Examining variations along different parenting dimensions.

Despite significant progress in understanding parenting and its effects for children’s development, there are ongoing debates about how best to conceptualize and measure it. For decades, parenting was characterized in terms of global, consistent, and stable parenting styles. However, studies examining variations along different parenting dimensions now predominate, due to concerns about whether styles accurately capture contextual variations and have the same meaning in different groups. These concerns also have led to new, more granular and ‘domain-specific’ models that are more flexible and situational. These issues are discussed below, along with recommendations for future directions in studying parenting.

 Research on parenting is moving towards ever-greater specificity. This has led to a more refined understanding of parenting, particularly regarding different forms of control and their links with adjustment. Research has upended the common wisdom about the importance of parental monitoring for healthy adolescent development and has led to greater emphasis on child-driven processes such as adolescent disclosure. There has been increased emphasis on how the effects of parenting on children’s development are mediated or moderated by different beliefs and on the different meanings behaviors have in different cultural contexts. And although not elaborated here, several new forms of parenting, such as helicopter parenting have been described. Despite these advances, greater precision is needed in linking parenting dimensions or domains with specific child outcomes. In addition, research should focus more on developmental competencies and positive outcomes, not just maladjustment. Research also should consider how different social contexts interact (e.g., the influence of parents versus peers). Furthermore, research on parenting has been limited by its heavy reliance on questionnaires. Although parenting becomes more difficult to observe in naturalistic settings as children grow older, surveys should be supplemented by observations of family interactions in the lab and at home. Research on parenting also often relies on parent reports, especially of young children, or adolescents’ (but not parents’) reports, as teens are seen as acting on their perceptions of parenting. Although studies employing multiple reporters indicate that agreement between different family members is modest at best, new research shows that discrepancies between parents’ and children’s ratings are meaningful and deserving of study, particularly with new statistical methods designed to overcome problems associated with using difference scores. Additionally, studying how parenting differs by children’s birth order, gender, and personality facilitates our understanding of child-driven effects of parenting and challenge researchers to go beyond one-child-per-family research. Finally, research on parenting styles, dimensions, and beliefs has successfully grappled with contextual variations due to culture, race/ethnicity, SES, and neighborhood conditions. Other important social and societal trends require further investigation. Migration and immigration are on the rise around the world, and political conflict and war have led to huge numbers of refugees, many of whom are children. These situations pose enormous challenges for parenting and must be addressed in future research.

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