Child Development

Socioeconomic Status
Socioeconomic status (SES) is a reliable predictor
of parenting and child adjustment that is closely tied
to parental employment. It is a complex variable
based on income and education, along with other ‘‘so-
cial address’’ indicators, that determines many of the
structural components of children’s daily lives such as
neighborhood, school district, extracurricular activi-
ties, health care, and nutrition. A number of studies
have confirmed that there are SES differences in par-
enting practices and beliefs. Lower SES parents tend
to be more authoritarian in their overall parenting
style, with more controlling, restrictive, and disap-
proving parent-child interaction patterns. Parents’
use of control strategies may be the result of danger-
ous living conditions.

Higher SES mothers tend to be more verbal when
interacting with their children. Researchers are far
from understanding why SES is such a reliable indica-
tor of parenting factors. Current efforts are focused
on developing more detailed information on how
specific components related to SES—such as neigh-
borhood, job quality, and family structure—affect
parenting, and examining risk and resiliency models
within this framework.

Individual Differences
Individual parents have unique levels of personal
resources stemming from cumulative effects of up-
bringing, education, employment, and mental
health, for instance. Therefore, parents bring them-
selves to the parenting equation—including their own
developmental stage. The lifespan developmental
model emerged in the 1970s and is built on the prem-
ise that human development is a lifelong process. Par-
ents, therefore, are at a specific point in their own
growth as they face their child’s continually changing
needs. For instance, mothers may be negotiating
their own new identity as ‘‘homemaker’’ or ‘‘career
woman’’ as they make decisions about bedtimes, child
care, or nutrition. Similarly, marriages evolve over
time. Marital happiness and stability is a good predic-
tor of parenting quality whether or not parents fight
in front of children. Marital discord can be draining
emotionally and financially taxing, and may present
many unique complications in between. These factors
in the socioemotional lives of parents represent very
real barometers of what parents have to give to child
rearing.

In a similar vein, children bring to the careful
dance of child rearing their own individual selves
complete with desires, habits, and temperament.
Temperament is the biological preparedness infants
bring into the world that predisposes them to deal
with social, cognitive, and perceptual challenges in
particular ways. Children’s responses to such chal-

lenges play a significant role in adaptation to their en-

vironment. During the 1990s there was increasing

recognition that children’s individual differences in a

variety of behaviors shape the way parents respond to

children. For instance, infants with difficult tempera-

ment are thought to elicit more arousal and distress

from caregivers than their less difficult counterparts.

Temperamental differences are thought to be modifi-

able depending on parental personality traits, among

other environmental factors.

Parental Education

Finally, behavioral scientists have made efforts to

determine whether parenting is modifiable through

parental education. Many different programs for par-

ent education exist, with varying success rates in the

short and long term. The success of a program can be

measured according to changed parenting or im-

provement in child adjustment. In general, more

training has been shown to lead to better outcomes.

Parent education programs commonly focus on posi-

tive forms of discipline, information about children’s

developmental stages, activities to enhance children’s

cognitive skills, and the importance of warmth com-

bined with consistent rules. Longitudinal data from

‘‘welfare to work’’ studies indicate that parental edu-

cation programs need to include a minimum of bi-

weekly home visits and last over two years to be

effective in terms of changed parental behavior. Such

programs are prohibitively expensive. Thus, a high-

quality parent education program can change the

parenting of poorly educated, young, poor mothers,

but these improvements are not necessarily related to

better cognitive and social development for children.

This may be because parenting is just one of the chal-

lenges disadvantaged families face. For instance, bet-

ter parenting may not be able to completely eclipse

environmental threats, such as poverty or domestic vi-

olence.

See also: FATHERS; GAY- AND LESBIAN-HEADED

FAMILIES; PARENT-CHILD RELATIONSHIPS;

SINGLE-PARENT FAMILIES

Bibliography

Baumrind, Diana. ‘‘The Development of Instrumental Compe-

tence through Socialization.’’ In Anne D. Pick ed., Minnesota

Symposium on Child Psychology. Minneapolis: University of Min-

nesota Press, 1973.

Eccles, Jacquelynne S., Allan Wigfield, and Ulrich Schiefele. ‘‘Moti-

vation to Succeed.’’ In William Damon and Nancy Eisenberg

eds., Handbook of Child Psychology: Social, Emotional, and Person-

ality Development. New York: Wiley, 1998.

NICHD Early Child Care Search Network. ‘‘The Effects of Infant

Child Care on Infant-Mother Attachment Security: Results of

the NICHD Study of Early Child Care.’’ Child Development 68

(1997):860–879.

NICHD Early Child Care Search Network. ‘‘The Relationship of

Child Care to Cognitive and Language Development.’’

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