Parenting

The purpose of this randomized experimental design was to determine the impact of a culturally adapted family-based intervention program on parenting styles. A secondary purpose was to determine the impact of cultural factors, biculturalism and familism, on the parenting styles of parents who participated in the family intervention, as compared to those who did not participate in the intervention. The sample consisted mostly of Haitian parents whose youth, ages 13-17, were involved in the juvenile justice system in South Florida. Twenty-one parents were randomly assigned to the intervention group (n = 15) and comparison group, or standard of care (n = 6). This study was a substudy of a larger scale study that was conducted at a major university in South Florida.
Participants in the family-based intervention group received an evidence-based intervention that was adapted to their cultural needs and language preferences. The intervention lasted between 3-4 months. Participants in the comparison group were those in the standard of care, or treatment as usual group, who were referred to community-based organizations for counseling services. A pretest-posttest design was used to examine the effects of the culturally adapted intervention on parenting styles and familism. Parenting styles were measured using the Parenting Styles and Dimensions Questionnaire (PSDQ, Robinson et al., 1995) and familism was measured using the Attitudinal Familism Scale (Lugo Steidel & Contreras, 2003). T-test analyses were used to determine statistical significance of the variables and gain scores were calculated for the intervention group and comparison group. Pearson’s r correlation coefficient was also used to explore any significant relationships between the dependent variables, parenting styles and familism, and parenting styles and biculturalism. Biculturalism was measured using the Bicultural Involvement Questionnaire (Szapocznik et al., 1980).

Resilience is imperative during adolescence. Previous studies focused on the moderating role of parenting between temperament and adaptive outcomes in children (Karreman et al., 2010; Wang et al., 2016). However, little is known about how personality such as neuroticism affects resilience during adolescence, and how parenting influences neuroticism and resilience at this life stage. The current study investigated the longitudinal effects of neuroticism and both positive and negative parenting on selfreports of resilience in a sample of high-school adolescents in Lithuania (N = 859). The results suggested that high levels of neuroticism predicted declining rates of resilience. This association was moderated by parent support and behavioral control. Specifically, high levels of parent support and behavioral control would attenuate the effect of neuroticism on resilience during adolescence, but only when the neuroticism level of the individual was not high. The findings indicate that the neuroticism erodes the advantages that are otherwise associated with positive parenting. The findings have important implications. Good parenting is effective to foster resilience among children with low neuroticism, but for children with high neuroticism, more attention should be paid to the specific skills that might directly foster resilience rather than relying on parenting.

This study took place during the 1990-1991 school year and involved 58 pregnant and parenting teenage participants between 14 and 19 years of age living in north Broward County, Florida. It evaluated the effectiveness of a parenting program by comparing performance of two groups on the Adult and Adolescent Parenting Inventory (AAPI). The experimental group consisted of 39 (out of a potential pool of 139) public high school students. The 39 students of the study completed one full semester at a special center. The study's control group consisted of 19 teen parents who were non-treatment participants with similar demographic and descriptive profiles. The study also determined which of the subject variables of home environment, age, parenting status, reading level, and grades earned in coursework were correlated significantly with experimental group posttest performance in the AAPI's constructs of empathy, expectations, physical punishment, role modeling, and with a composite total score. Using analysis of variance (ANOVAS), there were no differences on three constructs (empathy, physical punishment and role modeling) between the experimental and control groups. Significant differences between groups were found in the parental expectation and total composite construct. Stepwise regression was used with Florida Atlantic University's Vax using SPSSX for correlations of independent variables with experimental group posttest performance. The parental expectations construct was not significantly correlated with any independent variables. Significantly correlated variables at the.05 level included the "Child Development" class grade with the dependent variables of posttest total composite score, physical punishment, and role modeling. At the.01 level, the "Child Development" grade also significantly correlated with the empathy posttest score. The reading level was significantly correlated with the empathy and physical punishment constructs. Treatment/control group long-term performance paralleled research indicating that participation in programs designed to offer support to teenage mothers was related to positive caregiving styles (Dunst, Vance, & Cooper, 1986). Brooks-Gunn (1991) also found that second-generation teen parents who had been participants in parenting programs were likely to have attained higher levels of education and to have had fewer of their children taken from them 17 years later (Brooks-Gunn, 1991).

This one-year longitudinal study was designed to illuminate the direction of the causal arrow between children's perceptions of their mother's behavior and children's attachment style during a period of development that has been relatively neglected in research on attachment - preadolescence. The possibility that children's behavior problems moderate the influence of perceived parenting on attachment, or of attachment on perceived parenting, was also investigated. Participants were an ethnically diverse sample of 407 children (213 girls, 194 boys) who were in the fourth grade at initial testing (M age = 11 years 1 month). Measures included children's perceptions of five maternal behaviors (harassment, overprotectiveness, monitoring, affectionate contact, and reliable support), peer reports of children's behavior problems (internalizing and externalizing), and children's self-perceived attachment styles (preoccupied and avoidant). Contrary to a traditional attachment perspective, there was limited evidence that perceptions of parenting led to change in children's attachment styles. Though children with internalizing problems who perceived their mother as harassing developed preoccupied attachment over time, and children with externalizing problems who perceived their mother as v overprotective developed avoidant attachment over time. However, there was considerable support for the reverse causal hypothesis that children's attachment style influences how they perceive their mother: Preoccupied attachment predicted increasingly favorable perceptions of maternal behavior over time (reduced harassment and increased monitoring), whereas avoidant attachment predicted increasingly unfavorable perceptions of the mother over time (increased harassment, reduced monitoring, reduced affectionate contact, and reduced reliable support). Children's behavior problems moderated a few of these relations.

Attachment, a vital part of human life, is defined as a strong emotional bond with a caregiver that is formed through repetitions of behaviors that children adjust to accordingly. One forms a view on relationships that transfers from parents to peers as a result of their internal working model (IWM). A secure attachment can form a healthy model while an insecure one may form an unhealthy, negative model. The present study assesses preadolescents' attachment styles toward their friends and examines whether their attachment styles interact with peers' attachment styles to predict liking of the peers and aggression toward the peers.

This study investigated friend influence on school engagement in a sample of 160 stable same-sex friendship dyads (94 female dyads and 66 male dyads) from five senior high schools and four vocational schools in a small city in central Finland. Longitudinal data were collected during the first and second years of upper secondary school, approximately one year apart, and self-reports were available from both members of each friendship dyad. The framework of the Actor-Partner Interdependence Model (APIM; Kenny, Kashy & Cook, 2006) was used to estimate friend influence on school engagement in a model that did not distinguish same-sex friends, in a direct-effects model that distinguished friends based on relative levels of school burnout, and in a multiple-group model for distinguishable friends that investigated perceptions of maternal affection as a moderator of friend influence. Results suggest that the higher burnout partner in a friendship dyad influenced a decline in the lower burnout partner's school engagement only when the lower burnout partner perceived low maternal affection. When the lower burnout partner perceived high maternal affection, there was no evidence of negative influence by a higher burnout partner. Patterns of influence did not vary as a function of sex or school track. The importance of distinguishing friends on a theoretically and statistically meaningful basis to learn who influences whom, and of investigating indirect effects models when studying friend influence is also discussed.

This work is comprised of altered, found familiar objects. They are stacked and are covered with Egyptian paste, then fired in a burn-out kiln. Through transformation by fire the objects become post-apocalyptic relics. Raised in an Irish Catholic alcoholic home by a raging perfectionist mother, the kitchen was a battlefield - the home, a place of great drama. After dish throwing and frying pan swinging, dinner was precisely laid out on a clean white tablecloth - order covering disorder. The failed domestic environment of my childhood informs this body of work and is inflected by recovering psychological states. Empowered through feminist critique and filtered through my study of Jungian psychology, these objects enact a precarious balance between the known and the estranged. Through the process of transmutation, a cathartic space is generated, giving space for viewers to potentially confront their memories of home.