In this article, the authors argue for a greater understanding of children's play across cultures through better integration of scientific thinking about the developed and developing societies, through consideration of socialization beliefs and goals, and, finally, through the use of more complex models in research investigations. They draw on…

This study examined whether the longitudinal association between parental directing of friendships (i.e., encouraging or discouraging certain friendships) and young adolescents' friendship adjustment (i.e., friendship quality and friends' positive characteristics) was moderated by skin conductance level reactivity (SCLR) to peer stress.…

This article reports on the intergenerational transmission of environmental concern and the explanatory power of communication patterns within the family. Using representative data from the Parent-Child Socialization Study in Belgium (PCSS, 2012), this article focuses on the relative influence of the mother and the father, and gender-specific…

Parents impact adolescent substance abuse, but sex-specific influences are not well-understood. This study examined parental influences on adolescent drinking behavior in a sample of ninth-grade students (N = 473). Hierarchical regression analyses indicated parental monitoring, disapproval of teen alcohol use, and quality of parent-teen general…

Using two waves of longitudinal data, we utilized the family stress model of economic hardship to test whether family socioeconomic status is related to adolescent adjustment (substance use and academic achievement) through parental knowledge and adolescent self-regulation (behavioral self-control and delay discounting). Participants included 220…

Background: Youth assets protect adolescents from tobacco use, but their influence in young adulthood is unknown. Purpose: To determine the prospective influence of assets possessed in young adulthood with tobacco use the following year. Methods: Data from waves 4 and 5 from the Youth Asset Study (n = 450, ages 18-22 at wave 5) were used. Logistic…

Parental abuse is supposedly objectionable because it is the instigation of the child's delinquency. This instigation is likely to stem from the impairment of parental control arising from parental abuse, with respect to social control theory. For the substantiation of this likelihood, the present study surveyed 229 users of youth social work…

Kyle D. Pruett, MD, clinical professor of child psychiatry at the Yale School of Medicine, responds to questions about the importance of engaging men in the lives of children. Dr. Pruett discusses how men parent differently than women; how mothers and fathers can effectively co-parent; the impact of parenting on the marital relationship; and the…

Using data from the longitudinal NICHD Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development (N = 1364), this study examined the association between mothers' sensitivity and children's externalizing behavior from preschool to preadolescence. Externalizing behavior declined on average across this period with a slowing of this decline around middle…

The primary goal of the current study was to test whether parent and adolescent preference for a common language moderates the association between parenting and rank-order change over time in offspring substance use. A sample of Mexican-origin 7th-grade adolescents (M[subscript age] = 12.5 years, N = 194, 52% female) was measured longitudinally on…

Executive control (EC) develops rapidly during the preschool years and is central to academic achievement and functional outcome. Although children with perinatal adversity are at known risk for EC impairments, little is known about the underlying nature of these impairments or the mechanisms that contribute to their development over time. Drawing…

This article, through looking at mothers' modes of engagement with their children's education, proposes an integrative analytical approach to the study of the making of mothers, mothering, and motherhood. The article presents and brings into dialogue four different bodies of anthropological and sociological literature: mothering as a…

The purpose of our study was to examine the ways in which parents engage in play with their children within the family context and to establish which parental play behaviour predicts the play behaviour of their children during interactive play with toys. The sample included 58 children from 2;6 to 6 years old and their parents. The parent-child…

The purpose of this study was to describe adolescents' perceptions of parental influences on their smoking behavior. Thirty-five adolescents, 14 to 18 years old, provided narrative accounts of their smoking histories in semistructured interviews. Most of the participants recognized that their parents played an important role in shaping their…

Preschoolers, as a group, are highly attuned to causality, and this attunement is known to facilitate memory, learning, and problem solving. However, recent work reveals substantial individual variability in the strength of children's "causal stance," as demonstrated by their curiosity about and preference for new causal information. In…