Be creative – how would you entice parents or parents to be to come?

Assignment Instructions

Week 2

During weeks 1 and 2 you have explored how parenting expectations, experiences and styles are influenced by many factors. The learning resources suggest several ways to provide parenting information and related family supports. For Assignment 1 due Week 2 you will use this information to create an enticing flyer for a parenting class that is designed to help prepare new parents. Your flyer should include:

1. The purpose of the parenting class – including why it is important

2. At least 5 distinct topics that will be addressed in the class noting why each is important. Be sure to cite resources to back this up.

3. Be creative – how would you entice parents or parents to be to come?

Flyer length minimum 500 words, 2 academic references used, MS word or RTF format only.

Possible grade

Student grade

The paper addresses the issues specified by the assignment – 5 parenting topics described.

The author shows insight and sophistication in thinking and writing

Two academic references were used with corresponding citations in the body of the paper

Paper was well organized and easy to follow. Paper was the required length. Cover page, paper body, citations and Reference list were in the American Psychological Association format.

Few to no spelling, grammar, punctuation or other writing structure errors

TOTAL

100

HELPFUL CLASS REQUIRED READING

https://edge.apus.edu/access/content/group/education-common/Universal/CHFD/331/elf/lesson-1/elf_index.html

https://edge.apus.edu/access/content/group/education-common/Universal/CHFD/331/elf/lesson-2/elf_index.html

Assignment Instructions

Week 2

1. The purpose of the parenting class – including why it is important

2. At least 5 distinct topics that will be addressed in the class noting why each is important. Be sure to cite resources to back this up.

3. Be creative – how would you entice parents or parents to be to come?

Flyer length minimum 500 words, 2 academic references used, MS word or RTF format only.

	Possible grade	Student grade
The paper addresses the issues specified by the assignment – 5 parenting topics described.	20
The author shows insight and sophistication in thinking and writing	30
Two academic references were used with corresponding citations in the body of the paper	20
Paper was well organized and easy to follow. Paper was the required length. Cover page, paper body, citations and Reference list were in the American Psychological Association format.	20
Few to no spelling, grammar, punctuation or other writing structure errors	10
TOTAL	100

HELPFUL CLASS REQUIRED READING

https://edge.apus.edu/access/content/group/education-common/Universal/CHFD/331/elf/lesson-1/elf_index.html

https://edge.apus.edu/access/content/group/education-common/Universal/CHFD/331/elf/lesson-2/elf_index.html

READING 2.pdf

PARENTING: SCIENCE AND PRACTICE, 12: 212–221, 2012 ISSN: 1529-5192 print / 1532-7922 online DOI: 10.1080/15295192.2012.683359

Cultural Approaches to Parenting

Marc H. Bornstein

SYNOPSIS

This article first introduces some main ideas behind culture and parenting and next addresses philosophical rationales and methodological considerations central to cultural approaches to parenting, including a brief account of a cross-cultural study of parenting. It then focuses on universals, specifics, and distinctions between form (behavior) and function (meaning) in parenting as embedded in culture. The article concludes by pointing to social policy implications as well as future directions prompted by a cultural approach to parenting.

INTRODUCTION

Every culture is characterized, and distinguished from other cultures, by deeply rooted and widely acknowledged ideas about how one needs to feel, think, and act as a functioning member of the culture. Cross-cultural study affirms that groups of people possess different beliefs and engage in different behaviors that may be normative in their culture but are not necessarily normative in another culture. Cultural groups thus embody particular characteristics that are deemed essential or advantageous to their members. These beliefs and behaviors tend to persist over time and constitute the val- ued competencies that are communicated to new members of the group. Central to a concept of culture, therefore, is the expectation that different cultural groups possess distinct beliefs and behave in unique ways with respect to their parenting. Cultural variations in parenting beliefs and behaviors are impressive, whether observed among different, say ethnic, groups in one society or across societies in different parts of the world. This article addresses the rapidly increasing research interest in cultural dif- ferences in parenting. It first takes up philosophical underpinnings, rationales, and methodological considerations central to cultural approaches to parenting, describes a cross-cultural study of parenting, and then addresses some core issues in cultural approaches to parenting, namely, universals, specifics, and the form-versus-function distinction. It concludes with an overview of social policy implications and future directions of cultural approaches to parenting.

THE CULTURE–PARENTING NEXUS

Culture is usefully conceived of as the set of distinctive patterns of beliefs and behaviors that are shared by a group of people and that serve to regulate their daily living. These beliefsandbehaviorsshapehowparentscare for theiroffspring.Thus,havingexperienced

This article not subject to US copyright law.

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unique patterns of caregiving is a principal reason that individuals in different cultures are who they are and often differ so from one another. Culture helps to construct parents andparenting, and culture ismaintained and transmitted by influencingparental cognitions that in turn are thought to shape parenting practices (Bornstein & Lansford, 2010; Harkness et al., 2007). Children’s experiences with their parents within a cultural context consequently scaffold them to become culturally competent members of their society. For example, European American and Puerto Rican mothers of toddlers believe in the differential value of individual autonomy versus connected interdependence, a contrast that in turn relates to mothers’ actual caregiving (Harwood, Schoelmerich, Schulze, & Gonzalez, 1999): Where European American mothers use suggestions (rather than commands) andother indirectmeans of structuring their children’s behavior, Puerto Rican mothers use more direct means of structuring, such as commands, physical positioning and restraints, and direct attempts to recruit their children’s attention. Parents normally organize and distribute their caregiving faithful to indigenous cul-

tural belief systems and behavior patterns. Indeed, culturally constructed beliefs can be so powerful that parents are known to act on them, setting aside what their senses might tell them about their own children. For example, parents in most societies speak to babies and rightly see them as comprehending interactive partners long before infants produce language, whereas parents in some societies think that it is nonsensical to talk to infants before children themselves are capable of speech (Ochs, 1988). Cultural cognitions and practices instantiate themes that communicate consistent cul-

tural messages (Quinn & Holland, 1987). For example, in the United States personal choice is firmly rooted in principles of liberty and freedom, is closely bound up with how individuals conceive of themselves andmake sense of their lives, and is a persistent and significant construct in the literature on parenting (Tamis-LeMonda & McFadden, 2010). Moreover, culture-specific patterns of childrearing can be expected to adapt to each society’s specific setting and needs. For example, young infants among the nomadic hunter-gatherer Aka are more likely to be held and fed in close proximity to their care- givers than are infants from Ngandu farming communities who are more likely to be left by themselves, even though these two traditional groups live close to one another in central Africa (Hewlett, Lamb, Shannon, Leyendecker, & Schölmerich, 1998). Aka par- ents are reasoned to maintain closer proximity to infants because the group moves in search of food more frequently than do Ngandu. Generational, social, and media images—culture—of caregiving and childhood play

formative roles in generating parenting cognitions and guiding parenting practices (Bornstein & Lansford, 2010). Parenting thus embeds cultural models and meanings into basic psychological processes which maintain or transform the culture (Bornstein, 2009). Reciprocally, culture expresses and perpetuates itself through parenting. Parents bring certain cultural proclivities to interactions with their children, and parents inter- pret even similar characteristics in children within their culture’s frame of reference; parents then encourage or discourage characteristics as appropriate or detrimental to adequate functioning within the group.

CULTURAL STUDY AS A PRIMARY APPROACH IN PARENTING SCIENCE

The move toward a culturally richer understanding of parenting has given rise to a set of important questions about parenting (Bornstein, 2001). What is normative parenting

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and to what extent does it vary with culture? What are the historical, economic, social, or other sources of cultural variation in parenting norms? How does culture embed into parenting cognitions and practices and manifest and maintain itself through parenting? There is definite need and significance for a cultural approach to parenting science.

Descriptively it is invaluable for revealing the full range of human parenting. The study of parenting across cultures also furnishes a check against an ethnocentric world view of parenting. Acceptance of findings from any one culture as “normative” of parent- ing is too narrow in scope, and ready generalizations from them to parents at large are blindingly uncritical. Comparison across cultures is also valuable because it augments an understanding of the processes throughwhich biological variables fuse with environ- mental variables and experiences. Parenting needs to be considered in its socio-cultural context, and cultural study provides the variability necessary to expose process.

Cultural Methods in Parenting Science

Some culture research in parenting compares group means on variables of inter- est, like parenting cognitions and practices or their child outcomes, using analyses of variance statistics. Other research looks at how culture moderates patterns of associa- tions between variables across cultural groups. Both approaches require indicators that are clearly defined and measured in consistent ways. Cultural science, in addition to requirements of any good science, also brings with it unique issues and requirements (translation, sampling, and measurement equivalence, for example), and risks associ- ated with this research are enhanced when it is conducted without full awareness and sensitivity to these specific concerns. For example, studies that compare cultural groups often require the collection of data in different languages, and the instruments used in such comparisons must be rendered equally valid across cultural groups (Peña, 2007). Furthermore, with any test of between-group differences, there is a chance that mea- sures are not equivalent in the groups. Equivalences at many levels are important, and steps need to be taken to promote not only cross-linguistic appropriateness but also cross-cultural validity of instruments to achieve at least “adapted equivalence” (van de Vijver & Leung, 1997). Indeed, failure to do so creates problems in interpretation of find- ings that are as serious as lack of reliability and validity (Vandenberg & Lance, 2000). If test measurement invariance is not tested and ensured, additional empirical and/or conceptual justification that the measures used have the same meaning in different cultural groups is required. Cultural comparisons of parenting usually involve quasi-experimental designs, in

which samples are not randomly selected either from the world population or from national populations or (obviously) assigned to cultures. Interpreting findings is much more challenging in such designs than in experiments that are based on random assign- ment of participants. A major challenge that confronts cultural comparisons concerns how to isolate source(s) of potential effects and identify the presumed active cultural ingredient(s) that produced differences. Samples in different cultures can differ onmany personological or sociodemographic characteristics that may confound parenting differ- ences. For example, parents in different cultural groups may vary in modal patterns of personality, acculturation level, education, or socioeconomic status (Bornstein et al., 2007; Bornstein et al., 2012a). Various procedures are available to untangle rival expla- nations for cultural comparisons, such as the inclusion of covariates in the research design to confirm or disconfirm specific alternative interpretations. By ruling out com- plementary accounts, it is possible to draw conclusions that are more firmly situated in

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culture. For example, culture influences teaching and expectations of children in moth- ers of Australian versus Lebanese descent all living in Australia apart from child gender, parity, and socioeconomic class (Goodnow, Cashmore, Cotton, & Knight, 1984). Other methodological questions threaten the validity of cultural comparisons

(Matsumoto & van de Vijver, 2011). For example, it matters who is doing the study, their culture, their assumptions in asking certain questions, and so forth. Whether collaborat- ing scientists are “on the ground” in the culture and undertake adequate preliminary study to generate meaningful questions are also pertinent.

Similarity and Difference in Parenting across Cultures

The “story” of the cultural investigation of parenting is largely one of similarities, differences, and their meaning. In an illustrative study, we analyzed and compared natural mother-infant interactions in Argentina, Belgium, Israel, Italy, and the United States (Bornstein et al., 2012b). Differences exist among the locales we recruited from in terms of history, beliefs, languages, and childrearing values. However, the samples were more alike than not in terms of modernity, urbanity, economics, politics, living standards, even ecology and climate. Thus, they created the possibility of identifying culture-unique and -general conclusions about childrearing. Mothers were primiparous, at least 18 years of age, and from intact families; infants were firstborn, term, healthy, and 5 months old. Our aims were to observe mothers and their infants under eco- logically valid, natural, and unobtrusive conditions, and so we studied their usual routines in the familiar confines of their own homes. We videorecorded mother–baby dyads and then used mutually exclusive and exhaustive coding systems to compre- hensively characterize frequency and duration of six maternal caregiving behavioral domains (nurture, physical, social, didactic, material, and language) and five corre- sponding infant developmental domains (physical, social, exploration, vocalization, and distress communication). One question we asked concerned cultural similarities and differences in base rates

of parenting in the six caregiving domains. We standardized maternal behavior fre- quency in terms of rate of occurrence per hour, pooled, normalized, and disaggregated the data by country, finally analyzing country means for parallel comparisons for dif- ferent domains. Mothers differed in every domain assessed. Moreover, mothers in no one country surpassed mothers in all others in their base rates of parenting across domains. The fact that maternal behaviors vary significantly across thesemodern, indus- trialized, and comparable places underscores the role of cultural influence on everyday human experiences, even from the start of life. Of course, even greater variation is often revealed in starker contrasts. For example, mothers in rural Thailand do not know that their newborns can see, and so during the day swaddle infants in fabric hammocks that allow babies only a slit view of ceiling or sky (Kotchabhakdi, Winichagoon, Smitasiri, Dhanamitta, & Valyasevi, 1987). Awareness of alternative modes of development also enhances understanding of the nature of variation across cultures; cross-cultural com- parisons show how. For example, U.S. mothers are often thought of as being highly verbal, but U.S. mothers actually fell at the bottom of our five-culture comparison. A second question we asked concerned relations between parent-provided experi-

ences and behavioral development in young infants (Bornstein et al., 2012b). Across cultures, mothers and infants showed a noteworthy degree of attunement and speci- ficity. Mothers who encouraged their infants’ physical development more had more

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physically developed infants as opposed to other outcomes; mothers who engaged infants more socially had infants who paidmore attention to them;mothers who encour- aged their infants more didactically had infants who explored more properties, objects, and events in the environment, as did babies whose mothers outfitted their environ- ments in richer ways. That is, mothers and infants are not only in tune with one another, but their correspondences tend to be domain specific. Thus, specific correspondences in mother–infant interaction patterns were widespread and similar in different cultural groups. This kind of study continues the story of cultural approaches to parenting in terms of

their traditional dual foci on similarities and differences. Mothers in different cultures differ in their mean levels of different domains of parenting infants, but mothers and infants in different cultures are similar in terms of mutual attunement of caregiving on the part of mothers and development in corresponding domains in infants. A shift in focus to the meaning of those similarities and differences advances the culture and parenting narrative.

CULTURAL UNIVERSALS, SPECIFICS, AND FORM–FUNCTION RELATIONS IN PARENTING

Culture-Common and Culture-Specific Parenting

The cultural approach to parenting has as one main goal to evaluate and com- pare culture-common and culture-specific modes of parenting. Evolutionary thinking appeals to the species-common genome, and the biological heritage of some psycho- logical processes presupposes their universality (Norenzayan & Heine, 2005) as do shared historical and economic forces (Harris, 2001). At the same time, cultural psychol- ogy explores variation in core psychological processes by investigating the competing influences of divergent physical and social environments (Bornstein, 2010; van de Vijver & Leung, 1997). Psychological constructs, structures, functions, and processes like parenting can be universal and simultaneously reflect cultural moderation of their quantitative level or qualitative expression. Language illustrates this essential duality. An evolutionary model posits a language instinct from the perspective of an inborn and universal acquisition device, but diversity of environmental input plays a strong role in the acquisition of any specific language (Pinker, 2007). Some demands on par- ents are universal. For example, parents in all societies must nurture and protect their young (Bornstein, 2006). Other demands vary greatly across cultural groups. For exam- ple, parents in some societies play with babies and see them as interactive partners, whereas parents in other societies think that it is senseless for parents to play with infants (Bornstein, 2007). Culture-specific influences on parenting begin long before children are born, and they

shape fundamental decisions about which behaviors parents should promote in their children and how parents should interact with their children (Bornstein, 1991; Whiting, 1963). Thus, caregiving varies among cultures in terms of opinions about the full range of caregiving and child development, including the significance of specific competencies for children’s successful adjustment, the ages expected for children to reach develop- mental milestones, when and how to care for children, and the like. For example, the United States and Japan are both child-centeredmodern societies with equivalently high

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standards of living and so forth, but U.S. American and Japanese parents value differ- ent childrearing goals which they express in different ways (Bornstein, 1989; Bornstein et al., 2012a; Morelli & Rothbaum, 2007). American mothers try to promote auton- omy, assertiveness, verbal competence, and self-actualization in their children, whereas Japanese mothers try to promote emotional maturity, self-control, social courtesy, and interdependence in theirs. Many parenting cognitions and practices are likely to be similar across cultures;

indeed, similarities may reflect universals (in the sense of being common) even if they vary in form and the degree to which they are shaped by experience and influenced by culture. Such patterns of parenting might reflect inherent attributes of caregiving, historical convergences in parenting, or they could be a by-product of information dissemination via forces of globalization or mass media or migration that present par- ents today with increasingly similar socialization models, issues, and challenges. In the end, all peoples must help children meet similar developmental tasks, and all peo- ples (presumably) wish physical health, social adjustment, educational achievement, and economic security for their children, and so they parent in some manifestly sim- ilar ways. Furthermore, the mechanisms through which parents likely affect children are universal. For example, social learning theorists have identified the pervasive roles that conditioning and modeling play as children acquire associations that subsequently form the basis for their culturally constructed selves. By watching or listening to oth- ers who are already embedded in the culture, children come to think and act like them. Attachment theorists propose that children everywhere develop internal working mod- els of social relationships through interactions with their primary caregivers and that these models shape children’s future social relationships with others throughout the balance of the life course (Sroufe & Fleeson, 1986). With so much emphasis on identifi- cation of differences among peoples, it is easy to forget that nearly all parents regardless of culture seek to lead happy, healthy, fulfilled parenthoods and to rear happy, healthy, fulfilled children.

Form and Function in Cultural Approaches to Parenting

These general considerations of universals and specifics lead to a logic model that contrasts form with function in parenting. By form, I mean a parenting cognition or practice as instantiated; by function, I mean the purpose or construal or meaning attached to the form. A proper understanding of the function of parenting cognitions and practices requires situating them in their cultural context (Bornstein, 1995). When a particular parenting cognition or practice serves the same function and connotes the same meaning in different cultures, it likely constitutes a universal. For example, care- givers in (almost) all cultures routinely adjust their speech to very young children making it simpler and more redundant, presumably to support early language acqui- sition; child-directed speech constitutes a universal that adults find difficult to suppress (Papoušek & Bornstein, 1992). The same parenting cognition or practice can also assume different functions in different cultural contexts. Particular parental practices, such as harsh initiation rites, deemed less harmful to children in some cultures may be judged abusive in others. Conversely, different parenting cognitions and practices may serve the same function in different cultural contexts. For example, an authoritative parent- ing style (high warmth, high control) leads to positive outcomes in European American school children, whereas an authoritarian parenting style (low warmth, high control)

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leads to positive outcomes in African American and Hong Kong Chinese school chil- dren (Leung, Lau, & Lam, 1998). When different parenting cognitions or practices serve different functions in different settings, it is evidence for cultural specificity. Many dif- ferent parenting practices appear to be adaptive but differently for different cultural groups (Ogbu, 1993). Thus, cultural study informs not only about quantitative aspects but also about qualitative meaning of parents’ beliefs and behaviors.

SOCIAL POLICY AND FUTURE DIRECTIONS IN CULTURAL APPROACHES TO PARENTING

It is imperative to learn more about parenting and culture so that scientists, educators, and practitioners can effectively enhance parent and child development and strengthen families in diverse social groups. Insofar as some systematic universal relations obtain between how people parent and how children develop, the possibility exists for identify- ing some “best practices” in how to promote positive parenting and child development. Differences attached to the cultural meanings of particular behaviors can cause prob- lems, however. For example, immigrant children may have parents who expect them to behave in one way that is encouraged at home (e.g., averting eye contact to show defer- ence and respect) but then find themselves in a context where adults of the mainstream culture attach a different (often negative) meaning to the same behavior (e.g., appearing disinterested and unengaged with a teacher at school). Other possible future directions for a cultural parenting science would consti-

tute a long agendum. Some will be procedural. Many studies rely on self-reports, and many survey parenting at only one point in time. Observations of actual prac- tices constitute a vital complementary data base (Bornstein, Cote, & Venuti, 2001), and a developmental perspective offers insights into temporal processes of encul- turation, parents tracking differential ontogenetic trajectories, and highlights inter- generational similarities and differences in parents and children from different cul- tures (Bornstein et al., 2010). Parenting modifies social and cognitive aspects of the developing individual and so the design of the brain. For example, assistance con- stitutes an important feature of family relationships for adolescents but has distinc- tive values in Latino and European heritage cultures. Youth in both ethnic groups show similar behavioral levels of helping but, via functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), different patterns of neural activity within the mesolimbic reward system: Latinos show more activity when contributing to family, and European Americans show more activity when gaining cash for themselves (Telzer, Masten, Berkman, Lieberman, & Fuligni, 2010). A future behavioral neuroscience of parent- ing will profitably include cultural variation (Barrett & Fleming, 2011; Bornstein, 2012). Parenting is thought to differ in mothers and fathers (and for girls and boys), but

most parenting research still focuses on mothers. In many cultures, children spend large amounts of time with caregivers other than parents, and all contribute to the caregiving environment of the child. How caregiving is distributed amongst different stakeholders across cultures is not well understood, and future cultural research in parenting will benefit from an enlarged family systems perspective (Bornstein & Sawyer, 2006). Thinking about parent–child relationships often highlights parents as agents of

socialization; however, caregiving is a two-way street. Parent and child activities are

CULTURAL APPROACHES TO PARENTING 219

characterized by intricate patterns of sensitive mutual understandings and unfolding synchronous transactions (Bornstein, 2006, 2009). Moreover, children’s appraisals of their parents affect parenting and child adjustment. Future research needs to attend to child effects, cultural normativeness, and construals of parenting as well as how culture moderates each. Parenting styles that are congruent with cultural norms appear to be effective in transmitting values from parents to children, perhaps because parenting practices that approach the cultural norm result in a childrearing environment that is more positive, consistent, and predictable and in one that facilitates children’s accurate perceptions of parents; children of parents who behave in culturally normative ways are also likely to encounter similar values in settings outside the family (e.g., in religious institutions, in the community) that reinforce their parenting experiences.

CONCLUSIONS

Research on dynamic relations between culture and parenting is increasingly focused on which aspects of culture moderate parenting cognitions and practices and how they do so, as well as on when and why links between parenting cognitions and practices and children’s development are culturally general versus culturally specific. These new directions will move the field toward a deeper understanding, not just of which simi- larities obtain and which differences can be identified, but also of why, in whom, and under which conditions. The cultural study of parenting is beneficially understood in a framework of nec-

essary versus desirable demands. A necessary demand is that parents and children communicate with one another. Normal interaction and children’s healthy mental and socioemotional development depend on it. Not unexpectedly, communication appears to be a universal aspect of parenting and child development. A desirable demand is that parents and children communicate in certain ways adapted and faithful to their cul- tural context. Cultural studies tell us about parents’ and children’s mutual adjustments in terms of universally necessary and contextually desirable demands. Assumptions about the specificity and generality of parenting, and relations between parents and children, are advantageously tested through cultural research because neither parenting nor children’s development occurs in a vacuum: Both emerge and grow in a medium of culture. Variations in what is normative in different cultures help us to question our assumptions about what is universal and informs our understanding of how parent– child relationships unfold in ways both culturally universal and specific. That admirable goal notwithstanding, methodological challenges unique to this line of research loom large. It has been said that only two kinds of information are transmitted across genera-

tions: genes and culture. Parents are the final common pathway of both. We can ask, however, Which is the more meaningful and enduring? The biological view is that we are “gene machines,” created to pass on our genes. A child, even a grandchild, may resem- ble a parent in facial features or in a talent for music. However, as each generation passes the contribution of any parent’s genes is halved and it is pooled with those of many other parents. It does not take long to reach negligible proportions. Genes may be immortal, but the unique collection of genes which is any one parent crum- bles away (Dawkins, 1976). Rather, what parents do, and how they prepare the next

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generation in their cultures, can live on, intact, long after their genes dissolve in the common pool.

AFFILIATION AND ADDRESS

Marc H. Bornstein, Child and Family Research, Eunice Kennedy ShriverNational Institute of Child Health and Human Development, Suite 8030, 6705 Rockledge Drive, Bethesda MD 20892-7971, USA. E-mail: Marc_H_Bornstein@nih.gov.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Research supported by the Intramural Research Program of the NIH, NICHD. I thank P. Horn and C. Padilla.

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READING.pdf

Factors influencing parenting in early childhood: a prospective longitudinal study focusing on changecch_1037 198..207

A. Waylen* and S. Stewart-Brown†

*Department of Oral and Dental Science, Bristol Dental School, University of Bristol, Bristol, and †Health Sciences Research Institute, Warwick Medical School, University of Warwick, Coventry, UK

Accepted for publication 7 August 2009

Keywords ALSPAC, causal factors, longitudinal analysis, parent–child relationship

Correspondence: Andrea Waylen PhD, Department of Oral and Dental Science, Bristol Dental School, Lower Maudlin Street, Bristol BS1 2LY, UK E-mail: andrea.waylen@bristol.ac.uk

Abstract Background Parenting influences child outcomes but does not occur in a vacuum. It is influenced

by socio-economic resources, parental health, and child characteristics. Our aim was to investigate

the relative importance of these influences by exploring the relationship between changing

parental health and socio-economic circumstances and changes in parenting.

Methods Data collected from the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children were used to

develop an eight-item parenting measure at 8 and 33 months. The measure covered warmth,

support, rejection, and control and proved valid and reliable. Regression analysis examined changes

in financial circumstance, housing tenure, marital status, social support, maternal health and

depression, and their influence on parenting score. The final model controlled for maternal age,

education, and baseline depression.

Results Most mothers reported warm, supportive parenting at both times. Maternal depression was

the only variable for which both positive and negative change was associated with changes in

parenting score. Less depression was associated with better parenting scores and more depression

with worse parenting scores. Improvements in social support and maternal general health were both

associated with improved parenting scores, but for neither of these variables was deterioration asso-

ciated with deterioration in parenting scores.Worsening financial circumstances predicted deteriora-

tion in parenting score, but improvements were not predictive of improvements in parenting.

Conclusions Programmes aiming to improve parental health and social support are likely to return

greater dividends with regard to improving parenting than programmes that aim to reduce family

poverty.

Be creative – how would you entice parents or parents to be to come?

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