PARENTING PRACTICES AND CHILDREN'S SOCIAL, EMOTIONAL, AND COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT
Cheryl Buehler: I'm interested in parenting practices in a variety of families - foster, married, and divorced. The research on foster parents and families is conducted with scholars from social work and has an applied focus (Buehler, Cox, & Cuddeback, 2003; Buehler, Orme, Post, & Patterson, 2001; Orme & Buehlker, 2001; Orme, Buehlker, McSurdy, Rhodes, & Cox, 2003; Orme, Buehler, McSurdy, Rhodes, Cox, & Patterson, in press; Rhodes, Orme, & Buehler, 2001). Click on title for in press papers concerning foster care work: The Potential for Successful Family Foster Care: Conceptualizing Competency Domains for Foster Parents, Parental and Familial Characteristics of Family Foster Care Applicants, and Parental and Familial Characteristics used in the Selection of Foster Families. For a look at my work on parenting in married and divorced families, please see the research emphases on Youth and Adolescent Development, and Marital Dynamics in Divorced and Remarriage.
David Demo: My research focuses on the influences of divorce, family structure, and family relationships on the well-being of children and parents. I am particularly interested in how parent-child and parent-adolescent relationships change during family transitions and how these relationships influence children's and adolescents' development.
Anne Fletcher: Dr. Fletcher is interested in the influences of parenting styles and practices on child and adolescent well-being. She is currently involved in a project that examines the extent to which a number of different aspects of parental behavior are linked with adolescent involvement in problem behavior.
Esther Leerkes: I study the emotional and cognitive processes that influence maternal sensitivity particularly in response to infant distress. I am interested in the process by which mothers' feelings and beliefs about emotions and their related parenting behavior influence the development of young children's understanding of emotions, emotion regulation behaviors, and subsequent social competence or behavioral problems.
Marion O'Brien: I have a broad interest in parenting practices as they relate to parental attitudes, attributions, and goals, and in examining the relation between parental cognitions, parenting behavior, and child development.
Andrew Supple :I am interested in how parenting behaviors such as support, monitoring, autonomy granting, positive induction, and punitive or coercive discipline influence a variety of adolescent outcomes. I believe that research in this area needs to consider how contextual influences (race, gender, SES, generational status) alter family processes in reference to parental socialization of adolescents.
Jonathan Tudge : Parenting practices, and how they both influence and are influenced by their children, clearly relate to children's social and cognitive development. My research is aimed at understanding the links among (a) parents' values and beliefs about raising children, (b) the types of everyday activities that children of preschool age are involved in with their typical social partners, and (c) how the children's teachers and parents view them, academically, socially, and behaviorally, once they go to school. We interview the parents when their children are three years of age, focusing on the parents' goals, values, and beliefs for their children. At the same time, we observe the settings into which the parents place their children, the children's activities in those settings, and the ways in which their typical social partners (including the parents) deal with them. We observe for the equivalent of one complete day in the children's lives (20 hours of observation on each child, spread over the course of a week), wherever the children happen to be (with parents, in a child care center if they go to one, with grandparents, shopping, etc.). Then, once the children have entered school, we collect more information from both the teachers and the parents, about how they're doing. Most importantly, we have been able to link perceptions of the children's school performance to the types of activities in which they've been involved several years earlier.