an active mediation strategy may be most effective for developing a positive media diet early in development. To examine parental mediation practices with tweens and teenagers, Lauricella and colleagues (2016) conducted a nationally representative survey of 1,786 parents of children age 8 to 18 living in the United States. Parents’ attitudes toward media usage by their 8- to 18-year-olds was mixed; 56% were concerned about addiction to technology and 34% about media usage interfering with sleep, but 44% reported that social media mostly helps teens to build relationships, and 94% believed that technology could support education. They were also concerned about exposure to sexual or violent content, cyberbullying, and sexting. Most families (77%) have rules about content, with 88% having rules for tweens but only 67% for teens (Lauricella et al., 2016). For example, most parents (78%) report that teens and tweens cannot use devices during family meals, 63% report a rule of no devices when going to sleep, and most enforce these rules (Lauricella et al., 2016). Parents of tweens are more likely to check content (e.g., send texts via their phones) or enforce media practices (e.g., require that devices are stored in a central location overnight) than parents of teens (Lauricella et al., 2016). About half of parents also report discussing television content, videogames, and app content with their tweens and teens (Lauricella et al., 2016). The success of rule enforcement differs across age. Sanders, Parent, Forehand, Sullivan, and Jones (2016) examined parental rule use (time and content rules) and rule enforcement across three age groups: young children (3 to 7 years), tweens (8 to 12 years), and teenagers (13 to 17 years). Parental efficacy with technology was associated with higher implementation of parenting rules and enforcement and with lower media usage by young children and tweens. The model did not hold during adolescence, suggesting that adolescents develop increasing independence around media. In a five-year longitudinal study of 10- to 15-year-olds, Padilla-Walker, Coyne, Fraser, Dyer, and Yorgason (2012) 386

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found that parental mediation strategies changed from preadolescence to adolescence from more active to more deferent strategies. Family rules and discussion may not be salient to tweens and teens (Uhls and Robb, 2018). Only 52% of teens and tweens reported that their parents had conversations with them about amount of exposure, but 86% reported that they had conversations with their parents about online safety practices, such as online privacy or cyberbullying (Rideout, 2015). Tweens reported that their parents generally knew about their media usage patterns, but teenagers reported that their parents knew much less; one-third of teens reported that their parents did not know what they did on social media. Teens and tweens living in higher-income households and/or with more educated parents reported that their parents were less aware of their online media usage than tweens and teens living in lower-income households and/ or with less educated parents (Rideout, 2015). Although 85% of parents reported that they monitored media usage by their tweens and teens, especially traditional television and movie content, fewer (60%) were aware of Internet usage, and only 40% were aware of social media usage (Lauricella et al., 2016). Like other decisions that teenagers face, decisions about media usage require supported practice and eventually autonomy. During adolescence when parental mediation is restrictive, adolescents may rebel against such restrictions, resulting in increased media conflict and sometimes counterintuitively higher rates of media usage (Uhls and Robb, 2018). Almost 40% of parents also reported that negotiating media usage with their teens and tweens resulted in conflict (Lauricella et al., 2016). That is, like other areas of growing autonomy, there is tension between parental mediation and monitoring of digital media during adolescence. Unlike other behaviors, digital behaviors cannot be constantly monitored, which could augment parent–adolescent conflict in the digital age (Uhls and Robb, 2018). Effective parenting practices, such as having mutually agreed on rules, such as putting away the phone during mealtimes, were followed and considered to be important by both parents and teenagers (Uhls and Robb, 2018). In a context of high parental media usage for both work and personal use, parents engage in fewer direct mediation strategies and they are less effective as children get older. As with other activities, parents give more autonomy over media choice and usage to teens than to tweens. Parents are less aware of media usage patterns on social media platforms and the Internet than more traditional forms of media, despite high levels of concern and some conflict surrounding implementing media usage rules. Effective parenting strategies that recognize increasing autonomy and decision-making capabilities of adolescents are associated with more moderate media use and better psychosocial outcomes.

Media Selection Parents are generally quite successful at navigating television content for preschool children. There is still a relatively delineated set of broadcast television programs that are categorized and rated as educational programming and loosely regulated by the Children’s Television Act (Jordan, 2008). For infantdirected programming and “educational apps,” however, media selection is much more challenging. There are currently 80,000 apps in the app store tagged as “educational” (Zosh, Roseberry Lytle, Golinkoff, and Hirsh-Pasek, 2017). Both infant-directed programming and educational apps are not regulated and are often accompanied by strong claims that, in most cases, have not been empirically evaluated (Fenstermacher et al., 2010; Guernsey and Levine, 2015; Zosh et al., 2017). Parents often rely on marketing or parent testimonials to influence their decision-making (Guernsey and Levine, 2015; Zosh et al., 2017). Both types of programming also market content to wide age ranges (e.g., birth to 3 years; Fenstermacher et al., 2010). Recently, media curators, such as Common Sense Media, have developed web platforms to provide content and age-appropriateness ratings for a number of different types of media content across childhood and adolescence. Overall, families may develop a technology environment built around a complex set of factors. These factors include parents’ own screen usage and attitudes about media, child factors (age and 387

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media competence), and family demographics (access to resources, family routines) (Barr and Linebarger 2017; Lauricella et al., 2015; Nikken and Schols 2015; Uhls and Robb, 2018).

Negative Implications of Parental Media Usage: Technoference Early childhood may be a particularly vulnerable time for exposure to background media sources, a time when children have little input regarding their own media exposure. They choose neither the amount nor the content of exposure, both of which are chosen by parents, siblings, and other family members. “Technoference” is defined as everyday interruptions to interpersonal interactions or time spent together that occur due to digital and mobile technology devices (McDaniel, 2015; McDaniel and Coyne, 2016; McDaniel and Radesky, 2017). For example, if a parent is checking Facebook at repeated intervals on a smartphone, the parent may not realize that she or he is disconnecting from the child multiple times at unpredictable intervals during the day. Furthermore, when checking cell phones, parents’ faces typically have no expression, which may be perceived by young children as a “still face,” to which children respond aversively (Adamson and Frick, 2003; Goldstein, Schwade and Bornstein, 2009).

Background Television Adult-directed programming such as sitcoms or game shows are often on in the background while young children play. In the United States the average daily background television exposure for toddlers is 5.5 hours (Lapierre, Piotrowski, and Linebarger, 2012). During this programming, infants and toddlers typically attend to the television only 5% of the time (Anderson and Pempek, 2005). Parents may believe that, because their infants are not “watching” background television, their infants are not being affected by it (Anderson and Pempek, 2005). Such background media usage decreases parent–child interactional quality as well as child play quality and language learning (Kirkorian, Pempek, Murphy, Schmidt, and Anderson, 2009; Reed, Hirsh-Pasek, and Golinkoff, 2017; Schmidt, Pempek, Kirkorian, Lund, and Anderson, 2008). Schmidt and colleagues (2008) examined looking time and infant play behavior during an adultdirected game show. In this study, children aged 12, 24, or 36 months were allowed to play with toys while a television showed a parent-selected, adult-directed TV program. Parents were free to interact with their children in this study. Infants’ quality and quantity of play with toys was significantly worse when adult-directed television was on compared to when the television was off. Although children only attended to the game show 5% of the time, their play episodes were shorter, less complex, and included less focused attention when the television was on than when it was off. Furthermore, adultdirected television also reduced the quality and quantity of parent–child interactions. Parents actively engaged with their children 68% of the time when the TV was off, compared to only 54% of the time when the TV was on. Parents also were slower to respond to bids for attention and responded in a more passive manner (Kirkorian, et al., 2009). However, the children did not follow parent look onsets, and there was no relation between parent and child looking patterns (Anderson and Hanson, 2017). The quality of language produced was assessed both when the television was on and when the television was off. Child-directed speech decreased (12% fewer words and 20% fewer new words were spoken to the child) when an adult-selected program was playing than when it was not. Furthermore, regardless of program content (child or adult directed), when the TV was on, parents interacted less with their children than when the TV was off (Courage, Murphy, Goulding, and Setliff, 2010; Kirkorian et al., 2009). Anderson and Hanson (2017) calculated the cumulative effect of weekly background television exposure using the average daily estimate of 5.5 hours of background television per day (Lapierre et al., 2012). Even if toddlers were only exposed to half as much background television, children would hear approximately 13,400 fewer child-directed words per week (Anderson and Hanson, 2017; see also 388

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Christakis et al., 2009 for a similar finding using in-home LENA (Language ENvironment Analysis) audio recording devices). Anderson and Hanson (2017) emphasized, however, that the changes in language usage when the television was on versus when it was off also varied by household usage patterns. When television was more frequently on in the household, language patterns were similar whether the television was off or on (Anderson and Hanson, 2017). When the television was used less frequently in the house, the number of words produced when the television was on was significantly lower than when the television was off (Anderson and Hanson, 2017). That is, the typical family media ecology also influenced the language patterns in the household when the television was in use.

Smartphones Parental smartphone usage may be as disruptive as background television to child outcomes. The release of the new devices such as the smartphone has been met with both moral panic about potential peril associated with the new technology and unrealistic expectations that these devices would revolutionize early education (Lauricella, Blackwell, et al., 2017). These unlikely expectations arose from the fact that the mobile, touchscreen-enabled interactive devices were much easier to operate than prior computer interfaces. The usability of these devices initially suggested that they might be more developmentally appropriate for very young users and require less parental scaffolding to guide their use (Moser et al., 2015). Because these devices were easier to operate, parents quickly became engaged in what Chiong and Shuler (2010) termed the “pass-back effect,” that parents passed back the mobile device to the child sitting in the backseat of the car. Although electronic babysitting is not a new phenomenon (Rideout and Hamel, 2006; Zimmerman et al., 2007a), the mobility of the new devices meant that electronic babysitting could be used to keep a child occupied, regardless of location. Parents of children aged 0 to 6 years in a nationally representative survey reported using a device while preparing meals, traveling, and going out for meals, as well as to calm a child when transitioning from another activity (Wartella et al., 2014). Somewhat counterintuitively, higher child tablet usage is associated with lower maternal wellbeing (Pempek and McDaniel, 2016). Parents reported that children predominantly played apps marketed as educational, such as drawing or preliteracy apps, or view streaming video content (Pempek and McDaniel, 2016). A similar association had been reported between higher educational television exposure during infancy and concurrent maternal depression (Bank et al., 2012). Under conditions of higher parental stress, parents use more educational content. Parents may have used educational media to provide cognitive stimulation when they were unable to do so themselves (Bank et al., 2012; Pempek and McDaniel, 2016). Interpretation of media usage patterns should include considerations of the instrumental and psychological functions of parental media usage. Parents are also likely to use cell phones to calm their babies. Parents of 15- to 36-month-old children at the Women Infants and Children (WIC) nutrition clinics were asked about their children’s socioemotional development and their use of mobile devices during family routines, such as at bedtime or while doing chores, and if they used mobile devices to calm their babies (Radesky, Peacock-Chambers, Zuckerman, and Silverstein, 2016). Parental report of socioemotional difficulties was associated with parental use of mobile technology as a calming device but not with other uses. The authors noted that due to the correlational nature of the study, it is not possible to know if parents with more difficult babies used mobile devices more for calming, if parents who felt more overwhelmed used mobile devices, or if mobile devices were likely to result in more socioemotional difficulties. Frequent use of mobile devices for self-regulation may mean, however, that parents and children are less likely to develop other regulatory strategies. Similar to background television, smartphones create technoference. A qualitative observational study conducted in a fast-food restaurant of families eating meals showed that higher parental cell 389

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phone usage was associated with increased bids for parental attention from children, and parents sometimes responded in a hostile way, resulting in a negative circle of interactions (Radesky et al., 2014). The authors reported that about 30% of the parents were completely absorbed with their mobile device at the expense of interacting with their children. Radesky et al. (2015) followed up this finding with a laboratory-based study that examined spontaneous cell phone use during a structured parent–child interaction. During the parent–child interaction, low-income mothers asked their 6-year-old children to try different types of food. Observers coded how frequently mothers prompted children to try the foods and whether they spontaneously checked their mobile devices during the interaction. They found that the 23.1% of mothers who spontaneously checked their phones, were less likely to talk to their children, and displayed fewer positive nonverbal interactions particularly when they were introducing unfamiliar food. These findings of poorer-quality language and parent– child interactions mirror those reported for background television. Parents who report higher levels of personal mobile device usage also report more coparenting problems (McDaniel and Coyne, 2016) and more child behavioral problems (McDaniel and Radesky, 2017). In an experimental study, Reed and colleagues (2017) tested whether cell phone calls interrupted language learning by 2-year-olds. Using a within-subjects design, 38 mothers taught their 2-year-olds two novel words. Mothers received a call that interrupted them while teaching one of the words, but for the other word the call occurred prior to teaching. Children were significantly more likely to learn the uninterrupted word than the interrupted word. This finding remained despite the child hearing the novel word the same number of times in both conditions. The “still face” presented to the infant during smartphone usage may disrupt communication from the infant to the parent as well. Goldstein and colleagues (2009) reported that parents respond to infant vocalizations 30% to 50% of the time. When parents present a “still face” response, 5-montholds increase their negative vocalizations, presumably to regain the adult’s attention. When the interaction resumes, the infant decreases negative vocalizations and re-engages in turn-taking with the parent. The greater the increase in vocalizations in response to a “still face,” the better language outcomes are at 1 year of age. It is not yet known if parental responsiveness will change as a function of frequent smartphone usage. If the parent is less responsive, the infant may be less likely to attempt to reengage the parent. Language development would therefore likely be disrupted by frequent, intermittent parental smartphone usage. It is also possible that infants will persist in their attempts to reengage or learn to do so only when parents are not using smartphones. Research in this area will need to consider bidirectional communication patterns between parents and infants to understand the impact of technology on language development and other developmental outcomes. Few studies have included assessments of mobile and interactive media use, particularly among families of young children. Because mobile device use occurs in brief, intermittent bursts (Oulasvirta, Tamminen, Roto, and Kuorelahti, 2005), self-report or recall of mobile device use is often inaccurate (Goedhart, Kromhout, Wiart, and Vermeulen, 2015). Passive sensing applications that track cell phone pick-ups have shown that parents check their cell phones up to 100 times per day and that these media checks occur at unpredictable intervals. Because it is difficult for parents to assess how frequently they are using their cell phones, similar to background television, they are likely to underestimate the effect on their young children. It is likely that such frequent interruptions will have negative effects on child outcomes.

Implications of Technoference Researchers have associated heavy exposure to television during early childhood with poor school performance, increased bullying, attention problems, and sleep problems during childhood and adolescence (Christakis, Zimmerman, DiGiuseppe, and McCarty 2004; Lanhuis, Poulton, Welch, and Hoancox, 2007; Thakkar, Garrison and Christakis, 2006; Thompson and Christakis, 2005; Zimmerman, 390

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Glew, Christakis, and Katon, 2005; Zimmerman, Christakis, and Meltzoff, 2007b; Zimmerman and Christakis, 2005, 2007). Negative associations endure even when demographic factors (e.g., socioeconomic status, ethnicity, maternal risk factors, and prematurity) are controlled in the statistical models (but see Foster and Watkins, 2010). Researchers compared infant exposure to child-directed and adultdirected programming and reported that exposure to adult-directed or violent programming during infancy was associated with parental reports of poorer executive functioning, but exposure to similar levels of child-directed programming was not (Barr, Lauricella, Zack and Calvert, 2010; Zimmerman and Christakis, 2007). Similarly, high levels of television exposure during the first year of life, is likely to include background television, was negatively associated with vocabulary development, but not during the second year of life (Zimmerman, et al., 2007b). Exposure to child-directed programming during the second year of life was not associated with poorer vocabulary (Taylor, Monaghan, and Westermann, 2017). A small but growing body of evidence therefore suggests that technoference, rather than direct exposure to media during early childhood, may cumulatively have more negative effects on early development. Background television and technoference are probably consistent negative influences on development during early childhood (Anderson and Hanson, 2017).

Potential Benefits Associated With Parental Scaffolding Guernsey and Levine (2015) argued that: We cannot afford to ignore the affordances of technology, especially for disadvantaged children and families of many different backgrounds and circumstances who may not otherwise have access to information and learning opportunities. And yet to leave the fate of these children to technology alone would be a big mistake. (p. 129) Although there are likely to be some negative implications of early media exposure, infants and young children can learn from television, tablets, and computers (Barr, 2010, 2013) beginning as early as 6 months of age (Barr, Muentener, and Garcia, 2007). Learning to apply knowledge from a screen is complex, however, because it involves transfer of learning. Infants show a “transfer deficit” (Barr, 2010, 2013; Hipp et al., 2017), that is, they learn less from screens than from face-to-face interactions because they have difficulty transferring learning from the image on the screens to real-world, 3D objects (Anderson and Pempek, 2005; Barr and Hayne, 1999; Zack, Barr, Gerhardstein, Dickerson, and Meltzoff, 2009). Due to cognitive constraints on learning and memory from media that are exacerbated during early childhood where the memory system is less flexible and the knowledge base of the child is sparse (Barr, 2010, 2013), there are parallels across media devices making scaffolding useful across traditional and mobile media devices. As technology created specifically for young children proliferates, researchers have more closely examined parent–child interactions during television viewing, e-book reading, and app use (Fidler, Zack, and Barr, 2010; Lauricella, Barr, and Calvert, 2009; Neumann, 2017; Segal-Drori, Korat, Shamir, and Klein, 2010; Zack and Barr, 2016). Parental scaffolding or joint media engagement contributes to how much a child can potentially benefit from media exposure. A number of factors predict whether parents will engage in scaffolding or not. Connell and colleagues (2015) investigated differences in parents’ joint media engagement with children age 8 and under by family demographic characteristics and technology type. They reported that more parents co-engaged with television and books compared to smartphones and tablet computers. Younger parents and fathers were more likely to co-engage with videogames and mobile technology, and Latin American parents were more likely to co-engage with tablet computers compared to European-American parents, even when controlling for parent age and education, child age and gender, and parent’s time with the device and time with the child (Connell et al., 2015). 391

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The question is why would the likelihood of using scaffolding with different types of media arise? Perhaps because parents process audio-visual content so easily themselves, they may have the misperception that scaffolding is not needed, especially with newer media where an e-book autonarrates, and an app is interactive and responsive to the child (Barr and Linebarger, 2017; Guernsey and Levine, 2015). Fathers may be more likely to co-use videogames and mobile technology because these devices offer more opportunities for playful interactions than other types of media (Connell et al., 2015). When parents scaffold media in a developmentally sensitive way (Nikken and Schols, 2015), this scaffolding is likely to enhance learning (Barr, Zack, Garcia, and Muentener, 2008; Fidler et al., 2010; Segal-Drori et al., 2010; Zack and Barr, 2016) and psychosocial outcomes (Padilla-Walker, Coyne and Collier, 2016). Definitions of scaffolding are derived from parenting research conducted when measuring parent–child interactions during play and picture book reading and include measures such as warmth, structuring of the play to enhance child autonomy, and labeling objects and expanding on play themes to connect the content to the child’s real-world experiences (Brito, Ryan, and Barr, 2014). The types of strategies that parents typically use when reading picture books to their children are the same strategies that are effective for scaffolding learning from television, tablets, and e-books (Fidler et al., 2010). Parental scaffolding is associated with a reduction in the transfer deficit (Zack and Barr, 2016). Zosh and colleagues (2017) argued that the science of learning principles are key to the effectiveness of parental scaffolding of media. In particular, they provided evidence that children learn best when they are active and engaged and not distracted, when they are learning material that is meaningful to them, and when learning occurs within a supportive social context. Overall, parental scaffolding plus high-quality content and technology provide the best opportunities for maximizing the promise of digital media during early childhood (Barr and Linebarger, 2017). For older children scaffolding may be in the form of active mediation and discussion of media content rather than active mediation during media use.

Television and Support Toddlers’ and preschoolers’ comprehension of educational television is enhanced when parents coview with their children compared to when children view alone, but comprehension varies by how actively involved parents are during co-viewing. In a study on toddler word learning from video, Strouse and Troseth (2014) found that 24-month-olds transferred a word they learned from watching a video to a real 3D object only when a parent provided verbal scaffolding. Strouse, O’Doherty, and Troseth (2013) randomly assigned 3-year-olds and their parents to two different conditions. In the control condition, the dyad viewed a video, and comprehension questions were asked at the video’s conclusion. In the dialogic strategies condition, parents were taught dialogic reading techniques, such as pausing and asking questions, and were told that they could pause the video while viewing to ask comprehension questions throughout. Comprehension of story content increased in the dialogic strategies condition compared to the control group. Simply pausing the video overcame a common fear that parents have that they are interrupting the child if they talk while the video is playing. In a third condition, an onscreen adult asked comprehension questions. Comprehension in this condition was better than the control but not as good as the parent scaffold condition. This finding raises the possibility that onscreen tutors could provide support to children in the absence of an adult. In other studies, parents and their young children are observed during co-viewing of child-directed content (Barr, Zack, Garcia, and Muentener, 2008; Fender, Richert, Robb, and Wartella, 2010; Fidler et al., 2010; Lemish and Rice 1986). Lemish and Rice (1986) found that parent–child interactions during TV viewing were linguistically rich, and parents adopted a number of strategies that are typically deployed during book reading, such as use of labeling and narrating the content. There is variation in interactional quality provided to infants and young children. Higher-quality parental scaffolding 392

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was associated with more infant vocalizations (Fender et al., 2010) and greater infant attentiveness and responsiveness (Barr et al., 2008; Fidler et al., 2010). Infants also learn viewing patterns from their parents. Demers, Hanson, Kirkorian, Pempek, and Anderson (2013) found that the mothers’ and infants’ gaze patterns were highly correlated such that the more the parent looked at the screen, the more the infant looked. Nonparent and infant gaze patterns were also correlated, showing that the way the video content was designed simultaneously influenced both adult and infant looking. However, patterns overlapped more when the parent and infant viewed together. Specifically, infants followed parental gaze and were more likely to look back at the screen just after the parent began looking at the screen. The same pattern was not true when parents were viewing adult-directed content. The authors concluded that during child-directed programs, infant looking can be guided by parents who view with them. There are, however, tradeoffs to parental scaffolding. Lavigne, Hanson, and Anderson (2015) found that parents talked less (approximately one-third fewer words) to their 1-year-olds when the television was on than when it was off. Furthermore, parents who paid more attention to the show talked less. A silver lining, however, was that parents included more new words per utterance during co-viewing, and this carried over after the television program ended, resulting in richer parental language during the subsequent free play episode. The authors speculated that high-quality educational content could provide the parents with topics that might be of interest to young children or have modeled language that parents could use with their young children. Anderson and Hanson (2017) compared language use during book reading and television viewing. The amount of language during television viewing was only 25% of that during book reading. Again during television viewing, parents used more new words. Book reading was clearly a more linguistically based interaction, but different types of media may facilitate different types of learning. For example, toddlers learn about action-based events as well or even better from TV compared to reading (Brito, Barr, McIntyre, and Simcock, 2012; Simcock, Garrity, and Barr, 2011). This type of action-based learning is likely to be strengthened by parental scaffolding. The potential benefits of parental scaffolding depend on the combination of the quality of program content and the quality of parent–child interactions during that viewing experience. For example, in a study of low-income Latin American families and their children, Mendelsohn, Brockmeyer, Dreyer, and colleagues (2010) found that language outcomes at 14 months could be predicted by how much the parents reported actively discussing educational media content when their children were 6 months old. Specifically, verbal interactions during educational content at 6 months were associated with better language outcomes at 14 months. Rasmussen and colleagues (2016) asked parents to show preschoolers an animated PBS show for two weeks. The show, based on Fred Rogers, focused on increasing self-regulation. Parents completed Valkeburg’s mediation scale, and children completed pre-post measures of empathy, self-regulation, and emotion recognition. Parental active mediation practices were associated with a pre- to post-increase in empathy. For children in lower-income households there were also changes in self-efficacy and emotion regulation. The effectiveness of a prosocial program aimed at 2- to 4-year-olds was maximized by use of consistent active mediation practices in the home. Poor-quality content combined with low parental engagement is likely to be associated with longterm negative outcomes, and the converse is also likely to be true (Anderson and Hanson, 2017). For older children, the scaffolds may be provided outside media usage. Padilla-Walker and colleagues (2016) found that active mediation of 11-year-olds was associated with more prosocial behavior and less aggression two years later and that this association was mediated by adolescents’ own level of self-regulation and sympathy. Restrictive mediation, however, was a less effective strategy and was associated with lower teen sympathy and self-regulation and less prosocial behavior two years later. Active mediation may provide an opportunity for parents and adolescents to discuss challenging content areas portrayed in the media. 393

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Tablets and Support Other studies have demonstrated that the quality of interactions between child and parent plays an important role in making tablets an effective means of early learning. In an observational study of parents with their children aged 4 to 6 years old, both mothers and fathers frequently scaffolded play with an app on a tablet by using verbal descriptions, providing physical support, and offering emotional encouragement to their children (Wood et al., 2016). Neumann (2017) observed parents and their 3-year-olds using an iPad application. She found that parents frequently provided cognitive scaffolds to describe the content of game, and parents also used “tech talk” to orient the youngest children to the game. In a study conducted by Zack and Barr (2016), 15-month-old infants and their mothers participated in this semi-naturalistic teaching task. Mothers taught their infants that a button on the real toy worked in the same way as a virtual button on the touchscreen (or vice versa). Overall, 64% of infants learned how to make the button work, transferring learning from the touchscreen to the 3D object or vice versa. The level of interactional quality (diverse verbal input, emotional responsiveness, structure) predicted infant transfer. Infants were 19 times more likely to succeed and transfer learning between the touchscreen and real object if they were in a dyad high in interactional quality. Conversely, experimental studies have demonstrated that removing social scaffolds decreases transfer of learning by 2-year-olds (Zimmermann, Moser, Lee, Gerhardstein, and Barr, 2016). As children gain more experience with devices and their representational flexibility increases, the transfer deficit has been shown to decrease, showing that over time parental scaffolding can be reduced (Huber et al., 2016). Huber and colleagues (2016) demonstrated that 4- to 6-year-olds transferred learning about a challenging puzzle task from a touchscreen tablet to the real world. But in a followup study Tarasuik, Demaria and Kaufman (2017) found that children under 4 years could not transfer learning on this task, suggesting that parents need to monitor when scaffolding may be needed. As children age and become more fluent in the use of technological tools, they may be more skilled at transferring information from screens to the real world. Similarly, as children learn the content, reducing scaffolding is feasible (Guernsey, 2017).

E-Book Design and Support Like other media, the design of the content and the context in which e-books are used are critical to child comprehension (Bus, Takacs, and Kegel, 2015; Takacs, Swart, and Bus, 2015). For parents using e-books with young children, there are two major points to consider: how to manage the interactivity and how to provide support while reading an e-book. Recent meta-analysis has indicated that targeted interactive functions, such as animation as opposed to static images and music or sound effects matched to narrative content, can enhance comprehension of the narrative and aid vocabulary acquisition (Takacs et al., 2015). Conversely, hot-spotting (e.g., when clicking on the screen within the story takes you out of the story to other information) and unrelated games (e.g., collect items on the screen, click to play a song) can distract and interfere with comprehension (Piotrowski and Krcmar, 2017; Takacs et al., 2015). Interference occurs largely because unrelated games and hot-spotting draw both the parent’s and child’s attention away from the storyline (Parish-Morris, Mahajan, Hirsh-Pasek, Golinkoff, and Collins, 2013). Like studies conducted with other media, due to both variability within e-book content and individual differences, scaffolding e-book reading can be vital to effective learning (Chiong et al., 2012; Krcmar and Cingel, 2014; Lauricella, Barr, and Calvert, 2014; Strouse and Ganea, 2016, 2017). In some cases, reading an e-book with adult scaffolding provides larger benefits than independent e-book reading (Korat, Levin, Atishkin, and Turgeman, 2014; Korat, Segal-Drori, and Klein, 2009; Segal-Drori et al., 2010). For example, Korat et al. (2009) found a larger increase in kindergarteners’ 394

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phonological awareness and word reading ability after reading the e-book with an adult’s support compared to reading it independently. In another study, Segal-Drori and colleagues (2010) compared a well-designed book in e-book and paper formats. Half of the children received parental scaffolding and half did not. Comprehension was highest for children in the e-book plus scaffolding condition (Segal-Drori et al. 2010). When researchers have compared engagement and comprehension during e-book and picture book reading during early childhood, findings have been mixed. Under some conditions, story engagement is higher with e-books than picture books (Lauricella et al., 2014; Richter, and Courage, 2017, Strouse and Ganea, 2017). Some studies demonstrate no differences in story comprehension (Lauricella et al., 2014; Richter and Courage, 2017), others higher comprehension with e-books than picture books (Strouse and Ganea 2017), and yet others poorer comprehension with e-books than picture books (Krcmar and Cingel, 2014; Parish et al., 2013). For example, Strouse and Ganea (2017) randomly assigned parent–toddler dyads to read commercially available e-books or picture books matched for content. After reading the books with their parents, experimenters asked toddlers to choose a picture of an animal labeled in the book and then to extend that knowledge to choose the same animal using replica objects. Engagement during e-book reading was higher, as was identification of the animal in both pictures and replica objects than for picture books. There was no difference in topics discussed during e-books or picture books in this study. In contrast, when there are multiple hotspots and unrelated games embedded in the story, comprehension suffers (Krcmar and Cingel, 2014; Parish-Morris, et al., 2013). Additional games and hotspots may increase the cognitive load needed to process the content (both the story narrative and unrelated pieces of information), leading to poorer comprehension (Krcmar and Cingel, 2014; Piotrowski and Krcmar, 2017; Takacs et al., 2015). Individual differences play a role in determining when parental scaffolding is needed. Strouse and Ganea (2016) randomly assigned 4-year-olds to three e-book reading conditions: the e-book auto-reads story prediction prompts, an adult reads the same scripted prompts, or an adult scaffolds the prompts. The book was about camouflage. Given that these prompts were well designed and the content was age appropriate, there were no significant differences between conditions. Children with lower vocabulary and executive functioning scores, however, did best in the condition where adults scaffolded the prompts tailoring them to children, suggesting that adults need to adjust the level of support to meet the needs of the individual child. A long-term mission of educational television, such as Sesame Street, has been to engage parents by designing programs with two audiences in mind: the target child and the adult. James Earl Jones, the voice of Darth Vader in the Star Wars franchise, was the first celebrity guest to appear on Sesame Street (in 1969); he recited the alphabet. The inclusion of guest celebrities encouraged parents to watch the show and to engage with their children. Investigators have examined the interaction between the quality of the content and the quality of parent–child interaction. For example, Korat and Or (2010) compared a well-designed educational e-book that included embedded definitions and complex language with a commercially available e-book that did not include literacy-promoting strategies. The design of the book was an important predictor of the quality of parent–child interaction. The quality of parent–child interaction was higher when reading the well-designed educational text than it was when reading the commercially available text. Korat and Or (2010) argued that e-books may support parents in their interactions with their children rather than the e-book simply containing educational content. The e-book can also provide direct prompts and modeling for parents to follow via onscreen tutors. Onscreen tutors effectively support direct learning during adolescence (Richards and Calvert, 2017). Troseth and colleagues modified an e-book based on a popular PBS children’s program to include an onscreen tutor that was a familiar character from the program. The tutor modeled dialogic reading strategies while the parent and child read the e-book together. There were two levels of the e-book. In the easier version, the onscreen tutor modeled dialogic questions that were directly related to the content. In the more difficult version, the onscreen tutor asked more abstract dialogic questions 395

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and did not provide a model during the final five pages. The parents in the onscreen tutor group asked more dialogic questions than parents in the print book and the no onscreen tutor control groups (Strouse, Flores, Stuckelman, Russo Johnson, and Troseth, 2017). Parents living in both high-income and lower-income households adopted the dialogic reading techniques (Strouse et al., 2017; Troseth, Strouse, Russo Johnson, Stuckelman, and Flores, 2018). The finding is significant because typically it is difficult to teach dialogic reading practice. These findings suggest that onscreen modeling may be an effective method of enhancing parental scaffolding techniques during shared book reading. There is a tradeoff between content learning and skill learning to master a tool. During e-book reading, parents often discuss technical aspects of the device, such as how to operate the device, often called “tech talk” (Chiong et al., 2012; Krcmar and Cingel, 2014; Lauricella et al., 2009; Lauricella et al., 2014; Parish-Morris et al., 2013; Richter and Courage, 2017). For example, during a computer book reading task between caregivers and preschoolers, Lauricella et al. (2009) found that when the child was learning to operate the computer mouse, caregivers concentrated on scaffolding the mechanics of the task. Conversely, when parents reported that their children did not know how to use a mouse, they spent more time scaffolding children’s vocabulary and comprehension of the story, developmental tasks more typical of picture book reading. During picture book reading, there is more discussion of the story narrative. However, during picture book reading young children learn to use this tool as well, including learning to hold the book so that the picture is correctly oriented (DeLoache, Uttal, and Pierroutsakos, 2000). Parents also engage in “tech talk,” encouraging their children to turn the page or to hold the book in the correct orientation. During video chat, similar patterns have been observed with parents narrating through periods of poor Internet connection or dropped calls and often persisting through such technical issues (McClure and Barr, 2017). No studies have examined whether excessive use of “tech talk” persists once parents and children understand the mechanics of e-books or other technology (picture books or video chat). Given that very young children tend to read the same books repeatedly, parents may at first focus on the form of technology, but then after the first few times begin to focus on the content. Longitudinal studies examining repeated interactions are needed to answer questions regarding the balance between learning about technology and learning content from technology.

Video Chat and Support Several research studies have also explored how and in what ways young children can learn via video chat technology. Previous research has shown that children under 3 may have difficulty processing information on screens. For example, when children are told via a prerecorded video where to find an attractive hidden toy, they are typically unable to actually locate the toy, even though children are perfectly capable of doing so when given the same information in person (Troseth, Saylor, and Archer, 2006). In contrast, children who engaged in a five-minute video chat interaction with an adult partner prior to the hidden toy task were able to successfully use the information given to them onscreen to find the toy (Troseth et al., 2006). Although learning may be easier from video chat than from noninteractive televised presentations, other developmental challenges arise during video chat (McClure and Barr, 2017). For example, there may be audio or video delays, and, of course, there is no physical contact with their social partner. Despite these hurdles, social partners on both sides of the screen can help children overcome these video chat–associated challenges by scaffolding a young child’s participation in and use of the medium. For example, the parent holding the toddler while he speaks to a grandparent may act as physical proxy for the video chat partner, kissing or tickling the child at the end of a shared rhyme. Parents can also explain Internet delays and help mediate confusion caused by camera misalignment (McClure and Barr, 2017). Toddlers engage in joint visual attention across the screen attending to information that is on the screen (McClure, Chetsnova-Dutton, Holochwost, Parrott, and Barr, 2017). 396

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This joint attention is supported by the parent in the room and the grandparent on the other side of the video chat. Perspective taking may be influenced by the quality of interactions conducted via video chat. This is an empirical question. In summary, learning from media is challenging for young children. Strategies that parents typically use when reading picture books to their children are the same strategies that are effective in helping children to learn from television, tablets, and video chat. Research on the effects of scaffolding across media types suggests that young children require input from an engaged, responsive social partner if they are going to understand the functional relation between media and the real world in which they live. Parents should be encouraged to co-use media and to share and enjoy the experience with their children, rather than rely on the media as stand-alone educational devices. As children need to learn about the device, features, and affordances that are unique to each medium, this knowledge is best acquired in the context of parent–child interaction. This shared experience provides a basis for further discussion using enriched vocabulary to extend the learning beyond the screen. With the introduction of each new device, or when the complexity of content increases, scaffolding will again be necessary to allow the child to master the new technology or to learn a new concept. Children are also differentially susceptible to the effects of media based on their individual differences in learning (Valkenburg and Peter, 2013). For parents to determine how to scaffold media, they need to consider individual differences in the child’s cognitive and social skills, the content of the media, and the child’s experiences with different types of technology. Guernsey (2012) dubbed this the 3C’s: the child, the content, and the context.

Parental Guidelines for Media Usage Beginning in 1999 the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP, 1999) began to publish policy guidelines about media exposure. In this initial set of recommendations and for the next decade (AAP, 1999, 2011, 2013) the Academy based its recommendations almost solely on the recommended amount of exposure to television. Specifically for children under 2 years, the Academy recommended no television at all and for toddlers that television be limited to two hours or less per day. Based on the exposure rates described earlier in this chapter, these recommendations were not followed by parents. Either they did not know them or they were disregarded. At the time that the first set of recommendations was released, only three published empirical articles (Barr and Hayne, 1999; McCall, Parke, and Kavanaugh, 1977; Meltzoff, 1988) had examined learning from television during infancy. Although each study demonstrated learning from television was possible, two showed the transfer deficit. Over the next decade a small but growing body of literature emerged examining early media exposure and learning (Barr and Linebarger 2017). The most recent Academy recommendations (AAP, 2013, 2016) reflect the growing empirical database, and there has been a shift in focus that includes recommendations not only about exposure but also the content and context of viewing. For example, the latest two statements encourage media co-use , particularly during early childhood (AAP, 2013, 2016). Specifically, the AAP (2016) now recommends exposure only to educational content and accompanied by parental support where possible beginning around 18 months. The recommendation also noted the potential benefits of such parent-supported exposure to high-quality educational content, such as Sesame Street, for children’s learning and development (Wright et al., 2001). The policy differentiates between video chat and other screen media, with no age limit applied to video chat. The bidirectional nature of video chat differs from other screen media and scaffolding, as it can be provided on both sides of the screen (McClure and Barr, 2017), and parents often see video chat as an exception (McClure et al., 2015). The Academy policy statement was accompanied by a family media planning tool. Parents report little knowledge of the American Academy of Pediatrics recommendation, with only 20% citing the AAP as guiding their media choices for their young children (Rideout, 2017). 397

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Furthermore, the 20% of parents who reported following the AAP guidelines were largely educated and wealthy (Rideout, 2017). Recommendations regarding amount of exposure per day are unlikely to be the best predictors of outcomes. Przybylski and Weinstein (2017b), in a large population-based study of almost 20,000 parents, reported that the amount of time (one hour or two hours per day or above the recommendation) 2- to 5-year-old children were exposed was not associated with child well-being measures. A shift to focus parents on the importance of the content and context of media exposure is necessary. The National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC) and the Fred Rogers Center (2012) released a position statement supporting developmentally appropriate and intentional use of technology in early childhood education. This statement was directed primarily to early childcare providers but was of relevance to parents as well. It emphasized the need to better integrate technology into ongoing classroom practices and to extend learning rather than using technology as a stand-alone educational device. The AAP emphasis on quality social interactions to support learning from media during early childhood was repeated in this statement. Finally, Zero to Three released a set of guidelines called Screen Sense (Lerner and Barr, 2015) specifically developed for parents of children under 3 years. The authors recommend mindful media use, encouraging parents to (1) develop healthy media habits, (2) choose media content carefully, (3) share the experience with the child, and (4) be mindful of the impact that their own media use might have on their children. They also recommend that parents engage in activities to facilitate transfer of learning from the screen to the real world with their children. These guidelines also considered the highly saturated parental media environment and the likely greater negative impact of forms of background media via background television or interruptions from constant access to mobile devices. Media policy statements continue to be updated as new research is released and as new forms of media evolve.

Media-Based Interventions The decline in the cost of different devices has led to a proliferation of media devices across socioeconomic status, leading to an opportunity to provide cost-effective resources to many families. This digital promise—although not yet achieved—has made great strides in the past decade. A number of studies have examined whether texting can enhance parent engagement with educators (Hurwitz, Lauricella, Hanson, Raden, and Wartella, 2015; York and Loeb, 2014). Hurwitz and colleagues (2015) found that Head Start parents participating in a daily text-messaging program that provided educational activities and parenting tips reported that they engaged in more types of learning activities with their children compared to parents who did not receive text messages. This intervention was very effective for fathers, who are frequently not directly contacted and are often more difficult to engage. As described by Guernsey and Levine, there are a number of pitfalls to text-based interventions. First, texts are unidirectional. Second, it is unclear whether behavioral change is maintained after texts end. Finally, there are potential financial barriers as well as potential tech failures to these types of interventions. Guernsey and Levine (2015) reported that barriers to entry for text-based interventions are decreasing due to increased availability of Wi-Fi that decreases reliance on data plans and reduced cost of technology, particularly tablets and smartphones. Rather than unidirectional texts, newer apps allow for bidirectional communication between parents and childcare and health providers utilizing video chat (for review, see Guernsey and Levine, 2015; Lauricella et al. 2017). More individualized messages could be developed by integrating information across multiple sources (e.g., education and health care). Guernsey and Levine (2015) suggested that the adoption of such tailored and integrated messages would reduce the possibility that families would be presented with either too much information or conflicting information and would also increase the likelihood that parents would continue to read and act on the information over time. 398

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Service-based interventions have taken advantage of video modeling to enhance parent–child interactions. Interventions that include educational video components had been effective for adolescent parents and parents from low-income backgrounds (Coren, Barlow, and Stewart-Brown, 2003). Interventions were most effective when the video modeling was combined with active interaction and feedback with facilitators (Barr et al., 2014; Huebner and Meltzoff, 2005; Sharry, Guerin, Griffin, and Drumm, 2005). For example, the Just Beginning program is a relationship-based intervention for incarcerated teen fathers and their infants that utilizes media modeling (Barr et al., 2014). Integrating media takes a strengths-based approach for incarcerated teen parents, who typically have low literacy rates (Krezmein and Mulcahy, 2008) but a high affinity for and proficiency with digital media (Rideout, Foehr, and Roberts, 2010; Rideout, 2015). The videos were produced by Sesame Street’s Early Childhood Education Department. Like many Sesame Street videos, these were designed with a two-generational approach: the videos were interesting to infants but also modeled strategies to foster positive parent–child interactions for the parents. The videos had been tested in a study with middleincome parents and their toddlers. Parents who more frequently co-viewed the Sesame Beginnings video with their toddlers across a two-week period exhibited higher-quality parent–child interactions during a free play interaction than parents who had viewed videos that did not include a two-generation design (Pempek, Demers, Hanson, Kirkorian, and Anderson, 2011). The Sesame Street videos are able to clearly depict positive, warm parent–child interactions, which can otherwise be difficult to describe. The depiction of positive parent–child interactions is particularly important for incarcerated parents who do not have daily opportunities to interact with their children and often do not have a positive model of interactional quality. High-quality play was the target of the intervention because such play is central to developing a lasting positive and warm relationship. The Just Beginning intervention included the following components: video modeling, an opportunity for fathers to interact with their babies to practice the parenting skills, and trained facilitators who provided direct feedback. The evaluation measured changes in the interactional quality between fathers and their infants. There was a significant increase in father–child interactional quality as measured by a growth linear model of parent support and infant engagement across sessions (Barr et al., 2014). Another effective strategy for parenting interventions is video feedback. The PALS program (Play and Learning Strategies) in Texas (Landry, Smith, Swank, and Guttentag, 2008) and VIP (Video Interaction Project) in New York (Weisleder et al., 2016) have both taken advantage of video feedback. Play sessions are videorecorded either at the home (PALS) or at the pediatric clinic during the typical waiting time (VIP) while parents are playing with their young children. Trained facilitators then play the video back to the parent, and the pair discuss strategies that worked well. Researchers find that this feedback strengthens positive parenting strategies (Landry et al., 2008; Weisleder et al., 2016).

Future Directions in Parenting in the Digital Age Measurement Challenges A major challenge in this field involves the measurement of media exposure. Different laboratories use widely varying methods to measure media, even for more traditional forms like TV (e.g., recall based on a “typical” day versus diary methods; Vandewater and Lee, 2009), making it difficult to compare across studies. Most methods for estimating amount of exposure rely on one or several questions asking parents to “estimate the amount of TV viewed in a ‘typical’ day,” calling into question the strong conclusions drawn from such weak methods. The vast majority of research in this area focuses more on global estimates of time spent (Vandewater and Lee, 2009), ignoring content despite robust evidence that content is a critical moderator of media effects (Anderson et al., 2001). Researchers typically focus on the child while ignoring the media habits of other family members. This disregard is particularly problematic because each family member is likely to have his or her own device. 399

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Researchers are developing reliable methods for measuring use of newer media, especially for mobile devices where exposure often occurs in small bursts. Use of more precise measurement of media usage, including passive sensing apps, wearables, and time-use data that consider entire family activities including the content and context of media usage within the family, will systematize and standardize how media exposure is measured in the context of children’s everyday experiences. The measurement challenge is now greater not only because of the number of devices that need to be tracked but also because the family media ecology needs to be considered. Although a great deal is now known about parent mediation strategies with children 12 years and under, there are still large gaps in our understanding of the family ecology of media use. Researchers have only begun to investigate how parents mediate adolescent usage (Piotrowski, 2017; Uhls and Robb, 2018). Furthermore, many of the next cohort of parents will have grown up as digital natives. Parents who are digital natives themselves may use and mediate the use of media in the household in dramatically different ways than non–digital-native parents (Jennings, 2017). The effect of sibling–sibling interactions during media usage has been almost entirely ignored and requires urgent research attention (Jennings, 2017). Open questions include whether older siblings are mentoring younger siblings in the use of newer devices and under which contexts do older siblings view content meant for younger audiences and vice versa when younger siblings view content intended for older audiences (Jennings, 2017). The question of how parents manage rules and exposure to content types as well as access and “sharing” of devices between siblings has not been examined. The problem of capturing and integrating information about the family media ecology presents a measurement challenge that will need to be addressed. It will not be enough to collect a survey from one parent in the household. Rather, converging methodologies that take advantage of passive technology tracking on cellphones, digital capture of language and environments, physiological measurement of sleep and activity, and ecological sampling methods to track in-the-moment emotional responses are all needed.

Examination of Individual Trajectories Researchers should continue to incorporate multiple developmental processes and contextual features into their models. One example is the Differential Susceptibility to Media Model (Valkenburg and Peter, 2013), which recognizes that different children and adolescents in diverse contexts may have varying reactions to a range of media experiences. Susceptibility is not a single quality; rather, a variety of child and family factors may make children more or less susceptible to positive or negative outcomes. For example, Linebarger and colleagues (2014) evaluated susceptibility to media effects as a function of parenting skills and sociodemographic risk. To better understand the complex interaction of media exposure in the context of development, longitudinal studies to examine how family media diets are established, how trajectories develop, and how these patterns are related to long-term outcomes are needed. In this field, there has been only a handful of small-scale longitudinal studies to follow children over time with the specific goal of delineating the effects of media over childhood (Anderson et al., 2001; Barr, Lauricella, Zack, and Calvert, 2010; Linebarger and Walker, 2005; Wright et al., 2001). Unfortunately, ongoing large-scale longitudinal studies have not considered the role that digital media may play, despite the fact that media now comprise a large chunk of daily experiences. New studies of any type of development need to consider the entire family media environment, including family members and multiple devices, in order to thoroughly predict outcomes of various media diets on individual children living in various contexts.

New Waves of Technology Each wave of new technology has incorporated more sensory data. Currently advances in virtual reality and haptic sensors are new ways to increase interactivity and the reality of the media experience. 400

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Virtual reality provides 3D-like visual representations, and haptic cues provide tactile vibration feedback. Multisensory experiences may integrate more easily into children’s perceptions and representations gained from real-world experiences. Conversely, these experiences may provide interference with ongoing learning. Both haptic cues and virtual reality require additional empirical study with very young children accompanied by ongoing research examining how parents can support their children’s engagement in these new multisensory experiences. Video chat, a newer technology, lacks empirical evidence on how it can most effectively be deployed. Fisch (2017) argued that video chat provides unique opportunities to connect across multiple generations and often across geographical distances through a screen. It is still not yet clear how closely such interactions match face-to-face interactions. McClure and Barr (2017) examined how parents and grandparents facilitated interactions during video chat, but their analyses do not provide a complete picture of these interaction patterns or what children may learn from these experiences. Undoubtedly new media will eventually appear and be accompanied by its own set of affordances and constraints that will likely mirror some of the same affordances and constraints of prior research, and researchers should be careful to reexamine overlapping principles from parenting science that have persisted across multiple platforms.

Cross-Cultural Perspectives Are Needed Research on parenting and media usage has largely been conducted in the United States and the Netherlands, meaning that there is a dearth of knowledge about parenting media practices across cultures. This is despite the fact that mobile technology has penetrated the families of many children around the globe. For example, Lumbre-Visto (personal communication August, 2017) conducted a survey in a low-cost subdivision in the city of Tacloban, the Philippines, with 299 parents with children aged between 6 months and 5 years. Families had an average household income of 30,000 Php (~US$600). Most households owned either a television or a smartphone/tablet, and most children (96%) had used the device before 2 years. Very few households had Internet access (27%) or a television set placed in the child’s bedroom (15%). Households with Internet access frequently used video chat (80%) to keep in touch with relatives or to stay in contact due to parental work schedules. These findings suggest that media usage patterns are prevalent, but additional information is needed to understand patterns of usage and how they differ and overlap across different communities and cultures.

Effective Interventions The basic research on the measurement and long-term impact of media exposure can be leveraged to develop effective interventions to increase positive benefits of technology and reduce negative possible impacts. It will be necessary to design interventions to meet the needs of diverse and vulnerable families, including incarcerated parents, families living in poverty or who are experiencing homelessness, deployed military personnel, and children and families coping with divorce. Technology provides an opportunity for health care providers to meet families remotely to strengthen their parenting skills and child outcomes. For example, Jennings (2017) highlighted the importance of including larger, more diverse populations, including more work on populations with intellectual disabilities. This is an area where research on the effectiveness of interventions and technology-assisted learning is burgeoning, but how parents are empowered or included in such intervention approaches is often ignored. For example, Golan and colleagues (2010) developed a show to increase emotion recognition for children on the autism spectrum called The Transporters. The show took advantage of the parental observation that children with autism really enjoyed “Thomas the Tank” engine, possibly because the nonbiological movement of the trains was highly predictable. The show Transporters places a human face on a train. 401

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Recognition of facial emotions increased after viewing this show. Additional research focusing on parental use of such tools and extension of content beyond the media-based intervention is necessary to maximize the effectiveness of such interventions.

Conclusions Parenting in the digital age provides a number of unique opportunities and challenges to parents. The research demonstrates, however, that general parenting principles apply to media forms, particularly in the area of scaffolding experiences for very young children. Positive parenting practices around media are essential despite the sophistication and interactivity inherent in new forms of media. Because media are tools that require children to learn new affordances that often do not equally apply in the 3D world, they will need support to learn affordances and overcome constraints. Constraints and affordances differ even for new tools like virtual reality or intelligent agents. Because the content is a symbolic representation of information existing in the real world, children need guidance to learn the relation between images and the real objects. Children rapidly master these skills under responsive and supportive conditions, and such mastery will likely be increasingly important for school readiness and academic achievement. However, media is a double-edged sword, providing opportunities to extend learning within the parent–child context but also to interfere with that relationship. But the interference stems from the parent’s own media usage. Increasing parental awareness of the potential role that their own media use could play in interfering with the parent–child relationship is a first step to reducing long-term negative impacts on language and cognitive outcomes. Given our knowledge of both the pros and cons of parenting in the digital age, this is a time of promise for increasing access to resources for a large portion of parents around the globe.

Acknowledgments Thanks to Olivia Blanchfield and Madeline Lui for their help in the preparation of the manuscript. Thank you also to a grant from Children and Screens: Institute of Digital Media and Child Development.

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Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media, 43, 52–66. doi: 10.1080/08838159909364474 Valkenburg, P. M., and Peter, J. (2013). The differential susceptibility to media effects model. Journal of Communication, 63, 221–243. doi: 10.1111/jcom.12024 Vandewater, E. A., and Lee, S. J. (2009). Measuring children’s media use in the digital age: Issues and challenges. The American Behavioral Scientist, 52, 1152–1176. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0002764209331539 Vandewater, E. A., Park, S. E., Huang, X., and Wartella, E. A. (2005). “No-you can’t watch that”: Parental rules and young children’s media use. American Behavioral Scientist, 48, 608–623. Wartella, E., Rideout, V., Lauricella, A., and Connell, S. (2014). Revised parenting in the age of digital technology: A national survey. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University. Retrieved from https://cmhd.northwestern.edu/wpcontent/uploads/2015/06/ParentingAgeDigitalTechnology.REVISED.FINAL_.2014.pdf. Wartella, E., and Robb, M. (2007). Young children, new media. Journal of Children and Media, 1, 35–44. doi: 10.1080/17482790601005207 Weisleder, A., Cates, C. B., Dreyer, B., Berkule Johnson, S., Huberman, H., Seery, A., Canfield, C., and Mendelsohn, A. L. (2016). Promotion of positive parenting and prevention of socioemotional disparities. Pediatrics, 137, 1–9. doi: 10.1542/peds.2015-3239 Wood, E., Petkovski, M., De Pasquale, D., Gottardo, A., Evans, M. A., and Savage, R. S. (2016). Parent scaffolding of young children when engaged with mobile technology. Frontiers in Psychology, 7, 690. http://doi. org/10.3389/fpsyg.2016.00690 Wright, J. C., Huston, A. C., Murphy, K. C., St. Peters, M., Piñon, M., Scantlin, R., and Kotler, J. (2001). The relations of early television viewing to school readiness and vocabulary of children from low-income families: The early window project. Child Development, 72, 1347–1366. York, B. N., and Loeb, S. (2014). One step at a time: The effects of an early literacy text messaging program for parents of preschoolers. National Bureau of Economic Research. NBER Working Paper No. 20659 Zack, E., and Barr, R. (2016). The role of interactional quality in learning from touch screens during infancy: Context matters. Frontiers in Psychology, 7, 1264. http://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2016.01264 Zack, E., Barr, R., Gerhardstein, P., Dickerson, K., and Meltzoff, A. N. (2009). Infant imitation from television using novel touch-screen technology. British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 27, 13–26. doi: 10.1348/026151008X334700 Zimmerman, F. J., and Christakis, D. A. (2005). Children’s television viewing and cognitive outcomes: A longitudinal analysis of national data. Archives of Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine, 159, 619–625. Zimmerman, F. J., and Christakis, D. A. (2007). Associations between content types of early media exposure and subsequent attention problems. Pediatrics, 120, 986–992. Zimmerman, F. J., Christakis, D. A., and Meltzoff, A. (2007a). Television and DVD/video viewing in children younger than 2 years. Archives of Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine, 161, 473–479. Zimmerman, F. J., Christakis, D. A., and Meltzoff, A. (2007b). Associations between media viewing and language development in children under age 2 years. Journal of Pediatrics, 151:364-8

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14 PARENTING THE CHILD IN SCHOOL Robert Crosnoe and Robert W. Ressler

Introduction This chapter most directly links to the large interdisciplinary literature on parental involvement in education (with parental engagement and family–school partnerships being more contemporary alternative conceptualizations). Parental involvement encompasses a wide variety of behaviors that take place in multiple settings, such as the home (e.g., engaging in cognitively stimulating activities with children, such as shared reading), preschools and schools setting (e.g., meeting with teachers about children’s progress, volunteering at school), and in the community (e.g., finding positive extracurricular activities for children, exposing children to cultural resources, such as museums). Such behaviors also vary across developmental time, declining in many ways but also evolving into different forms as children’s needs change with age. For example, playing stimulating games with children is more important during early childhood than in adolescence, with helping children choose curricular options in school more common during adolescence than early childhood. Finally, both levels of engagement in and the meanings attached to parental involvement behaviors are highly context specific, differing across diverse segments of the population with diverse cultural settings for child development. For example, affluent European-American parents tend to emphasize the value of being visibly active in their children’s schools, whereas Asian-American immigrant parents are more likely to emphasize involvement at home and in the community as crucial (Christenson and Sheridan, 2001; Epstein, 2011; Hoover-Dempsey and Sandler, 1997). Across all this diversity and change, the common theme is that parents view creating, supporting, and managing children’s opportunities to learn as key components of their parenting role. Notably, research has consistently supported these parents’ views, showing that the various forms of parental involvement are positively associated with children’s and adolescents’ academic and behavioral outcomes. This evidence, in turn, has fueled a massive degree of federal, state, and local policy investment in efforts to increase parental involvement in education, efforts that have substantial public backing (Epstein, 2005; Pomerantz, Moorman, and Litwack, 2007). Yet others contest this research in many ways, generating substantial debate about socioeconomic and ethnic biases on the part of both schools and the researchers who study schools. Such biases pertain to the privileging of parenting behaviors and values of more affluent, European-American, and U.S.-born parents, which then causes professionals and the public to view involvement behaviors as a parenting ideal through which to evaluate all parents. Parents from other social strata and backgrounds then experience their efforts to support children’s school success as lacking, and educators or

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policymakers may judge them accordingly to the detriment of their children’s treatment in schools. Research emphasizing narrow, and especially school-based, aspects of involvement over a full range of parental views, values, and behaviors helps to reinforce this problem. In addition to these accusations of bias, the push for increased parental involvement as a remedy for the woes of the U.S. educational system has been criticized as placing too much responsibility for schools’ successes and failures on the shoulders of parents (Crosnoe, 2015; Domina, 2005; Lareau, 2003; Robinson and Harris, 2014; Tobin, Adair, and Arzubiaga, 2013). This chapter wades into this complex literature of translational social and behavioral science research on parental involvement in education and the many policies and programs it enforces. The primary focus is the United States—the developed country with arguably the greatest degree of emphasis on parental school involvement within its public educational system and the most scientific research emphasis on the subject—with attention to other developed countries as comparison and contrast (Avvisati, Besbas, and Guyon, 2010; Willms and Somer, 2001). To place some limits on the scope of this discussion, this chapter also focuses on parenting that is consciously linked to promoting children’s academic progress and future educational attainment, even though many of the most important parenting foundations for such educational trajectories—such as providing a secure and healthy environment for children to grow and thrive—are not necessarily education specific (Pomerantz et al., 2007; see also Hill and Chao, 2009). Tracing the historical roots of parental involvement and associated research and delving into contemporary questions about the promise and peril of using parental involvement as a policy lever can help reconcile the documented benefits of parental involvement for children and the ways that these benefits can obscure more problematic aspects of societal inequality. The goal is to reconsider parental involvement in education in the evolving contexts of its past, present, and future.

Historical Considerations in the Parent/School Relationship The history of parental involvement in education in the United States has been a story of an evolving—and inconsistent—sense of the role of parents within schools, with norms moving from active connection between home and school early on to a later separation of the two and then the modern vision of parents as having the responsibility to be “partners” with schools (see Figure 14.1). This modern vision grew out of multiple social, economic, and cultural trends, and lack of critical reflection on these converging trends is one reason why parental involvement in education is both a common point of public discussions of how to improve U.S. education and a source of conflict.

Three Stages of Parental Involvement in Education First, at the dawn of formal schooling in the United States in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, schools and families were closely connected, and parents were highly involved in the daily functioning and “big picture” design of schools. In the context of a decentralized government, isolated towns and communities in a largely rural society, and economic vulnerability, parents had to do much of the work to create schools and keep them going. For example, parents had more responsibility for hiring and firing teachers, and they exerted a great deal of influence on the curriculum and how teachers taught it. Thus, the role of parents was not just about their everyday interactions with their own children but also about guiding the ways that the community and teachers ran the schools their children attended (Cremin, 1957; Epstein, 2011; Prentice and Houston, 1975). During this era, the view of the relation between families and schools was one of interdependence. Second, moving from the 19th century through the 20th century, the educational system became much more institutionalized, professionalized, and formalized over the course of many years. As the system grew, government control of schools increased, and a common curriculum emerged, with the

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18th through 19th Century (Connection)

Late 19th through Early 20th Century (Separation)

Late 20th through Early 21st Century (Re-Emergence)

Figure 14.1 Three stages in the history of parental involvement in education in the United States

dominant perception developing that education was the domain of professionals, not parents. As a result, the strong influence of parents on schools declined, and parents and schools kept at a distance from each other. The role of parents changed, with parents now expected to prepare their children for school with the behaviors and attitudes necessary for academic success and then leave the actual instruction to the “experts” at school. More recently, increased demand for accountability in schools has once again highlighted the importance of parents who are informed and involved in their children’s educational experiences (Epstein, 2011; Labaree, 1988). In this era, the view of families and schools was one of support. Third, from the final decades of the 20th century into the 21st century, major changes within the educational system once again shifted the role of parents in schools and their educational involvement more generally. Although not the only cause, one of the first notable occurrences of the reinvestment of parents into the educational system arose because of laws and educational policies surrounding desegregation. For better or worse, parents once again felt compelled to take a more active role in their children’s education and the schools that their children attended (Clotfelter, 2004). Following on the heels of major demographic shifts in U.S. public schools, the diversification of schools through “school choice” movements also emphasized the importance of parents in obtaining and maintaining educational opportunities for their children (Berends, 2015). These factors, coupled with the underperformance of U.S. schools relative to other developed nations, the increased pressure to hold schools accountable for the academic performance of students, and a renewed emphasis on local control, led to the re-emergence of parents as powerful actors in schools. Today, in the United States more than in other developed countries, parents consider themselves as having a rightful say in school practices, educational policies, and pedagogical processes—as fundamental to the success of their children in schools through direct interactional parenting practices but also core to the successful functioning of schools through their interactions with school personnel and other parents. Large-scale school reforms in the United States—including federal policies such as No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top—have mirrored this perspective, repeatedly incentivizing schools to facilitate parental 412

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involvement, especially among parents from historically disadvantaged and marginalized segments of the population (Domina, 2005; Epstein, 2005; Lareau, 2003; Tobin et al., 2013). In this most recent era, the view of families and schools is one of partnership.

Three Contemporary Trends Fueling Emphasis on Parental Involvement As just noted, many social, economic, and cultural changes have converged to create the modern vision—among researchers and policymakers but also in the public—of families and schools as partners. Yet three in particular are important to highlight here because they speak to the ways in which the very idea of parental involvement in education is a social construction—reformulating and evolving as the context changes. First, the importance of educational attainment for both the individual and society has increased tremendously since the 1970s, both in the United States and in the rest of the developed world during a period of increasing global economic restructuring. Indeed, the returns to investments in educational attainment—typically measured by the greater earnings associated with receiving a college degree compared to a high school diploma—reached historic highs (see Figure 14.2), and these returns go beyond income to include such life course outcomes as better health, longer life expectancy, and more stable family lives. Such rising returns are a result of modern economic restructuring in the United States and other developed countries, in which the larger manufacturing sector of the economy has been replaced with an information/service sector with a higher demand for highly skilled professional workers (Fischer and Hout, 2006; Goldin and Katz, 2008). With these increasing stakes of high levels of progress and achievement in the educational system, competition among students for valued academic credentials and opportunities has increased. That increased competition, in turn, has led to competition among parents and an escalating race for investment in children’s education. In this environment, parental involvement—in the form of securing opportunities for children through supplemental activities, sought-after schools, and advocacy at school—has become a form of investment, one in which socioeconomically advantaged parents have the upper hand (Foster, 2002; Kornrich and Furstenberg, 2013).

Median Earnings for College Graduate/High School Graduate

2 1.8

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Figure 14.2

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Contemporary trends in returns to higher education in the United States

Note: For full-time workers, aged 25–34 Source: U.S. Census (Baum, 2014)

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Second, the norm of “intensive mothering” has expanded and strengthened in the United States and Europe (Faircloth, 2013; Hays, 1998). According to Hays (1998, p. 8), intensive mothering refers to the modern idea that children require a great deal of focused care, nurturance, and stimulation, so that rearing a child should be “child-centered, expert-driven, emotionally absorbing, labor-intensive, and financially expensive.” Either explicitly or implicitly, this idea assumes that such parenting is best done by mothers, who are not supposed to leave anything about their children’s futures to chance. It is a form of parenting defined by maximum focus on children and selfless sacrifice by mothers that took hold among the increasingly large share of college-educated (primarily European-American) mothers at the end of the 20th century and achieved great power in the media and popular culture. As a result, all mothers are judged according to how much they live up to the standards of intensive motherhood, and those who realistically cannot do so or who reject this characterization are disadvantaged (Artis, 2009; Elliott, Powell, and Brenton, 2015; Hays, 1998). Within the context of increasingly high stakes of educational attainment in the life course and in society, intensive mothering manifests in a specific forum of parental involvement often labeled concerted cultivation, or the idea that navigating children through the educational system requires vigilant attention, constant management, significant advocacy, and great personal sacrifice (Lareau, 2003). Like intensive mothering, concerted cultivation is a product of a primarily European-American affluent culture that has used its power in society to have this idea engrained in school practices and policies (Cheadle, 2008; Lareau, 2003). This shift towards concerted cultivation occurs even though there appears to be no intrinsic value in this kind of parental involvement; rather, it is just the kind of parental involvement that is currently most valued by societal elites (Lareau 2003). Indeed, such an emphasis on concerted cultivation may decrease a family’s quality of life or put undue pressure on already overworked mothers (Meyers and Jordan, 2006; Stone 2007). Third, the push for “privatization” of many public services in the United States and other liberal welfare regimes has extended into the educational system. In this perspective, schools are not merely public institutions overseen by the government and out of the touch of the people that they serve. Instead, the dominant view became that policies needed to hold schools accountable to the students, families, and communities that they served; that accountability was promoted by an open-market approach; and that applying insights from private enterprise to this public venture would improve overall functioning and productivity (Ravitch, 2016). Two clear dimensions of this trend are the growing emphasis on “school choice” and the rapid increase in the number and size of education-focused nonprofits attempting to bolster the success of traditional public schools and diverting resources away from direct investments in schools (Pettijohn, 2013; Renzulli and Roscigno, 2005). Another dimension more relevant to this chapter is that parents have increasingly taken the view that schools must answer to them and that they have a right and obligation to involve themselves in the management and leadership of schools. The spread of this view includes the construction of state and federal policies that require schools to develop shared governance plans with parents and community stakeholders (Domina, 2005; Epstein, 2005). The complex social and cultural tensions among parents, communities, and schools such as stereotyping, differing values, or even scheduling conflicts challenge the success of such policies (Tobin et al., 2013).

Three Contemporary Trends Complicating Emphasis on Parental Involvement Just as some social, economic, and cultural changes in the United States have led to the growing sense that parents have a crucial role not just in their children’s education but also in their children’s schools, simultaneous contemporary changes suggest that this role is far from straightforward or easy to enact. First, the population of U.S. schools—much like the U.S. population as a whole—is substantially more ethnically diverse today than it was in the not-so-distant past, but the ethnic composition of 414

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the nation’s teachers and school administrators has not kept pace. For example, the proportion of the K–12 student population that is non-Hispanic European-American in the United States has dropped to 46%, whereas the corresponding proportion for teachers is over 80% (National Center for Education Statistics, 2016). Such incongruence between teachers and students is also an issue in other developed (albeit less diverse) nations. As a result, many parents have diverse backgrounds and different ideas of parenting than the personnel at their children’s current or future schools. Although teachers, parents, and students can and do form meaningful and effective relationships across ethnic lines, cross-ethnic relationships in schools are somewhat more vulnerable due to a lack of communication and coordination and have heightened risks of antagonism. Indeed, ample research has shown that many non–European-American parents, especially African-American parents, feel alienated from and dismissed by European-American teachers and that European-American teachers often have stereotypical and negative views of non–European-American parents. In such cases, efforts by parents to become more involved in schools can lead to tensions, and they might not receive equal credit for their home- and community-based involvement efforts (Lareau and Horvat, 1999; Robinson and Harris, 2014). In addition, the persistent connection between ethnic and socioeconomic stratification in the United States and other affluent countries muddles relying on parental involvement for the educational success of children. Current socioeconomic circumstances mean that the aspects of parental involvement that are not incorporated into the public education system but require financial investment (e.g., purchasing reading materials, enrolling children in extracurricular activities, paying private school tuition) are more likely to be out of reach for ethnic minority parents than European-American parents. Second, the substantial increase in immigration in the United States after the major federal immigration reforms in 1965 has complicated contemporary expectations of parental involvement above and beyond the growing ethnic diversity of the country. Almost a quarter of children in U.S. schools are the children of immigrants, and that proportion is much higher in traditional immigrant destination states like California and Texas (Hernandez, 2004). Many other developed countries—from Australia to Iceland—also have experienced increased immigration and its effects on student populations, meaning that the relevance of immigration to parental involvement in schools extends beyond the United States (Runarsdottir and Vilhjalmsson, 2015; Washbrook, Waldfogel, Bradbury, Corak, and Ghanghro, 2012). As a result, many parents of children in U.S. schools have less understanding of the expectations that school personnel and other parents have of them—in addition to often having low levels of educational attainment in their home countries, facing language barriers with schools, and working in jobs that grant little control over their time. Immigrant parents from Latin America and Asia are also more likely than U.S.-born parents to view their educational role as parents as encouraging positive behavior and academic motivation at home and in the community, rather than directly interacting or coordinating with schools. Such parents see themselves as highly involved, but school personnel who are looking for more visible (and demanding) displays of involvement may not recognize them as such. When teachers and other school personnel do not see immigrant parents as involved, they may think that they do not care and possibly adjust their attention to the parents’ children accordingly. In such scenarios, schools view immigrant parents as problems to be fixed rather than resources on which to be capitalized. Although not immigrants, Native American parents have similar experiences in their children’s schools (Crosnoe and Ansari, 2015; Deyhle, 1991; McWayne, Melzi, Schick, Kennedy, and Mundt, 2013; Poza, Brooks, and Valdés, 2014; Tobin et al., 2013; Yoshikawa, 2011; Zhou, 2009). Further complicating this contemporary trend of increased immigration is any crossover—either perceived or real—between the institutions of public education and other governmental agencies and authorities that are tasked with the enforcement or regulation of the nation’s immigration laws. Undocumented immigrants, families of undocumented individuals, or even U.S. citizens who may be mistaken for undocumented immigrants may be more hesitant to involve themselves in any governmental institution, whether that institution itself has policies regarding an individual’s immigrant 415

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status (Brayne, 2014). This phenomenon—often called system avoidance—has clear implications in a modern environment that expects parents to be visible, present, and intensively involved in the dayto-day functioning of a government service such as public schools. Third, the family structures of U.S. students have become increasingly complicated and unstable (see Brown, Stykes, and Manning, 2016), leading to questions about who in the family is and can be involved in children’s education on a regular basis, especially in the most visible forms of parental involvement at school. The kinds of parental involvement emphasized by schools takes substantial time and effort, so much so that they are greatly facilitated by having a partner to share the burden. Consequently, single parents will have more trouble than partnered parents consistently engaging in many valued parental involvement behaviors. At the same time, because biological parents tend to be more consistently invested in children’s educational careers than stepparent figures, parents who are not partnered with their children’s other parent (or at least coparenting with that other parent) will also be at a disadvantage when it comes to active and intensive parental involvement. Policymakers, however, infrequently tailor school policies and programs aiming to increase parental involvement to meet the needs of parents in a diverse array of living arrangements (Crosnoe and Benner, 2012; Ressler, Smith, Cavanagh, and Crosnoe, 2017).

Where Things Stand Now Given historical changes in families, schools, and the connections between them, as well as contemporary changes that place pressure on these connections, we can conclude that parental involvement in education is a modern parenting practice that is potentially valuable for children and schools but also potentially contentious. Understanding how to realize the value of parental involvement while avoiding conflict requires a deeper dive into what parental involvement is and how it operates, with special attention to issues of socioeconomic, ethnic, and immigration-related diversity and inequality. Much of the research in this area is based on the often-unique U.S. case, where the interplay between families and schools is particularly complicated because of the decentralized educational system and the diverse population, but research on other countries (as well as comparative research) is also illuminating in many ways, both because of the similarities and differences it can reveal.

Central Issues in Parental Involvement Having laid out the historical and contemporary context of parental involvement in education in the United States and why it stands out from the rest of the developed world, this section elucidates various dimensions of parental involvement and how families and schools are (and are not) oriented towards each other. As the preceding discussion showed, parental involvement means different things to different parents, and even parents who have the same vision of parental involvement may face different constraints in acting on their motivations. At the same time, schools tend to view parental involvement and encourage involvement among parents in ways that may or may not correspond to what parents are thinking and doing. Moreover, these perspectives often reflect the persistent effects of ethnic and socioeconomic stratification, and reinforce a Western view of “good” parenting in a diverse population of students and families influenced by many other cultural traditions. Even when families and schools think that they are on the same page, therefore, they may not be adequately living up to their intentions to serve the best interests of children.

Different Conceptualizations of Parental Involvement Social and behavioral scientists tend to categorize various parental involvement in education behaviors according to what these behaviors entail and where and when they take place. In reviewing the 416

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literature, this chapter presents a five-part categorization to describe the basic behaviors within each category, how they are often contested culturally within the United States (and differ across countries), and efforts to address such problems to better serve the needs of developing children and youth.

Direct Development of Children’s Skills, Talents, and Interests The first category of parental involvement in education encompasses teaching, stimulation, and enrichment. This type of direct involvement in education mostly takes place in the home, especially when children are young. It generally involves face-to-face interactions in which parents share with, engage, and guide children in learning activities, both academic (e.g., learning numbers and letters) and cultural (e.g., telling stories about one’s people; Crosnoe and Cooper, 2010; Raver, Gershoff, and Aber, 2007; Tobin et al., 2013). One of the most commonly studied examples of direct development is parental language use with children. Ample evidence attests to the importance of extensive and rich language use on the part of parents in children’s cognitive development. One famous line of research documented the large socioeconomic disparities in parental language use with young children (Hart and Risley, 2003). The implication taken from this research is that these disparities help to explain the large socioeconomic gaps in school readiness and early achievement, although more recent research has argued that socioeconomic disparities in quality of parental language use are smaller than corresponding disparities in quantity (Hirsh-Pasek et al., 2015). Another example involves parents’ attempt to stimulate and cultivate children’s interests and capacities in math, with Chinese parents taking a more explicit skillbuilding approach compared to U.S. parents’ use of games and other “fun” activities (Pan, Gauvain, Liu, and Cheng, 2006; Siegler and Ramani, 2008). The argument is that involvement behaviors require significant investments of time, energy, and often money and are vulnerable to language or cultural differences between families and children’s preschools and schools (McWayne et al., 2013; Raver et al., 2007). Several innovative interventions to help parents of low socioeconomic means or facing other challenges to engage more easily and knowledgeably in shared learning activities with children, such as dialogic reading, reflect the emphasis on this type of involvement (Hargrave and Sénéchal, 2000).

Active Management of Schooling The second category of parental involvement in education encompasses assisting children with schoolwork (e.g., helping with homework), communicating with teachers (e.g., voicing concerns, asking advice), supervising course enrollments and activities (e.g., advising on which math class to take), accessing educational opportunities (e.g., choosing and securing a school or a program), preparing for future educational trajectories (e.g., counseling on college options), and advocating for children in school (e.g., protecting them from discipline, arguing for their selection into special programs; Catsambis, 2001; Hoover-Dempsey et al., 2001; Muller, 1995). This category of parental involvement in education is highly child specific, as it evolves over time as children mature and their needs and activities change. For example, helping with homework becomes increasingly difficult for parents as children move into and through secondary school and the curriculum becomes more advanced (Crosnoe, 2001; Eccles and Harold, 1993). More socioeconomically advantaged parents tend to have more resources to make this kind of parental involvement in education count. They may have more intimate knowledge of the ways that schools work, how to get ahead, and what is needed now to ensure success in the future, and they often have more power to get what they want and force more bidirectional exchanges (versus unidirectional) with schools (Crosnoe and Ansari, 2015; Crosnoe and Muller, 2014; Lareau and Horvat, 1999). As a result, many intervention programs targeting underprivileged students explicitly employ mentors to help with this management of schooling (Gandara, 2002). One criticism of this form of 417

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involvement is that it can become too controlling and reduce youth ownership of their schooling, and, indeed, studies of Chinese parents have shown that their involvement behaviors are more geared to cultivating youth autonomy (Cheung and Pomerantz, 2012; Pomerantz et al., 2007).

Effecting Change in School The third category of parental involvement in education includes explicit school-based activities and interactions like volunteering, participation in parent–teacher associations, fundraising, and leading school programs and school reform movements. Essentially, parents take on an active role within schools as a means of improving their children’s schools and both directly and indirectly helping their children through such improvements (Muller, 1995; Ressler et al., 2017; Simon, 2004). Because this kind of parental involvement in education is so visible, it tends to gain parents the most credit for being involved parents among teachers, school administrators, and other parents in the school community. Because these school-based involvement behaviors are so linked with holding schools accountable to students and families and increasing community control of schools, they are also typically the primary targets of policy and programmatic efforts to increase parental involvement in the United States. Yet comparative studies in other regions of the world (e.g., Latin America) have shown that elevated levels of school participation by parents is often a sign—either cause or effect—of schools effectively serving students (Epstein, 2005; Willms and Somer, 2001). One reason why this policy emphasis on this type of school-based parental involvement in education is often criticized as misguided or problematic is that such behaviors require substantial time but also power (and English language skills) and, therefore, advantage already advantaged parents and their children. Moreover, the truth is that any one parent can only have so much impact, and a strong coalition of involved and interconnected parents who know each other and care about each other’s children will have a bigger impact (Carbonaro, 1998; Gamoran, Turley, Turner, and Fish, 2012). One intervention targeting poor Latino/a schools in the Southwest of the United States, therefore, aimed to build stronger social networks among parents as a means of improving schools’ treatment of their children, and experimental evaluations suggested that it had its intended effects (Gamoran et al., 2012).

Creating Educational Opportunities Outside of School The fourth category of parental involvement in education incorporates the many ways that parents access formal activities and programs for their children that supplement and complement their academic studies in the K–12 system. Disparities in this kind of parental involvement begin early in children’s lives, as evidenced by the differential enrollment of children in early childhood education programs prior to school entry. Such patterns reflect socioeconomic stratification (as high-quality programs are often expensive and difficult to identify) but also differences in needs (e.g., variable rates of maternal employment) and cultural patterns (e.g., preferences for keeping young children at home or with family; Duncan and Magnuson, 2013; Fuller, 2007). Another example of this kind of parental involvement is enrollment of children in lessons (e.g., music), extracurricular activities (e.g., sports), camps (e.g., arts), and cultural activities (e.g., museum visits) aiming to cultivate children’s skills and talents. Such activities are hallmarks of concerted cultivation among U.S. parents, but they are common in other affluent countries in Europe and elsewhere (Cheadle, 2008; De Graaf, De Graaf, and Kraaykamp, 2000; Lareau, 2003). Many Asian immigrant parents engage in a different form of creating educational opportunities by sending their children to after-school and weekend educational programs to supplement their schooling (Zhou and Kim, 2006). Other examples include helping adolescents secure internships or summer jobs that might promote their college prospects. Much of the reason that the increased focus among parents (and schools) on creating educational opportunities for young people outside of school has generated significant debate in the United States 418

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(and many European countries) relates to access to these opportunities. The fact is that this parenting behavior is only sustainable for parents who have considerable economic means and can manage their own time (or buy other’s time, such as sitters; Kornrich and Furstenberg, 2013). Yet concerns that this form of parental involvement in education has “gotten out of hand” go beyond the socioeconomic circumstances of parents (The Economist, 2014). As so vividly illustrated by Lareau’s ethnographic work in Unequal Childhoods: Race, Class, and Family Life (2003), the perception among parents that they must maintain such active out-of-school schedules for their children is a burden on them and pressure on their families, including the children whom they are trying to support. Although most children and youth—even those with affluent professional parents—do not maintain such intense activity portfolios, concerns about “the overscheduled child” are real and suggest uneasiness with an increasingly visible parenting behavior (Mahoney, Harris, and Eccles, 2006).

Social Psychological Support for Learning and Schooling The fifth and final category of parental involvement in education here represents, in many ways, the cheapest and more important way that parents can help their children get the most out of school and realize the most of their talents, abilities, and opportunities (Hill and Tyson, 2009; Pomerantz et al., 2007). Some good examples of such support include encouraging young people to meet and overcome academic challenges; sharing and modeling values about the importance of education, setting, and reinforcing educational aspirations and expectations; talking through problems and stressors; and praising effort and accomplishment (Catsambis, 1998; Singh, Bickley, Trivette, and Keith, 1995). Such parenting behaviors matter to young people because they serve their needs to feel secure, safe, appreciated, cared for, and validated. Notably, however, parents should calibrate their support to best help their children. Sometimes, youth require more imposed structure, so unwavering acceptance of their behaviors can be counterproductive. At the same time, evidence from the growth (vs. fixed) mind-set literature in psychology indicates unqualified and uncritical praise for youth academic effort may undermine their academic pursuits (Dweck, 2008; Steinberg, Brown, and Dornbusch, 1996). Because social psychological support for learning and schooling generally does not require significant outlays of money, extensive time commitments, or familiarity with the educational system, it is less prone to socioeconomic and ethnic disparities than the other categories of parental involvement discussed here. Yet parents give social psychological support in ways that differ across diverse cultures, and those differences can lead to cultural misunderstandings and misinterpretations. For example, the United States and other Western countries, tend to view such support through the prism of warmth and affection. Consequently, teachers and other parents in these countries often view many parents in other countries and immigrant parents in their own countries—especially Asian parents—as unsupportive of their children when they are. Such parents may not be overtly affectionate, but their engagement in children’s educational pathways is often meant by them and—importantly—interpreted by their children as support (Chao, 2001; Cheung and Pomerantz, 2012; Zhou, 2009).

The Observed Benefits of Parental Involvement Other than the fact that they think that they are supposed to, parents engage in various involvement behaviors because they believe that doing so is good for their children, especially for their children’s short-term and long-term educational prospects. They are trying to find ways to support their children and get them ahead. Similarly, other than being pressured to or following the lead of others, schools engage in outreach with parents because they believe that doing so is good for their students and, therefore, good for them. These widespread beliefs beg the question: Does parental involvement boost the learning, achievement, engagement, and adjustment of children and adolescents? 419

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The short answer to this question is “it depends.” The existence and magnitude of the observed benefits of parental involvement in education vary across the type of behavior of interest, the academic outcome in question, the group of parents being studied, and the developmental stage of the child being parented (Crosnoe, 2015; Desimone, 1999; Pomerantz et al., 2007). Various dimensions of social psychological support for learning and achievement—including aspirations and socialization into academic values—tend to have more positive effects on young people than many other forms of involvement (Hill and Tyson, 2009; Ho and Willms, 1996; Robinson and Harris, 2014; Singh et al., 1995). Direct interactions with children to develop skills and the active management of educational opportunities in school seem to matter more in the long run than creating opportunities outside of school (De Graaf et al., 2000; Fan and Chen, 2001), although the benefits of after-school activities are just beginning to be qualitatively understood and may be most beneficial for those students most at risk (Nelson, 2017). Parental involvement in education may be more consistently associated with children’s behavioral outcomes (e.g., prosocial behavior in schools) than their academic outcomes (e.g., grades, test scores; Domina, 2005; Raver et al., 2007). Another complicating factor is that parental involvement may also appear to be negatively associated with children’s academic and behavioral adjustment and functioning (or not associated at all) when involvement behaviors are a reaction to children having problems in school rather than a proactive parenting strategy (Crosnoe, 2001; Desimone, 1999; Fan, 2001; Ho and Willms, 1996). Furthermore, the benefits of parental involvement in education for children and youth are more easily realized when parents have substantial financial, human, and cultural capital backing for their involvement behaviors; when they are facilitated, encouraged, and welcomed by schools and educators; and when they are well tailored to the needs of children (e.g., giving an academically successful student more freedom and autonomy but paying closer attention to one struggling; Ansari and Crosnoe, 2015; Bouffard and Weiss, 2008; Crosnoe, 2001; Lareau and Horvat, 1999; Stevenson and Baker, 1987; Useem, 1992). Notably, despite many cultural differences in the forms that parental involvement takes and in the degree to which it is emphasized by the educational system, the links between parental involvement and student outcomes appear to be more similar than different (Avvisati et al., 2010; Cheung and Pomerantz, 2012; Willms and Somer, 2001). Overall, the literature suggests that the benefits of parental involvement in education for children and adolescents (and their schools) are often oversold, that the degree to which they are causal warrants more skepticism than is usually given, and that the difference between parental involvement in education and engaged and positive parenting more generally is quite difficult to discern. Parental involvement in education, therefore, is not the linchpin of “good” parenting, nor the panacea for the challenges facing public education that schools, policies, or even parents sometimes make it out to be. At the same time, parental involvement does seem to matter and cannot be easily dismissed (Domina, 2005; Fan and Chen, 2001; Hill and Tyson, 2009; Robinson and Harris, 2014).

The Reconceptualization of Parental Involvement Into Partnership Historically, parents, practitioners, and policymakers have conceptualized, discussed, and studied parental involvement in education as a parenting behavior, but that conceptualization has increasingly come under fire in recent years. The concern is that it places inordinate responsibility for children’s academic successes—and schools’ productivity and effectiveness—on the shoulders of parents and shifts attention away from schools. Consequently, individuals can sometimes blame parents for children’s academic or behavioral problems in the educational system and lack of productivity on the part of schools. The ups and downs of education, therefore, can be laid at the feet of parents—especially parents from historically marginalized and disenfranchised groups—who are not doing their part (Adair, 2012; Lareau, 2003; Souto-Manning, 2010). 420

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This conceptualization of parental involvement in education as a singular and decontextualized parenting behavior, however, is completely at odds with contemporary theoretical models of child development that consistently emphasize how children grow up within a complex system of transactions among their ecological settings and developmental processes (Bronfenbrenner and Morris, 2006; Lerner, 2006). In such theoretical models, one cannot easily separate families from the other settings and processes influencing the child. Family influences, therefore, are dependent on, magnified by, and undercut by what else is going on in the child’s life. The specific field of research on parental involvement in education has incorporated these general ecological and systems models of development, with greater theoretical attention to the transactions between families and schools (Hoover-Dempsey and Sandler, 1997; Pianta and Walsh, 1996). Drawing on the work of Epstein (2011), Figure 14.3 compares the older model of parental involvement as parallel with school and community influences to a transactional model in which the influences of parents, schools, and communities on children and adolescents overlap. Parental involvement, therefore, arises from this overlap. Current understandings refer to this new transactional reconceptualization of parental involvement in education as family–school partnerships. This reconceptualization has gained a great deal of prominence in both research and policy. It emphasizes the contextualization of how educationally relevant parenting behaviors are more of a two-way exchange with their children’s schools. All the parental involvement in the world will likely not have its full effect if not welcomed, respected, and reciprocated by schools, and all the efforts of schools to educate children would not be successful if parents are not bought in or engaged (Sheridan and Moorman, 2015). One general way of thinking about family–school partnerships is to consider direct and indirect relations between these two ecological settings of child development (Crosnoe, 2015), as depicted in Figure 14.4. Direct partnerships encompass purposeful, ongoing, mutually engaged, and respectful interactions between parents and school personnel. Regular parent–teacher contact initiated by both sides that involves sharing perspectives represents one example. School outreach to parents of a variety

Family

School

Family

School

Child

Child Old: Parallel

New: Transaconal

Figure 14.3 Parallel versus overlapping influences of families and schools on students

Figure 14.4

Direct Partnership

• Interaction • Sharing • Dialogue

Indirect Partnership

• Supplementation • Mutual Reinforcement • Coordination

Direct and indirect family–school partnerships

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of backgrounds matched with parents’ engagement in activities designed to help support the needs of schools represents another. Parents connecting with each other around school activities and engaging with the school as groups represents a third. As for indirect partnerships, these are examples of seemingly parallel behaviors that reinforce learning and achievement across ecological settings, such as when parents construct learning activities at home that supplement what educators teach in the classroom or schools reinforce family values about classroom learning and behavior. The key, though, is that such parallel behaviors are coordinated—and coordinated consistently and regularly—rather than left to chance or initially discussed and then neglected. In both cases, parents learn from schools and schools learn from parents. The chances that families and schools are on the same page increase, and children’s learning and positive development benefit. To truly work for the good of children and adolescents and not simply pay lip service to the increasingly popular slogan of partnership, such family–school connections need to be characterized by a few things (Adair, 2012; Christenson and Sheridan, 2001; Hoover-Dempsey and Sandler, 1997): 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

A sense of shared responsibility Parental motivation and efficacy School outreach and an atmosphere of welcome Openness to each other and valuing of dialogue A common sense that ongoing and purposeful action is required to do best by children and adolescents

Many examples of true and effective family–school partnerships for the good of children and adolescents come from the growing literature on immigrant parents of students in the U.S. educational system, a situation that has long been ripe for cultural misunderstanding and even conflict but that also has shown promise when conscious actions are taken. Consider the early childhood education program targeting Latino/a communities, Lee y Seras, which involves workshops to demystify the U.S. educational system for immigrant parents, as well as workshops for educators to better understand the families and communities that they are serving (Goldenberg and Light, 2009). Another example involves schools serving communities with large numbers of Latino/as, many of whom are migrant workers or involved in other work with nonstandard hours. Rather than seeing a lack of parental involvement in school activities as a sign that parents do not care or are not invested in their children’s schooling, such schools can recognize the severe constraints on those parents’ time. Doing so may motivate schools to tinker with the flexibility of scheduling such activities to help parents get and stay involved (Poza et al., 2014). Other studies including research mixing quantitative and qualitative approaches (Crosnoe et al., 2015; Geller et al., 2015) have demonstrated the value of trusted cultural brokers, such as a parent support liaison, in family–school partnerships. Such individuals bring immigrant parents and school personnel together, forge trust on both sides, and translate for each other (both literally, in the case of Spanish-speaking parents and English-speaking educators, and figuratively, in the case of parents and teachers who have different lenses for thinking about schooling and parenting). This extensive theoretical, empirical, and policy activity demonstrates that family–school partnerships do not emerge organically on their own. Instead, such partnerships take time, effort, and maintenance. Both parties should be involved, motivated, and willing to give and take (Christenson and Sheridan, 2001; Epstein, 2011).

Practical Issues and Future Directions in Parental Involvement The preceding discussion of trends in parental involvement in education speaks to the complexity of this dimension of the parent role, gives insight into the ways that “good” parenting can be a 422

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context-specific phenomenon, emphasizes the value of ecological and systems perspectives on parenting, and elucidates the importance of using research to inform and support policy intervention serving the best interests of children. Moving forward, how can research continue to advance our understanding of this connection between the family and children’s larger developmental ecologies, and how can policy intervention continue to build on this research base?

Expanding Ideas of Ecological Consistency and Coordination If the insights of ecological and systems perspectives have led to the valuable reconceptualization of parental involvement in education as situated within the overlap of and exchange between family and school domains, then expanding this conceptualization beyond this basic dyad is likely to add value (Pianta and Walsh, 1996). One expansion is to recognize that both families and schools reside within a shared community context that powerfully influences both, while also acting as a key proximate mechanism for the influence of broad cultural values and traditions on people. Indeed, Epstein’s (2011) original model of family–school partnerships expanded into a model of family–school–community partnerships. In this model, community buy-in for family–school partnerships is key, where families represent community interests in the school and schools are charged with serving communities by educating children. Even as researchers are doing a much better job capturing exchanges between families and schools (versus focusing solely on parental behavior), they have made far less progress incorporating exchanges of both families and schools with communities into such research. Many of the insights in the growing field of research on neighborhood contexts of child development and parenting (e.g., social networks, local groups, residential composition, and mobility; see Browning, Leventhal, and Brooks-Gunn, 2004; Leventhal and Brooks-Gunn, 2000) can be leveraged to identify communities in which family–school partnerships might be most (or least) effective. Another expansion is to correct the long tendency in this line of research to ignore the children being parented or to only bring them in as “outcomes” of parenting behavior. The growing recognition of the importance of “child effects” in observed influences of parents, teachers, and other adults on children has largely been absent in the parental involvement (and family–school partnership) literature. We know, however, that the traits, behaviors, and experiences of children and adolescents play roles in eliciting the parenting and mentoring that they receive (Belsky, 1984; Stattin and Kerr, 2000). Parents respond to the perceived needs of young children (Does this child need my help? Is this child okay on their own?). As those young children grow and mature into older children and adolescents and take on more control of their lives, they often invite parents and other adults into their lives or shut them out (I need your help. Stay out of my business.) That active and passive elicitation (or discouragement) of parenting by children and adolescents themselves is likely to play a significant role in parental involvement in education and family–school partnerships needs to be better understood. As already alluded to, some observed negative associations between parental involvement behaviors and child and adolescent outcomes are likely a function of child effects, and past research backs up this conclusion. In both early childhood education and high school, parents—including and especially parents from historically disadvantaged groups—often get more involved (or buck normative declines in involvement over time) in response to their perception that their children need them—they need help or they need more opportunities (Ansari and Crosnoe, 2015; Crosnoe, 2001). In terms of translating such expanded ideas about family–school partnerships into policy and practice, Epstein (2011) and colleagues formulated specific action plans aimed at better connecting families and schools within their communities. Efforts to create school-like families—or families that reflect school culture and values—encourage parents to take on many of the same approaches used by teachers at school when they interact with their children at home (e.g., following similar 423

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time-scheduling patterns for learning activities or using similar reward strategies at home). Corresponding efforts to create family-like schools encourage schools to take concrete steps to meet with their students’ parents and learn from their own experiences parenting those students and then use that information to better individualize instruction for students. The added layer of community context emphasizes that community groups and leaders can serve as liaisons between parents and schools and that community inputs into school policies and procedures will foster more relationships that are positive with parents over time. Much of the contemporary policy action injecting communities into family–school partnerships involves the growing nonprofit sector. Strikingly, Americans have been creating more nonprofit organizations every year since 1989, when the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) began collecting and making available data on tax-exempt entities (Arnsberger, Ludlum, Riley, and Stanton 2008). Importantly, a good portion of the services provided by the nonprofit sector takes place in the realm of education, with fully 15% of total estimated contributions to the nonprofit sector in 2013 going towards education, representing more than $260 billion (Pettijohn 2013). This nonprofit community context is critical for parental involvement in education because ecological perspectives suggest that community organizations can create the very “family-like settings, services, and events” and “community schools” required by successful partnerships among families, schools, and communities. What’s more, acknowledgement of the importance of this community context is fundamental to the success of school–family partnerships (Bernal, Bonilla, and Bellido, 1995). Either through facilitating direct contact between school personnel and the parents of the students attending those schools, acting as a cultural bridge between families and schools, or supporting less advantaged parents as they navigate children through the educational system, these nonprofit organizations may be an important pathway through which parents can find support for their children’s educational experiences and opportunities (Hong, 2011; Meyers and Jordan, 2006; Ressler et al., 2017; Stefanski, Valli, and Jacobson, 2016). In an era when increased parental investment in children’s education at home and at school is becoming the norm, parental involvement at the community level may also be the next context in which inequality is either expanded or reduced.

Improving Research Conclusions Although the interdisciplinary literature on parental involvement in education (and more recently on family–school partnerships) is both broad and rich, it has some significant limitations. Those limitations need to be addressed moving forward if the promise of using research on this topic to inform policy and practice is to be fully (and accurately) realized. We offer two such limitations—and how to correct them in the future—here. First, the degree of confidence in causal inference associated with most observed associations between parental involvement behaviors and the academic and behavioral outcomes of children and adolescents in quantitative research is lower than it should be, especially if this evidence is to be used to inform policy and practice. These associations are rife with threats to such causal inference, including the bidirectionality between parents’ and children’s behaviors but also the many confounds likely to simultaneously influence both. Fortunately, longitudinal frameworks have helped to tease out the directionality of such associations and isolate the portion representing “child effects” (Domina, 2005; Englund, Luckner, Whaley, and Egeland, 2004). Some confounds can be easily observed and controlled for, such as parents’ socioeconomic circumstances or language barriers between home and school. Yet other confounds are known but not easily observed (e.g., genetic effects, cultural traditions), and still other confounds are likely unknown. Experimental designs are somewhat difficult to employ in the study of parenting and child outcomes, but some quasi-experimental statistical techniques, such as instrumental variable analyses and post-hoc robustness tests for unobserved 424

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confounds, have promise and need to be put to better use (Avvisati et al., 2010; Frank et al., 2008; Ressler et al., 2017). Second, with some notable exceptions (e.g., Lareau, 2003), quantitative research has typically dominated the literature on parental involvement in education, which has limited our ability to understand the mechanisms through which parenting behavior has effects on children and adolescents and to elucidate the many ways that parental involvement can be enacted. More extensive qualitative inquiry can move the field beyond hypothesis testing towards unpacking patterns of parental involvement, as well as its origins and effects. Consider that quantitative research typically counts involvement behaviors— often measured in grossly simple ways—but provides little insight into the substance of those parenting behaviors. As a result, we might know that parents talk to their children’s teachers X times per year without knowing what they are actually talking about (Crosnoe and Muller, 2014). Consider also that quantitative research typically identifies the predictors of some parental involvement behavior but not the motivations for that behavior. As a result, we might know that immigration status or lower levels of English proficiency predict less school-based involvement behavior without understanding how parents are thinking about their children’s schools and themselves (Adair, 2012; McWayne et al., 2013; Poza et al., 2014).

Empowering Parents vis-a-vis Schools One of the reasons that parental involvement in education is a frequently contested idea in both research and policy is because of its complex relation with inequality and power. For many families in lower positions in socioeconomic and ethnic stratification systems, the family–school relationship is decidedly power laden, and they do not have the upper hand. As such, they often feel told what to do, directed, minimized, and even shamed by school personnel (Adair, 2012; Lareau and Horvat, 1999). Consequently, they have trouble engaging in the parental involvement behaviors that they are motivated to do and/or making these behaviors count for their children. Many of the strategies for building family–school partnerships are centered on getting school personnel to listen to and familiarize themselves with parents (and other community members) and their values and perspectives. Those strategies can have an impact by lessening the unidirectional nature of many family–school relations but leave the underlying power imbalance intact. A longer-term and bolder strategy would do more to reduce this power imbalance between families and schools by investing in parents themselves. This strategy is in line with a long history in international aid and development of investing in parents as a means of ultimately boosting the prospects of their children. The idea is that offering parents opportunities to increase their human capital will lead to changes in their parenting behaviors and the resources that they have to help their children in the educational system. Such two-generation (or dual-generation) approaches have increasingly gained attention in the United States and in other developed countries, based on evidence that low-income mothers from a range of backgrounds who return to school themselves—to earn their high school diplomas, to learn English, to develop specific vocational skills—often take on more agentic roles in managing their children’s educational trajectories. The mechanisms are assumed to be their greater sense of efficacy, better understanding of schools, synergy in mothers’ and children’s educational activities, and elevated status in schools (Crosnoe and Kalil, 2010; Magnuson, 2007). Recent programs have been attempting to put these two-generation ideas to the test by linking educational and job training opportunities for low-income (ethnic minority) mothers with highquality early childhood education for their children. These new programs actually harken back to the original formulation of Head Start emphasizing the need to promote positive parenting in addition to providing children with early educational enrichment (Chase-Lansdale and Brooks-Gunn, 2014; Sommer et al., 2017). 425

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Conclusions Ever since the decline of child labor and the rise of compulsory schooling increased the importance of education in children’s lives and for their futures, parenting children through school has been a key dimension of the parent role in the United States and other developed countries. That role has intensified as the returns to educational attainment have reached historic levels in the contemporary context. The ways that parents have enacted this role have evolved considerably over time, in part because of changes in schools, and that evolution has provided a window into broader patterns of stratification and their influence on families and schools. On face value, parent involvement in education seems straightforwardly positive. Parents are attending to and investing in children as a means of promoting their long-term health and well-being in a society structured by links among family contexts, educational attainment, and socioeconomic mobility, in part by staking ownership in the schools serving their children. Yet this trend has also increased the burden on parents, who already engage in labor-intensive behaviors to help, protect, and socialize their children, and shifted some portion of the responsibility for educating young people from public institutions to the private family sphere. At the same time, the nexus of parenting and schooling has helped to shed light on the ways that powerful groups in society can impose their views of good parenting on others and infuse societal institutions within their views. In general, research on parental involvement—especially within developmental science—has tended to emphasize the positive benefits of parental involvement without interrogating its potential problems, and the extraordinary policy activity surrounding parental involvement in the United States has often striven to realize these benefits without attending to the associated risks.

Acknowledgments Funding for the two authors came from the Institute for Education Sciences (R305A150027; PI: Robert Crosnoe) and the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (R24 HD42849, PI: Mark Hayward; T32 HD007081–35, PI: Kelly Raley).

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15 PARENTING AND CHILDREN’S HEALTH CARE Carolyn Brockmeyer Cates, Victoria Chen, Caitlin F. Canfield, and Alan L. Mendelsohn

Introduction As any new parents might attest, the day they take home their baby for the first time is a day overcome with emotion. They may feel an overwhelming sense of love, gratitude, and joy potentially alongside a healthy mix of fear and bewilderment. All of a sudden, the parts of everyday life that are often taken for granted or little noticed, like eating, sleeping, and digesting, take on a new monumental importance—and new parents may realize quickly (perhaps even before leaving the hospital) that helping their baby to thrive and develop may take much effort and guidance. It may come as no surprise, then, that the words parents hear prior to leaving the hospital with their newborn, “Make sure to make an appointment with your child’s pediatrician within the next few days,” are typically welcome (aside from the dread of figuring out the early logistics of actually leaving their home with a newborn). What begins from this very first pediatric visit for many is a relationship between parents and pediatric health care providers that can be critical for shaping parenting and the early home environment from the earliest days, with important implications for child developmental outcomes (Brazelton, 1994; Dinkevich and Ozuah, 2002). It is significant that this relationship begins early in a child’s life, as the time between birth and the preschool years is critical. During this period, children experience rapid brain growth and development, setting the stage for ongoing trajectories of development. Furthermore, interactions between pediatric health care providers and families do not only occur early in a child’s life but also occur relatively frequently, with about 13 to 15 standard pediatric visits recommended from birth to age 5 (Hagan, Shaw, and Duncan, 2017). During these repeated points of contact, pediatric health care providers simultaneously directly monitor children’s developmental progress and provide parents with preventive counseling (“anticipatory guidance”) related to parenting practices (Brazelton, 1975). Over time, a relationship is often formed between parents and providers in which parents come to expect, and even seek, knowledge about how their parenting practices are tied to their children’s future outcomes. This close relationship, and the fact that parents come to see their children’s doctors poised to learn about their children’s development and behavior, are only some of the reasons why the pediatric primary care platform may be particularly well suited for the implementation of programs aiming to enhance developmental outcomes for young children. Leveraging the pediatric primary care setting to promote developmental outcomes may be especially important for children of families with low socioeconomic status (SES), who often experience disparities in development relative to middle-SES counterparts and constitute up to 40% to

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50% of the population served by pediatric health care providers (Radesky, Carta, and Bair-Merritt, 2016). Disparities in developmental outcomes for children in low-SES households have been documented as early as the time children begin to say their first words, with marked differences in both early vocabulary and language processing skills (Fernald, Marchman, and Weisleder, 2013). Critically, these differences appear to persist and worsen over time (Hart and Risley, 1995), with cascading influences on other domains of development, as well as outcomes in later school achievement and ultimate career success (Duncan et al., 2007). As such, it is important to think critically about public health solutions to help children from low-SES households overcome early disparities (“secondary/tertiary prevention”) and to prevent them from emerging in the first place (“primary prevention”). In thinking about strategies by which intervention is possible to prevent SES-related disparities in child development, parenting represents an important target. Although the source of these disparities is likely multifaceted and related to a number of risk factors that occur with poverty, including factors related to food insecurity, lack of prenatal care, reduced access to resources, and toxic stress (Garner and Shonkoff, 2012), differences in parenting also play a significant role in shaping developmental outcomes (Brooks-Gunn and Markman, 2005). For example, Hart and Risley (1995), showed that children from households of different SES backgrounds were exposed to a dramatically different amount of language, so much so that by the age of 4, children from low-SES homes were estimated to hear 30 million fewer words, on average, from parents and caregivers than peers from higher-SES households—this difference is often referred to as “the 30-million-word gap” in the current literature (Radesky et al., 2016). This one difference in parenting alone may critically affect developmental outcomes, as the amount of child-directed speech, even early in infancy, has been shown to relate to vocabulary and language processing outcomes, with implications for further learning and development (Weisleder and Fernald, 2013). Further differences exist in the quality of parent–child language interactions in lower-SES versus higher-SES homes, with parents from low-SES households engaging in conversations with less complex sentences, less elaborative speech, and fewer vocabulary words; these differences are also related to substandard school readiness outcomes. Given the critical and potentially modifiable nature of the early home language environment, growing attention has been given over the past few years to address the word gap and corresponding disparities in school readiness by enriching parent–child interactions in the earliest years of life. The pediatric health care setting is also being increasingly recognized as an effective and potentially cost-effective platform for enhancing early parent–child interactions. Due to many of the unique attributes of this setting, and to initiatives over the past several decades to transform preventive pediatric health care through the framework of the medical home model (described later), the pediatric primary care platform presents a significant opportunity to enhance parenting by addressing both family interactions directly and psychosocial factors that may also affect the quality of these interactions. This chapter reviews some of the important ways that pediatric health care providers work together with parents to shape parenting behaviors in the context of the well-child visit, including critical roles in developmental surveillance, screening, anticipatory guidance, and referral. It then discusses the critical role that the pediatric health care platform may play in secondary/tertiary prevention of specific identified issues related to child development and parent–child interactions, as well as primary prevention of developmental disparities—in particular those resulting from factors associated with low SES—through the promotion of parenting in the early years. In doing so, it reviews the extant literature on pediatric preventive interventions, highlighting key advantages of health care interventions and evidence of effectiveness. It then discusses parent engagement as a key challenge to parenting interventions and potential mechanisms for the enhancement of parent engagement in intervention programs. Finally, this chapter addresses issues related to maximization of impact, as well as scaling of pediatric health care interventions, with implications for policy. 432

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Prevention During the Well-Child Visit: Developmental Surveillance and Screening Developmental and behavioral concerns/delays are prevalent in the general population. One study estimated that up to 15% to 17% of children have a developmental disorder (Boyle et al., 2011) and up to 25% to 40% of children have at least one mental health or behavioral diagnosis in the United States (Costello, Mustillo, Erkanli, Keeler, and Angold, 2003; Merikangas et al., 2010; Weitzman and Wegner, 2015). These issues are often underidentified, with only 2% to 3% of children enrolled in Early Intervention under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) Part C, and 5% to 6% of children receiving early childhood special education services under IDEA Part B, Section 619 (Macy, Marks, and Towle, 2014). This gap between known prevalence rates of developmental and behavioral disorders and current prevalence of children receiving IDEA Part B or C services remains a missed opportunity for intervention, with studies showing that a 2- to 4-year gap may exist between when issues begin to arise and when those problems are severe enough to meet criteria for a disorder (O’Connell, Boat, and Warner, 2009). Early identification of children with developmental delays is essential so that children with delays can benefit from early child development programs. The link between early brain development and child development is at the foundation of understanding the impact of early identification of developmental delay and subsequent intervention (Garner and Shonkoff, 2012; Garner and Shonkoff, 2012). This connection is encapsulated in a paradigm of health and disease across the life span known as the ecobiodevelopmental framework (Garner and Shonkoff, 2012). Brains are physiologically built over the course of a lifetime with early childhood experiences shaping the foundation of social, emotional, and learning skills that are used through adulthood. A combination of genes and environmental experiences affects the architecture of the brain. In line with the ecobiodevelopmental framework, efforts of pediatric health care providers to promote developmental outcomes must be concerned simultaneously with indicators of a child’s healthy development in multiple domains, psychosocial factors that may shape the contexts in which the child is developing, and the health of the relationships within which the child’s most critical interactions occur. Pediatric health care providers are increasingly able to achieve this multifaceted approach to monitoring and promotion of child development due to the expansion of the medical home model. A medical home is a primary care setting that is accessible, continuous, comprehensive, family centered, coordinated, compassionate, and culturally effective (Medical Home Initiatives for Children With Special Needs Project Advisory Committee. American Academy of Pediatrics, 2002). In a medical home, a pediatric health care provider works in partnership with the family and patient to ensure that all needs of the patient are met. Through this partnership pediatric health care providers help the family and patient access/coordinate specialty care, educational services, out-of-home care, family support, and other public and private community services that are important to the overall health of the child and family (Hagan et al., 2017; Medical Home Initiatives for Children With Special Needs Project Advisory Committee. American Academy of Pediatrics, 2002). In the context of a medical home, primary care providers can holistically consider health factors, family factors (American Academy of Pediatrics Committee on Hospital Care, 2003; American Academy of Pediatrics Task Force on the Family, 2003), community factors (Garg, Sandel, Dworkin, Kahn, and Zuckerman, 2012; Rushton and American Academy of Pediatrics Committee on Community Health Services, 2005), and other psychosocial factors that may affect child outcomes; importantly, they can consider these factors together in deciding how to best promote child development and behavior (Bitsko et al., 2016). As recommended in Bright Futures, a collaboration between the American Academy of Pediatrics and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Maternal Child Health Bureau (Hagan et al., 2017), a core component of pediatric well-child visits is monitoring and promotion of parenting and child health and development, including routine surveillance of development (informal monitoring)

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and periodic formal monitoring using validated screening instruments and protocols. As such, pediatric health care providers have been trained to provide both developmental and behavioral promotion; to evaluate health issues (e.g., vision, hearing, and other health problems) that may affect child mental health, behavior, and development; and to develop a unique rapport with families through which they can have meaningful discussions and follow-up about developmental delays. Pediatric health care providers are uniquely able to monitor, detect, and track child mental, behavioral, and developmental delays. One reason for this is that pediatric health care providers encounter all families of children under 5 years of age at a frequency and with continuity that is unique in the community. As previously mentioned, guidelines recommend between 13 and 15 well-child visits in the first five years of life, with at least 6 visits within the first year alone (Hagan et al., 2017). Although recommendations are frequently not followed perfectly, most children attend well-child visits, with almost 92% of children seen for a well-child visit in 2013 (Child Trends, 2014). Although adherence to visits varies with SES, families living at