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classrooms or day-care centers in which the daily experiences of children are struc-tured and overseen by adults. The enormous body of literature on childhood social-ization has strongly emphasized the role of parents. This emphasis has a long and deep tradition. The idea that "as the twig is bent, so grows the tree" can be traced at least as far back as Greek and Biblical times-(probably earlier), and in most societies parents are the ones assigned primary responsibility for "bending" the chil-dren in desirable directions, by supervising, teaching, and disciplining them as they grow up. Early childhood in particular has long been thought to be a period in the life cycle when humans are especially plastic-a time when children are especially open to social influences on characteristics they will carry with them long after they have left their family of origin. Things thought to be especially vulnerable to influence in the first 5-7 years of children's lives include the language they speak, their food preferences, their religious beliefs, and certain enduring personality traits. In the twentieth century, assumptions about the importance of within-family child-hood socialization have been part of the fabric of mainstream psychological theories. From roughly the 1920s through the 1960s, behaviorist learning theories held sway, emphasizing the "blank slate" status of infants and the power of adults to teach young children, for good or ill, what they must learn. Parents, of course, were seen the most available teachers, and the ones responsible for carrying out the training of their children. The physiological drive states (hunger, fatigue) with which children are innately endowed were not ignored in the learning theories of the time, so there was some blending of nature and nurture, but the major emphasis was on the control of learning processes exercised by environmental inputs. Psychoanalytic theories of this period emphasized the importance of early in-family experience in determining subsequent inner conflicts, defense mechanisms, and internalization of values. In more recent decades, as the cognitive revolution took hold and learning theory (as it related to socialization) was reformulated as cognitive social learning theory, the active role of children as participants in their own socialization was increasingly stressed. Currently, there increasing emphasis on .the role of parents' and children's mutual perceptions and understandings about each other's dispositions and intentions determiners of their influence upon one another. But none of these theoretical shifts has greatly affected the underlying assumption that parents have a powerful impact on the characteristics children develop and the directions their lives take. The child development research literature has continued to include a wide range of studies on such things as familial risk factors (i.e. aspects of family functioning that are related to the subsequent development of externalizing or internalizing disorders in children); social conditions that affect such parenting practices as how well parents are able to monitor their children, or how warm and responsive they are; and parenting behaviors as mediators of the connection between societal risk factors (e.g. poverty or dangerous neighborhoods) and children's adjustment. In recent decades, there has been a countervailing ground swell of research and theorizing about nature-the genetic endowment of parents and children-as exerting a powerful influence on the characteristics that children develop. Of course, for many decades, elementary psychology textbooks have carned tables comparing identical
DOI link for classrooms or day-care centers in which the daily experiences of children are struc-tured and overseen by adults. The enormous body of literature on childhood social-ization has strongly emphasized the role of parents. This emphasis has a long and deep tradition. The idea that "as the twig is bent, so grows the tree" can be traced at least as far back as Greek and Biblical times-(probably earlier), and in most societies parents are the ones assigned primary responsibility for "bending" the chil-dren in desirable directions, by supervising, teaching, and disciplining them as they grow up. Early childhood in particular has long been thought to be a period in the life cycle when humans are especially plastic-a time when children are especially open to social influences on characteristics they will carry with them long after they have left their family of origin. Things thought to be especially vulnerable to influence in the first 5-7 years of children's lives include the language they speak, their food preferences, their religious beliefs, and certain enduring personality traits. In the twentieth century, assumptions about the importance of within-family child-hood socialization have been part of the fabric of mainstream psychological theories. From roughly the 1920s through the 1960s, behaviorist learning theories held sway, emphasizing the "blank slate" status of infants and the power of adults to teach young children, for good or ill, what they must learn. Parents, of course, were seen the most available teachers, and the ones responsible for carrying out the training of their children. The physiological drive states (hunger, fatigue) with which children are innately endowed were not ignored in the learning theories of the time, so there was some blending of nature and nurture, but the major emphasis was on the control of learning processes exercised by environmental inputs. Psychoanalytic theories of this period emphasized the importance of early in-family experience in determining subsequent inner conflicts, defense mechanisms, and internalization of values. In more recent decades, as the cognitive revolution took hold and learning theory (as it related to socialization) was reformulated as cognitive social learning theory, the active role of children as participants in their own socialization was increasingly stressed. Currently, there increasing emphasis on .the role of parents' and children's mutual perceptions and understandings about each other's dispositions and intentions determiners of their influence upon one another. But none of these theoretical shifts has greatly affected the underlying assumption that parents have a powerful impact on the characteristics children develop and the directions their lives take. The child development research literature has continued to include a wide range of studies on such things as familial risk factors (i.e. aspects of family functioning that are related to the subsequent development of externalizing or internalizing disorders in children); social conditions that affect such parenting practices as how well parents are able to monitor their children, or how warm and responsive they are; and parenting behaviors as mediators of the connection between societal risk factors (e.g. poverty or dangerous neighborhoods) and children's adjustment. In recent decades, there has been a countervailing ground swell of research and theorizing about nature-the genetic endowment of parents and children-as exerting a powerful influence on the characteristics that children develop. Of course, for many decades, elementary psychology textbooks have carned tables comparing identical
classrooms or day-care centers in which the daily experiences of children are struc-tured and overseen by adults. The enormous body of literature on childhood social-ization has strongly emphasized the role of parents. This emphasis has a long and deep tradition. The idea that "as the twig is bent, so grows the tree" can be traced at least as far back as Greek and Biblical times-(probably earlier), and in most societies parents are the ones assigned primary responsibility for "bending" the chil-dren in desirable directions, by supervising, teaching, and disciplining them as they grow up. Early childhood in particular has long been thought to be a period in the life cycle when humans are especially plastic-a time when children are especially open to social influences on characteristics they will carry with them long after they have left their family of origin. Things thought to be especially vulnerable to influence in the first 5-7 years of children's lives include the language they speak, their food preferences, their religious beliefs, and certain enduring personality traits. In the twentieth century, assumptions about the importance of within-family child-hood socialization have been part of the fabric of mainstream psychological theories. From roughly the 1920s through the 1960s, behaviorist learning theories held sway, emphasizing the "blank slate" status of infants and the power of adults to teach young children, for good or ill, what they must learn. Parents, of course, were seen the most available teachers, and the ones responsible for carrying out the training of their children. The physiological drive states (hunger, fatigue) with which children are innately endowed were not ignored in the learning theories of the time, so there was some blending of nature and nurture, but the major emphasis was on the control of learning processes exercised by environmental inputs. Psychoanalytic theories of this period emphasized the importance of early in-family experience in determining subsequent inner conflicts, defense mechanisms, and internalization of values. In more recent decades, as the cognitive revolution took hold and learning theory (as it related to socialization) was reformulated as cognitive social learning theory, the active role of children as participants in their own socialization was increasingly stressed. Currently, there increasing emphasis on .the role of parents' and children's mutual perceptions and understandings about each other's dispositions and intentions determiners of their influence upon one another. But none of these theoretical shifts has greatly affected the underlying assumption that parents have a powerful impact on the characteristics children develop and the directions their lives take. The child development research literature has continued to include a wide range of studies on such things as familial risk factors (i.e. aspects of family functioning that are related to the subsequent development of externalizing or internalizing disorders in children); social conditions that affect such parenting practices as how well parents are able to monitor their children, or how warm and responsive they are; and parenting behaviors as mediators of the connection between societal risk factors (e.g. poverty or dangerous neighborhoods) and children's adjustment. In recent decades, there has been a countervailing ground swell of research and theorizing about nature-the genetic endowment of parents and children-as exerting a powerful influence on the characteristics that children develop. Of course, for many decades, elementary psychology textbooks have carned tables comparing identical
ABSTRACT
PARENTING AND ITS EFFECTS ON CHILDREN 3