ABSTRACT
Maccoby’s description of children’s and parents’ roles in the gender dynamics of families paints a broad and yet nuanced picture of how children develop in families; the paper integrates concepts and observations from a range of perspectives, giving us an even-handed account of the significance of child effects on families. In her analyses of child influence processes, Maccoby emphasized the systemic properties of parent-child dyads. She argued that the emergent properties of dyads and social groups mean that, with respect to social behavior, causality might be better understood as being located within social relationships rather than within the behaviors or attributes of a single social partner.
