ABSTRACT
When plowing through the now hundreds of studies that deal with parent-child interactions, one can easily lose sight of how potent the immediate social and physical environment can be in shaping parental interactions with their children. Most studies focus at the group level on rather molar kinds of parenting processes, such as warmth, demandingness, and restrictiveness. But scenes from recent movies such as Life Is Beautiful and Schindler’s List, which depict parents struggling against the horrors of Nazi internment camps in World War II, stand in vivid contrast to the placid (somewhat disembodied) representations of parenting found in most scholarly journals. These celluloid depictions of anguished parents groping to find ways to provide safe and nurturant care under extraordinarily challenging conditions-granted the artistic license of the moviemakers-make abundantly clear just how powerful surroundings can be in affecting what parents do. Who can forget the tortured agony of Sophie Zawistoska as she faced the choice regarding the most basic of parenting acts: staying with one’s child in a time of peril!
