A study of six parents of children with autism examined overall management of television and video usage in their homes. Findings indicate the children's need for repetitive video viewing caused problems inside and outside the home and that parents managed usage largely on a situation-by-situation basis without any long-term strategy. (Contains…

Developed a comprehensive sequential family control model to explain the effects of family functioning variables, marital relations, and parent deviant models on early adolescent delinquency. Fourteen constructs were used to build and test the model, including mother's childbearing age, socioeconomic disadvantage, family adversity, onset of…

Reviews "It Isn't Fair! Siblings of Children with Disabilities" (Stanley D. Klein and Maxwell J. Schleifer, Editors). The book examines the attitudes of siblings and parents of disabled children, and discusses how parents' attitudes and actions determine whether the presence of such children in the family will be a positive or negative experience.…

Hypothesizes that marital conflict contributes unique variance of child functioning only when it occurs in front of children. Subjects were 146 mother/adolescent pairs. Results indicated that general family conflict was more predictive of child adjustment problems than marital satisfaction, and marital conflict occurring in front of children was…

The parents of children with visual impairments and the parents of their peers were interviewed to determine their children's mastery of 101 daily living skills. The 10 children with visual impairments performed only 44% of the tasks independently, while the 10 sighted children performed 84% of them independently. (Contains references.) (Author/CR)

This article presents an interview with a mother using a new mobility curriculum with her 4-year-old daughter with cerebral palsy. The physical supports or prompts used in the MOVE curriculum are designed to facilitate the use of mobility skills, not to replace them. An overview of the curriculum is provided. (Contains references.) (CR)

To examine the development of triplets, 23 sets of triplets were matched with 23 sets of twins and 23 singletons (N138). Maternal sensitivity was observed at newborn, 3, 6, and 12 months, and infants' cognitive and symbolic skills at 1 year. Triplets received lower maternal sensitivity across infancy and exhibited poorer cognitive competencies…

Background: Family quality of life (FQOL), as a family outcome measure of early intervention and other services, has increasingly drawn attention of researchers, policymakers and service providers. Developing an index of "family" QOL requires a measure suitable for use with multiple family members. The purpose of this study was to test whether…

A study examined what children learn in their transition from home life to the world of school and how they learn it. Subjects were students enrolled in pre-kindergarten and kindergarten classes at 10 public schools in Baltimore, Maryland, their teachers, and their families. A total of 42 families, each with a 4-year-old child enrolled in…

Used an ecological model of human development to assess the interrelationship between psychological determinants of parenting, parental age, and parenting skill for a sample of parents (N=310). Found parents' race to be significantly related to attitudes toward childrearing, knowledge of child development, and perceived social support. (Author/ABB)

Examines possible correlates of difficult temperament by testing 152 adopted and 120 nonadopted infants at 12 and 24 months. Finds no significant relationships between parental reports of difficult temperament and other aspects of infant development, the home environment, or parental personality. Questions the utility of the construct of difficult…

This study investigated parents' knowledge of their child's emergent literacy development by administering parent questionnaires that examined parents' beliefs of literacy learning and the early writing and reading experiences of preschool children in their home. A total of 115 questionnaires were administered to parents with children enrolled in…

Regression surface analysis was used to examine relations between family environment, assessed in parent interviews, and measures of academic achievement at different levels of school-related attitudes for 800 11-year-old children from lower and middle class groups: Anglo Australian, Greek, recent English immigrants, and Southern Italian.…

Examines the diversity of parenting styles in a sample of low-income, African American families served by Head Start. Analyses revealed a range of child-rearing beliefs. Findings suggest that crude group comparisons neither describe nor explain the effects of parenting values and parent-child interactions in such samples. (RJM)

Traced the life course, from mid-adolescence to young adulthood, of females characterized at age 16 as underachievers or overachievers. Found that, compared to the overachievers, the underachievers came from families with lower assessments of the daughters' academic achievement, lower aspirations, and conflicted relationships with parents.…