ABSTRACT
Parental influences on children’s development have been the topic of speculation for centuries and the focus of theory and research for decades. Although efforts in this area continue to vary in the degree of sophistication, one consistent similarity has been the preoccupation with the superiority of “traditional” family styles and “traditional” parental roles. Thus, social scientists have lauded family dynamics, parental behavior, and child development in two-parent families in which mothers are full-time homemakers and care providers, while fathers are primary breadwinners with minimal direct involvement in child care. Although less often remarked, scholars and researchers have also focused largely on middle-class White families in North America—in part, perhaps, because these families are most familiar to the majority of researchers and social scientists themselves. The exclusive focus on (and evaluative preference for) families of this type has become increasingly anachronistic in the face of demographic changes that have made traditional families less and less characteristic of the environments in which most children are raised, and that have made, even in the United States, the White, affluent, educated families that are widely studied increasingly unrepresentative of the population.
