Parenting and Child Adjustment

Since the early 20th century, developmental scientists have sought to understand how parents influence their children’s cognitive, social, and emotional development. Parents influence children in various ways. For example, marital relationships shape the family climate and indirectly affect parenting practices via parental psychopathology, eventually influencing child adjustment. However, parenting or parent-child interactions are the most direct and predominant way of influencing children. Parenting is a complex activity, encompassing various specific behaviors that work independently or together to influence child adjustment. In the late 1960s, John Bowlby proposed attachment theory in describing parent-child interactions and bonding. Around the same time, Diana Baumrind proposed the theory of parenting styles and conducted research on parenting typologies thereafter. Other researchers have focused on specific parenting behaviors, such as parental ...