Suchergebnisse

Over the last twenty years it has become recognized that fathers play a crucial role in child development and subsequent adult status and behaviour. This book presents the state-of-the-art on fathering and its determinants. Based on original research into the effects that different styles of fathering can have on children, it explores the long and short terms outcomes of involved fathering on different domains of children?s lives, including academic achievement, mental health, socio-economic status, adolescent relationships and delinquency

Abstract. This study explored the role of parental family structure, perceived father figure's involvement, and perceived mother figure's involvement in childhood in women's psychological distress in midadulthood. Six hundred and seventeen 28-59-year-old women with secondary school age children from three areas in South England completed the GHQ-12, scales retrospectively assessing mother's involvement and father's involvement, and items on parental family structure, educational attainment, social class (housing tenure), family size (number of children under age 21 in the household), partner status, employment status, and age. It was found that, even after controlling for current sociodemographic confounding variables, mother's involvement and father's involvement were negatively related to psychological distress. Parental family structure was unrelated to psychological distress. Family structure did not moderate the relationship between parental involvement and daughters' psychological distress, and the effect of father's involvement on a daughter's psychological distress did not vary with the level of mother's involvement.

This study used longitudinal data from the 1970 British Cohort Study (BCS70) to examine links between mothers' nonauthoritarian child-rearing attitudes, assessed when children were aged 5, and children's values at age 30 (antiracism, right-wing beliefs, support for authority, support for traditional marital values, support for working mothers, political cynicism, environmentalism, and support for the work ethic). Mothers' nonauthoritarian child-rearing attitudes were positively related to cohort members' antiracism and environmentalism, and were negatively related to cohort members' support for authority, support for traditional marital values, and support for the work ethic even after mothers' values (liberalism and support for working mothers) and known early (parental social class, socioeconomic disadvantage, family structure, general ability, and emotional and behavioral problems) and concurrent (social class, partner status, religiosity, self-reported physical health, and depressed mood) confounding factors were controlled for.

Purpose: To investigate the role of emotion regulation in the relation between fathers' parenting (specifically warmth, behavioral control and psychological control) and adolescents' emotional and eating disorder symptoms, after adjustment for controls. Methods: A total of 203 11–18 year-old students from a school in a socio-economically disadvantaged area in North-East London completed questionnaires assessing emotional symptoms (measured with the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire's (SDQ) Emotional Symptoms Scale), eating disorder symptoms (measured with the Eating Attitudes Test (EAT-26)), difficulties in emotion regulation (measured with the Difficulties in Emotion Regulation Scale (DERS)), and fathers' overprotection and warmth, measured with the Parental Bonding Instrument (PBI), as well as behavioral and psychological control. The confounding variables considered were number of proximal (i.e., during the last year) adverse life events experienced, gender, age, and socio-economic status (eligibility for free school meals). Results: Adolescents' difficulties in emotion regulation mediated the link between fathers' psychological control and adolescents' emotional symptoms, but not the link between fathers' parenting and adolescents' eating disorder symptoms, which appeared to be more directly linked to fathers' psychological control and number of proximal adverse life events experienced. Proximal adverse life events experienced were also strongly associated with difficulties in emotion regulation. Conclusions: The study findings have implications for intervention programs which may prove more fruitful in addressing adolescent emotional problems by targeting underlying emotion regulation abilities, and in addressing adolescent eating disorder symptoms by protecting adolescents with a recent experience of multiple adverse life events. Parenting programs also stand to benefit from the evidence presented in this study that paternal psychological control may have uniquely harmful consequences for adolescent development through the hampering or atrophying of emotion regulation abilities and the encouragement of eating disorders.

Summary: This study of 2722 adolescents aged 14-18 years explored whether parental involvement can protect against adolescent suicide attempts. Compared to their counterparts suicide attempters were more likely to have been in trouble with the police, to report lower levels of parental interest and academic motivation, and to report suicidal ideation and using alcohol or an illegal drug when they feel stressed. They were also less likely to reside with both parents. The association between parental involvement and suicidal behaviour was not stronger for sons than for daughters or for adolescents who had experienced family disruption than for those who grew up in two-parent families.

This study, using data from 5,689 cohort members of the National Child Development Study, explores the impact of both structure of parenting family and contextual factors on attitudes towards marriage at age 33. Traditional attitudes to marriage were positively related to religiosity and negatively related to high non‐verbal skills in childhood and smoking or drinking in adulthood but were unrelated to the structure or background of parental family. The results also yielded some very interesting gender differences. For example, the presence of partner at age 33 significantly predicted traditional attitudes to marriage in women but not in men. In men, by contrast, it was the presence of children at age 33, the absence of qualifications and current low socio‐economic status that were associated with traditional attitudes to marriage. The implications of these findings on future family change are discussed. Copyright © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.