ABSTRACT
In the first volume of Parental Belief Systems (Applegate, Burke, Burleson, Delia, & Kline, 1985), we reported an investigation of individual differences in parenting strategies grounded in a constructivist theory of communication. That investigation provided a systematic analysis of a range of parental communication behaviors that we argued had functional significance for children’s social-cognitive and communication development. We defined these variations in terms of the reflection-enhancing quality of parenting strategies. Reflection-enhancing parenting strategies were presented as realizations of a more general person-centered orientation to communication identified in our previous research as a salient dimension of individual difference in communicative development for children and adults across a variety of contexts (see reviews in Applegate, 1990; Burleson, 1989).
