Recent Developments in Our Understanding of Parenting: Bidirectional Effects, Causal Models, and the Search for Parsimony

In the last few decades, the study of parenting practices has acquired many of the characteristics of a growth industry. The situation is exemplified by the huge number of publications appearing in an array of scientific journals and the highly visible four-volume series with the title Handbook of Parenting (Bornstein, 1995). The revision of this series is a testament to the demand for scientific information about parenting.