What is colloquially referred to as "helicopter parenting" is a form of overparenting in which parents apply overly involved and developmentally inappropriate tactics to their children who are ...otherwise able to assume adult responsibilities and autonomy. Overparenting is hypothesized to be associated with dysfunctional family processes and negative child outcomes. Predictions were tested on 538 parent-young adult child dyads from locations throughout most of the United States. Parents completed a newly developed measure of overparenting as well as family enmenshment, parenting styles, and parent-child communication scales. Young adult children completed measures of parent-child communication, family satisfaction, entitlement, and several adaptive traits. Results showed that overparenting is associated with lower quality parent-child communication and has an indirect effect on lower family satisfaction. Overparenting was also a significant predictor of young adult child entitlement, although it was not related to any of the adaptive traits measured in young adult children.
The present meta-analysis integrates research from 1,435 studies on associations of parenting dimensions and styles with externalizing symptoms in children and adolescents. Parental warmth, ...behavioral control, autonomy granting, and an authoritative parenting style showed very small to small negative concurrent and longitudinal associations with externalizing problems. In contrast, harsh control, psychological control, authoritarian, permissive, and neglectful parenting were associated with higher levels of externalizing problems. The strongest associations were observed for harsh control and psychological control. Parental warmth, behavioral control, harsh control, psychological control, autonomy granting, authoritative, and permissive parenting predicted change in externalizing problems over time, with associations of externalizing problems with warmth, behavioral control, harsh control, psychological control, and authoritative parenting being bidirectional. Moderating effects of sampling, child's age, form of externalizing problems, rater of parenting and externalizing problems, quality of measures, and publication status were identified. Implications for future research and practice are discussed.
Pain that recurs or persists is unfortunately a common experience for children. One of the unique considerations in pediatric chronic pain management is the bidirectional influences of children's ...pain experiences and parental and family factors. In this review we present a developmental perspective on understanding pediatric chronic pain and disability, highlighting factors relevant from infancy to adolescence, and family and parent influences. Preliminary evidence indicates that developmental processes are influenced and may also shape the pediatric pain experience. Parent emotions, behaviors, and health also play a role in children's pain experiences, where overly protective parent behaviors, increased distress, and history of chronic pain are important parent-level influences. Research on family-level influences has revealed that families of children with chronic pain have poorer family functioning (e.g., more conflict, less cohesion) than families of healthy children. Several important gaps exist in this research, such as in understanding basic developmental processes in children with chronic pain and how they influence children's perception of and responses to pain. Also, there is a lack of longitudinal data on family relationships and individual adjustment to allow for understanding of whether changes occur in parenting over the course of the child's chronic pain experience. Although parent interventions have been successfully incorporated into many cognitive-behavioral treatments for children with chronic pain conditions, little guidance exists for adapting intervention strategies to be developmentally appropriate. Additional research is needed to examine whether parent interventions are effective at different developmental stages and the best way to incorporate developmental goals into treatment.
The Philippines is an intensely migrant society with an annual migration of one million people, leading to over a tenth of the population working abroad. Many of these emigrants are mothers who often ...have children left behind. Family separation is now recognized as one of the social costs of migration affecting the global south. Relationships within such transnational families depend on long-distance communication and there is an increasing optimism among Filipino government agencies and telecommunications companies about the consequences of mobile phones for transnational families. This article draws on comparative research with UK-based Filipina migrants — mainly domestic workers and nurses — and their left-behind children in the Philippines. Our methodology allowed us to directly compare the experience of mothers and their children. The article concludes that while mothers feel empowered that the phone has allowed them to partially reconstruct their role as parents, their children are significantly more ambivalent about the consequences of transnational communication.
This meta-analysis examines the association between exposure to community violence and parenting behaviors (i.e., positive parenting, harsh/neglectful parenting, parent-child relationship quality, ...and behavior control). A systematic search yielded 437 articles that measured community violence exposure before or at the time of parenting, assessed parenting, and were available in English. There were 342 effect sizes across parenting constructs: positive (k = 101; 68 studies), harsh/neglectful (k = 95; 60 studies), relationship quality (k = 68; 41 studies), and behavior control (k = 78; 51 studies), from 160 reports representing 147 distinct studies. Results of the three-level meta-analyses found small but significant effects between community violence and positive parenting (r = −.059, 95% CI −.086, −.032; 95% PI −.268, .151), harsh/neglectful parenting (r = .133, 95% CI .100, .166; 95% PI −.107, .372), parent-child relationship quality (r = −.106, 95% CI −.145, −.067; 95% PI −.394, .182), and behavior control (r = −.047, 95% CI −.089, −.005; 95% PI −.331, .237). The association between exposure to community violence and harsh/neglectful parenting and behavior control was moderated by the type of exposure to community violence, informant or source of community violence and parenting data, child age, sex, and race/ethnicity. Given the substantial degree of heterogeneity in overall effect sizes, implications for policy and intervention are tentatively considered while emphasizing that more empirical research on the association between community violence and parenting is essential for advancing the field.
Public Significance Statement
Given growing rates of community violence, research examining the correlates of community violence and their effects on children and families is timely. The current meta-analytic review suggests that greater exposure to community violence is associated with reduced positive parenting, poorer parent-child relationship quality, reduced behavior control, and increased harsh/neglectful parenting. Due to substantial variability in the direction and magnitude of effect sizes, more research is needed to inform intervention and policy initiatives, particularly within neighborhoods affected by community violence. It is important that neighborhood conditions support, rather than challenge, responsive parenting. To ensure that the onus of responsibility is not solely placed on parents, multisystemic interventions at the individual level (i.e., to build children's resilience), family level (i.e., to support positive caregiving), school level (i.e., to foster violence awareness), and the broader community level (i.e., to curtail growing incidences of crime through community reinvestment policies) are critical to ensure the well-being of children and families.
The extensive measures to prevent spread of COVID-19 have had a major impact on families' daily lives. Changes in family routines and experiences of COVID-19-related stress might negatively impact ...the quality of parenting and the parent-adolescent relationship. However, using active coping strategies might be associated with limited negative or even positive changes in the parent-adolescent relationship. This longitudinal, multi-informant, and pre-registered study used data of 240 mostly Dutch parents (85% mothers; Mage = 44.2 years old) and adolescents (50% girls; Mage = 11.4 years) from diverse SES backgrounds. Using Latent Change Score models, we examined how parent-reported parenting (i.e., positive parenting and discipline practices) and adolescent-reported relationship quality (i.e., support and negative interaction) changed from pre-COVID-19 (Fall 2019) to the COVID-19 period (Spring 2020). Moreover, we investigated whether parents' and adolescents' level of COVID-19-related stress was associated with the change in relationships, and whether active coping moderated the association between stress and changes in relationships. Results showed average decreases in support, positive parenting, and negative interactions between parents and adolescents. COVID-19-related stress was not a direct predictor of relationship changes and there was little evidence of moderating effects. Only adolescents' use of active coping strategies moderated the effect of stress on positive parenting. For high active coping adolescents, the link between stress and change in positive parenting was negative, whereas for low active coping adolescents this link was positive. The findings suggest that parent-adolescent relationships during a pandemic need attention, especially for adolescents with high stress levels and using active coping strategies.
With online education and programs becoming increasingly common, it is necessary to examine their effectiveness. In this study, we conduct a meta-analysis of online parenting programs. In this ...meta-analysis, we included 28 studies yielding 127 effect sizes examining 15 outcome variables. We found that online parenting programs had the strongest effects on increasing positive parenting and parents' encouragement. We also found significant effects of reducing negative parent-child interactions, child problem behaviors, negative discipline strategies, parenting conflicts, parent stress, child anxiety, parent anger, and parent depression. Results also revealed programs' significant effects on increasing parent confidence, positive child behavior and parenting satisfaction. Comparisons of programs that included clinical support (meaning programs through which participants had access to content experts, therapists, or content specialists in conjunction with the online program) versus programs that only contained online components, revealed no significant differences in 6 program outcomes between programs with and without clinical support. Comparisons of programs provided to targeted populations versus general populations revealed no significant differences in four program outcomes between populations. Results suggest that online parenting programs can provide benefits for parents who may not be able to access in-person resources.
The importance ofparental favoritism in childhood and adulthood has been well documented; little is known, however, about changes over time in such within-family differentiation. Drawing on theories ...of life course processes and developmental psychology, the authors used 7-year panel data collected from 406 older mothers about their relationships with 1,514 adult children to explore patterns of favoritism regarding caregiving and emotional closeness. The findings demonstrated continuity in patterns of mothers' favoritism. Mothers tended to prefer the same children across time, particularly regarding preferred caregivers. It was anticipated that children's social-structural characteristics, similarity to their mothers, structural position in the family, and support provision to mothers would predict favored child status across time; however, only similarity and support processes were strong and consistent predictors of change and continuity in patterns of mothers favoritism.
Objective: This study examined the effects of the Protecting Strong African American Families (ProSAAF) prevention program on children's outcomes more than 2 years after enrollment, including direct ...effects of the intervention and indirect effects through couple functioning and parent-child relations. Method: Three hundred forty-six African American couples with an early adolescent child participated; all families lived in rural, low-income communities in the southern United States. Families were randomly assigned to ProSAAF or control conditions and completed four waves of data collection. Couples reported couple functioning at baseline (Wave 1) and at 9-month follow-up (Wave 2), and parent-child relations at 17-month follow-up (Wave 3). Children reported their conduct problems, affiliation with deviant peers, substance use, sexual onset, depressive symptoms, and self-control at 25-month follow-up (Wave 4). Results: Path analyses indicated significant indirect effects of ProSAAF on children's outcomes through improvements in couple functioning and better parent-child relations. There were no significant direct effects of the intervention on children's outcomes or significant indirect effects through couple functioning alone. Conclusions: This couple-focused prevention program has positive indirect effects on several child outcomes through the intervening processes of promoting improvements in couple functioning and better parent-child relations. These findings provide cautious optimism regarding the possible benefits of couple-focused programming on participants' children while suggesting ways in which future couple-focused interventions could yield stronger effects on these youth.
What is the public health significance of this article?
This study demonstrates that a couple-focused prevention program improves couple functioning and in turn promotes better parent-child relations and child psychosocial functioning two years after enrollment. These findings are important in suggesting that couple-focused programming can yield small benefits for children's long-term outcomes when they enhance couple and parent-child relationships.
Emerging data suggest that during childhood, close family relationships can ameliorate the impact that adversity has on life span physical health. To explain this phenomenon, a developmental stress ...buffering model is proposed in which characteristics of family relationships including support, conflict, obligation, and parenting behaviors evolve and change from childhood to adolescence. Together, these characteristics govern whether childhood family relationships are on balance positive enough to fill a moderating role in which they mitigate the effects that childhood adversities have on physical health. The benefits of some family relationship characteristics are hypothesized to stay the same across childhood and adolescence (e.g., the importance of comfort and warmth from family relationships) whereas the benefits of other characteristics are hypothesized to change from childhood to adolescence (e.g., from a need for physical proximity to parents in early childhood to a need for parental availability in adolescence). In turn, close, positive family relationships in childhood operate via a variety of pathways, such as by reducing the impact that childhood stressors have on biological processes (e.g., inflammation) and on health behaviors that in turn can shape physical health over a lifetime.
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