About Parenting.
Perhaps most basically, the refinement we have suggested reduces the ambiguity in the conclusions drawn about the effects of parental control . For example, on the basis of their assessment of parental control as the extent to which key decisions were made by children themselves versus their parents , Fletcher et al. concluded that ‘‘ parental control and monitoring are . . . effective deterrents against adolescent misbehavior ’’. One might take away the incorrect message that parental control in general, including forms characterized by pressure, intrusion, and dominance, is good for children , but these investigators did not examine such forms of control. The use of the term structure , rather than control, would clearly convey the nature of the findings without creating confusion. This is important given that, as we noted earlier, some investigators have incorrectly described the body of research on parental control as yielding inconsistent findings. A distinction between control...