Parent and Child Conflict as Relationships of Power

It is paradoxical that parent and child conflict is about relations of power but no theory of power has been advanced. Recent work in developmental psychology has discussed power and agency (Kuczynski et al., 1999), drawing links between child development and the sociology of childhood. This work falls short of developing a theory of power relations among parents and children. However, theoretical constructs are available to think about parent and child conflict as relations of power and to ground such ideas in empirical data.