write an article on the topic behaviour of young children towards their parents instructions.
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As noted above, critics charge that interpreters of traditional socialization studies have exaggerated the importance of parenting in children’s lives—that in fact, the effect sizes reported in many widely-cited studies are really quite small. Indeed, reviews of research done before the mid-1980s did show weak correlations between parenting processes and children’s characteristics (e.g. Maccoby & Martin 1983). Since then, many studies have come up with more robust findings, no doubt reflecting improvements in the ways in which parent and child characteristics are assessed. Leading researchers no longer rely on a single measure, such as a parent or child interview or a parent or child self-report scale, as a measure of parent or child attributes. Instead information is obtained from multiple sources—from parents, children, teachers, school records, sometimes from children’s peers and police records as well—and importantly, from direct observation of parent-child interactions and of children in out-of-home settings. When several measures such as these are aggregated, associations between parent attributes and children’s behavior can be quite substantial. Parenting variables have typically accounted for 20% to 50% of the variance in child outcomes (Conger & Elder 1994, Reiss et al 1995). Exceptionally robust connections are reported in the recent large-scale study of adolescents in never-divorced and step-families, Hetherington and colleagues (Hetherington et al 1999). Using composite scores for both parenting styles and children’s attributes, report a concurrent coefficient of 0.76 between mothers’ “authoritative parenting” and adolescents’ “social responsibility” (the coefficient for fathers is 0.49). Parental negativity has very strong connections for both parents with adolescents’ depression and internalizing behavior. 1 Patterson and colleagues have also found substantial correlations between parental characteristics (e.g. disciplinary practices and monitoring) and children’s antisocial behavior (Patterson & Forgatch 1995). They are able to show connections between parental behaviors and the children’s negative, coercive behavior both at home and in out-of-home contexts.
Concurrent correlations are usually considerably larger than predictive ones. Longitudinal studies present the opportunity to examine the connections, if any, between child-rearing styles at one point in time and subsequent attributes of the child. The strength of the connections that have been found depends on many things, such as what “packages” or clusters of parent and child variables are considered, the way they are measured, the length of time between predictive and outcome measures, and whether background variables are statistically controlled. A few examples will illustrate the range of findings. Kochanska 1997b:94 has been able to show that aspects of early parenting account for a significant but moderate (Beta coefficient 0.29, F 9.96) portion of the variance in young children’s self-regulation and internalization assessed a year later. Pettit and colleagues (1997:908) found some—but fewer and weaker—predictive relationships between parenting as assessed at the beginning of the kindergarten year and children’s adjustment and academic performance seven years later, in the sixth grade. Strong predictive power of family interaction processes over much longer spans of time have been found in longitudinal studies of antisocial behavior (see Loeber & Dishion 1983). In current socialization studies, simple first-order correlations between parenting characteristics and child outcomes are seldom relied on. Indeed, sometimes they are not even reported. Instead, multivariate analyses are used to investigate such questions as whether a given aspect of parenting has different effects on different kinds of children or in families living in different circumstances; or whether different aspects of parenting have independent, additive effects, whether they are interchangeable, or whether they interact so that the effects of one depend on the level of another.
In longitudinal work, the initial level of a child’s characteristic at time 1 is sometimes statistically controlled to determine whether a time-l parent attribute is associated with subsequent change change in the child’s behavior. As an example, Patterson & Bank (1989) studied families when their sons were in grade school, and again when the boys were adolescents. They found that changes in parenting during these years were strongly related to the chances of a boy’s being arrested for delinquent activities in adolescence, even after the boy’s anti-social tendencies at grade-school age were controlled. We see, then, that a variety of questions are being asked in current and recent research—questions to which simple parent/child correlations, either concurrent or time-lagged, will not provide answers