Parenting Practices & Child Adjustment: Studying Links Across Family Diversity - Prof. anó, Apuntes de Psicología

¡Descarga Parenting Practices & Child Adjustment: Studying Links Across Family Diversity - Prof. anó y más Apuntes en PDF de Psicología solo en Docsity! Journal of Marriage and Family 64 (August 2002): 703–716 703 PAUL R. AMATO The Pennsylvania State University FRIEDA FOWLER* The University of Nebraska—Lincoln l Parenting Practices, Child Adjustment, and Family Diversity The authors used data from Waves 1 and 2 of the National Survey of Families and Households (NSFH) to test the generality of the links between parenting practices and child outcomes for chil- dren in two age groups: 5–11 and 12–18. Par- ents’ reports of support, monitoring, and harsh punishment were associated in the expected di- rection with parents’ reports of children’s adjust- ment, school grades, and behavior problems in Wave 1 and with children’s reports of self-esteem, grades, and deviance in Wave 2. With a few ex- ceptions, parenting practices did not interact with parents’ race, ethnicity, family structure, educa- tion, income, or gender in predicting child out- comes. A core of common parenting practices ap- pears to be linked with positive outcomes for children across diverse family contexts. Support, monitoring, and discipline are central di- mensions of parental behavior that are linked with children’s adjustment, development, and well-be- ing. Parental support is reflected in behaviors such as helping with everyday problems, praising chil- dren’s accomplishments, and showing affection. Department of Sociology, The Pennsylvania State Univer- sity, University Park, PA 16802 (pxa6@psu.edu). *Department of Sociology, University of Nebraska—Lin- coln, Lincoln, NE 68588-0324. Key Words: diversity, family structure, gender, parenting, race, social class. Monitoring involves supervising children’s activ- ities, keeping track of children’s school work and peer relationships, and requiring conformity to family and community norms. When children misbehave, some parents turn to coercive forms of discipline (such as spanking), whereas other parents rely on noncoercive methods (such as dis- cussing the consequences of misbehavior). A large body of research indicates that the optimal com- bination of parental behavior involves a high level of support, a high level of monitoring, and the avoidance of harsh punishment (Baumrind, 1968, 1978; Darling & Steinberg, 1993; Maccoby & Martin, 1983; Rollins & Thomas, 1979). A focus on family diversity shifts our attention to the fact that most studies in this literature have been based on samples of White, two-parent, mid- dle-class families. For this reason, it is not clear whether the dimensions of effective parenting identified in previous research are linked with pos- itive child outcomes among African Americans or Mexican Americans, single parents, parents with low levels of education, and poor parents. Fur- thermore, because most studies have focused on the parenting practices of mothers, it is not clear whether effective parenting takes the same form among fathers as it does among mothers. Similar- ly, few studies consider whether the same parent- ing practices are equally beneficial for sons and daughters. The purpose of our study is to deter- mine whether the dimensions of effective parent- ing identified in prior research apply mainly to 704 Journal of Marriage and Family children in relatively advantaged families (that is, White, two-parent, middle-class families) or whether these benefits extend to children in di- verse families as defined by race and ethnicity, family structure, and socioeconomic status. To ac- complish this goal, we rely on data from Waves 1 and 2 of the National Survey of Families and Households (NSFH). PARENTING PRACTICES AND FAMILY DIVERSITY Research consistently shows that parental support, monitoring, and (avoidance of) harsh punishment are associated with positive outcomes among chil- dren, including higher school grades, fewer be- havior problems, less substance use, better mental health, greater social competence, and more pos- itive self-concepts. Furthermore, these benefits ap- pear to extend to children of all ages, including children in preschool (Crockenberg & Litman, 1990), children in primary school (Jackson, Hen- riksen, & Foshee, 1998; Pratt, Green, MacVicar, & Bountrogianni, 1992), teenagers (Gunnoe, Hetherington, & Reiss, 1999; Jackson et al., 1998), and college-age offspring (Strage & Brandt, 1999). These studies have relied on two measurement strategies. Some studies have ex- amined associations between child outcomes and continuous measures of parental behavior, such as support, involvement, warmth, approval, control, monitoring, and harsh punishment (e.g., Amato, 1989; Gray & Steinberg, 1999; Kurdek & Fine, 1994). Other studies have adopted a categorical approach, with the most common scheme involv- ing four parenting styles: authoritative, authoritar- ian, indulgent, and neglecting (e.g., Lamborn, Mounts, Steinberg, & Dornbusch, 1991; Radzisz- ewska, Richardson, Dent, & Flay, 1996). Regard- less of whether researchers have used a dimen- sional or a categorical strategy, however, the results typically lead to similar conclusions. That is, children appear to do best when parents are warm and supportive, spend generous amounts of time with children, monitor children’s behavior, expect children to follow rules, encourage open communication, and react to misbehavior with discussion rather than harsh punishment. This body of evidence does not imply a simple unidirectional model in which parents’ behavior causes children’s behavior. Indeed, most family scholars assume that children and parents influ- ence one another in a reciprocal fashion (e.g., Am- bert, 1992; Belsky, 1990; Maccoby, 2001). For example, aggressive behavior among children may elicit harsh behavior from parents, and harsh parenting, in turn, may provoke further misbehav- ior among children (Patterson, Bank, & Stool- miller, 1990). We assume that parenting practices and positive (or negative) child behavior are best viewed as two components of a dynamic system. The assumption of reciprocal influence, however, does not undermine the conclusion that a combi- nation of strong support, a high level of monitor- ing, and the avoidance of harsh punishment rep- resents an optimal form of parenting. As noted earlier, most studies in this literature have relied on samples of White, two-parent, mid- dle-class families. This lack of attention to family diversity may be a serious limitation. According to Bronfenbrenner’s (1979) ecological theory, family processes (such as parental behavior) and contextual factors (such as parents’ social class or race) often interact in affecting children’s devel- opment. Similarly, sociological perspectives sug- gest that optimal socialization practices depend on a family’s location within the social structure (e.g., Kohn, 1977). More generally, attention to how parenting practices and child outcomes are linked in different types of families is consistent with the call for greater attention to diversity in family re- search (Demo, Allen, & Fine, 2000). How might parenting practices interact with family context in shaping offspring outcomes? We consider two po- sitions. The first position assumes that optimal parenting practices vary across family contexts, whereas the second position assumes that optimal parenting practices apply to most children, irre- spective of family context. Optimal Parenting Varies Across Family Contexts Some researchers have argued that disadvantaged children may benefit less from authoritative par- enting than from a more restrictive, tough style of parenting. For example, Baldwin, Baldwin, and Cole (1990) argued that poor parents living in dangerous neighborhoods need to exercise a high level of control over their children—a level of control that parents living in affluent neighbor- hoods would find neither necessary nor desirable. Deater-Deckard and Dodge (1997) claimed that a moderate level of physical punishment is not problematic for African American children be- cause this disciplinary style is normative in Black communities. Steinberg, Dornbusch, and Brown (1992) claimed that factors in the social environ- ments of some minority children (such as peer 707Parenting Practices TABLE 1. CONFIRMATORY FACTOR ANALYSIS BASED ON THREE LATENT VARIABLES REPRESENTING PARENTAL SUPPORT, MONITORING, AND USE OF HARSH PUNISHMENT Item Children age 5–11 Support Monitoring Harsh Punishment Children Age 12–18 Support Monitoring Harsh Punishment 1. Spend time in leisure activities 2. Work on projects or playing 3. Have private talks 4. Help with reading or homework 5. How often praise child 6. How often hug child .56 .78 .70 .66 .45 .43 — — — — — — — — — — — — .62 .79 .67 .69 .44 .54 — — — — — — — — — — — — 7. Child not allowed home alone 8. Know child’s whereabouts 9. Rules about amount of television 10. Rules about types of television pro- grams 11. How often slap or spank child 12. How often yell at child — — — — — — .30 .25 .47 .44 — — — — — — .40 .97 — — — — — — .67 .36 .48 .54 — — — — — — .76 .51 Note: Model x2 5 614.18; df 5 100; GFI 5 .95; CFI 5 .93; RMSEA 5 .04. N 5 1,693 children between the ages of 5 and 11 and 1,707 children between the ages of 12 and 18. All paths between latent variables and observed indicators are significant at p , .001. then used the resulting equation to calculate lamb- da, or the probability of not being interviewed, for all cases. Lambda was not associated significantly with the independent (parenting) variables or the dependent (child outcome) variables and using it as a control variable did not result in substantively important changes in the conclusions. We found little evidence, therefore, that attrition biased the results of our longitudinal analyses. Variables Parenting practices. We used items from the Wave 1 interviews that appeared to measure pa- rental support, monitoring, and harsh punishment. Six items served as indicators of support. The first four questions asked parents how often they spend time with their child in leisure activities away from home (picnics, movies, sports, etc.), at home working on a project or playing together, having private talks, and helping with reading or home- work (1 5 never or rarely, 6 5 almost every day). The fifth and sixth questions asked parents how often they praised or hugged their children (1 5 never, 4 5 very often). Four items served as in- dicators of parental monitoring. First, parents re- ported on times when they allowed the child to be at home alone (before school, in the afternoon af- ter school, all day when there is no school, at night, and overnight). Responses to this question ranged from 0 5 child allowed to be alone all of these times to 5 5 child not allowed to be alone during any of these times. The second item dealt with how often children were expected to tell par- ents where they are when away from home (1 5 hardly ever, 4 5 all the time). Finally, parents reported on whether they restricted the amount of television (1 5 yes, 0 5 no) or the types of tele- vision programs the child watches (1 5 yes, 0 5 no). To measure harsh discipline, we askded par- ents how often they (a) yell at their children and (b) spank or slap their children (1 5 never, 4 5 very often). To determine the factorial validity of the 12 parenting items, we conducted a confirmatory fac- tor analysis using Analysis of Moment Structures (AMOS; Arbuckle, 1997) software. Item loadings appear in Table 1. The three latent variables ap- peared to represent parental support, monitoring, and harsh punishment, respectively. The fit of the model was acceptable, as reflected in values of .97 for the Goodness-of-Fit Index (GFI), .93 for the Comparative Fit Index (CFI), and .039 for the Root Mean Square Error of Approximation (RMSEA). Furthermore, the item loadings were generally similar for children between the ages of 5 and 11 and for adolescents between the ages of 12 and 18. The one exception involved the load- ings of the monitoring items, which were lower for younger children than for adolescents. This difference may reflect the fact that parents report- ed greater variability in their monitoring of ado- lescents than of younger children. Child outcomes. As part of the NSFH1 interview, parents rated the focal child on 10 items drawn 708 Journal of Marriage and Family TABLE 2. M AND SD FOR CHILD ADJUSTMENT VARIABLES, FAMILY DIVERSITY VARIABLES, AND CONTROL VARIABLES Child Age 5–11 M SD Child Age 12–18 M SD Child well-being Adjustment (87–88) Grades (87–88) Behavior problems (87–88) Self-esteem (92–94) 1.45 4.01 .34 3.25 .27 .93 .69 .38 2.56 6.82 .75 .29 1.66 1.15 Grades (92–94) Deviance (92–94) Diversity variables Parent race–ethnicity African American 5.98 .66 .21 1.60 1.16 .19 Mexican American White Other Family structure Married biological parents .08 .65 .06 .59 .05 .72 .04 .56 Single biological parent Other Parent education Income (log base 10) Respondent is father .28 .13 12.99 4.46 .34 2.78 .44 .29 .15 12.93 4.53 .32 2.98 .43 Control variables Child is son Child age Number of siblings .49 7.83 1.21 1.97 1.04 .52 15.14 .95 1.99 1.11 Note: Standard deviations are not included for dichotomous variables. All variables are measured in 1987–1988, except for child self-esteem, grades, and deviance. For variables measured in 1987–1988, the sample size is 1,693 children between the ages of 5 and 11 and 1,707 adolescents between the ages of 12 and 18. For child self-esteem, grades, and deviance (measured in 1992–1994) the sample size is 1,331. from a larger inventory of child behavior (Ach- enbach and Edelbrock, 1981). Sample items in- cluded ‘‘loses temper easily,’’ ‘‘bullies or is cruel or mean to others,’’ ‘‘does what you ask,’’ and ‘‘gets along well with other kids.’’ Response op- tions were 1 5 not true, 2 5 sometimes true, and 3 5 often true. Items were scored so that high scores indicated negative behavior, and the mean of the 10 items served as the measure of children’s adjustment (a 5 .68). Table 2 provides descriptive statistics for this variable and for other variables in the analysis. Parents also provided information on children’s school success. For children age 5–11, parents rat- ed how well the child was doing in school (1 5 near the bottom, 5 5 one of the best students). For children age 12–18, parents reported on typ- ical school grades (1 5 mostly F’s, 9 5 mostly A’s). Finally, parents indicated whether the focal child had ever experienced one of the following behavior problems: repeated a grade, met with a teacher or principal because of behavior problems at school, was suspended or expelled from school, ran away from home, was in trouble with the po- lice, saw a doctor for an emotional or behavioral problem, and was especially difficult to raise. The sum of the number of problems reported by par- ents served as the measure of behavior problems. To assess outcomes from the child’s perspec- tive, we relied on Wave 2 interviews with focal children. The child’s self-esteem was based on four items, such as ‘‘I am a person of worth,’’ and ‘‘I am satisfied with myself.’’ Response options ranged from 1 5 strongly disagree to 4 5 strong- ly agree, and the mean response across the four items served as the measure of self-esteem (a 5 .65). Children also reported on their school grades, with responses ranging from 1 5 mostly F’s to 9 5 mostly A’s. Although it is probable that some children misrepresent their grades, Dornbusch et al. (1987) found a correlation of .76 between high-school students’ self-reported grades and official grade point averages. Finally, children reported on five deviant activities: being truant from school, having sexual intercourse, smoking cigarettes in the last month, drinking al- cohol during the last month, and using marijuana. The five items correlated positively, indicating that children who had engaged in one activity were more likely to have engaged in the other 709Parenting Practices FIGURE 1. MODEL RELATING PARENTAL SUPPORT, MONITORING, AND HARSH PUNISHMENT TO CHILDREN’S WELL-BEING activities. The sum of the activities (which could range from 0 to 5) served as the measure of de- viance. (Because the distributions for parent-re- ported behavior problems and child-reported de- viance were positively skewed, we replicated all analyses with log transformations to normalize the distributions and the results were identical to those reported later.) Family diversity variables. Data on parents’ race and ethnicity, family structure, education, income, and gender were obtained from the Wave 1 inter- view with parents. Race was coded into four cat- egories representing Whites (n 5 2,329), Blacks (n 5 680), Mexican Americans (n 5 221), and other (n 5 170). We decided not to combine Mex- ican Americans (the largest Latino group) with other Latinos, such as Cubans and Puerto Ricans, because of cultural differences between these groups. Family structure was coded into three cat- egories: households in which the child lived with two married, biological (or adoptive) parents (n 5 1,996); households in which the child lived with a single parent (n 5 969); and other family struc- tures, such as stepfamilies and unmarried cohab- iting couples with children (n 5 435). Although the single-parent category excluded single parents cohabiting with a partner, it included a variety of other family forms, such as single-mother house- holds, single-father households, children living with one never-married parent, children living with a divorced parent, children living with a wid- owed parent, and multigenerational households. The average parent had about 13 years of educa- tion. Sixty percent of parents had levels of edu- cation corresponding to a high-school diploma or less (n 5 2,056) and the remaining 40% had some education beyond high school (n 5 1,344). The average household income was about $30,000 per year in 1987–88. Twenty-three percent of respon- dents had household incomes below 150% of the poverty line (n 5 774), and the other 77 percent of respondents had household incomes above this threshold (n 5 2,626). About one third of respon- dents were fathers (n 5 1,122) and the rest were mothers (n 5 2,278). Control variables. Because they could be associ- ated with parents’ behavior as well as children’s behavior, we controlled for the focal child’s gen- der (1 5 son, 0 5 daughter), the focal child’s age, and the number of siblings living in the house- hold. The typical household had about one child in addition to the focal child, and the gender of the focal child was almost evenly split between boys and girls. RESULTS Parenting Practices and Parents’ Reports of Child Well-Being in Wave 1 We relied on AMOS software with maximum likelihood estimation for all analyses (Arbuckle, 1997). Figure 1 shows the analytic model for the analyses based on data from Wave 1. The three 712 Journal of Marriage and Family revealed that the association between harsh pun- ishment and children’s behavior problems was stronger among mothers (b 5 .23, p , .01) than among fathers (b 5 .02, ns). Finally, with respect to children’s gender, a significant overall differ- ence emerged for young children. Additional mul- tigroup analyses revealed that the association be- tween harsh punishment and behavior problems was stronger among sons (b 5 .49, p , .001) than among daughters (b 5 .28, p , .001). No other gender differences emerged from the analysis. In general, the results in Table 4 (Columns 1 and 2) provide relatively little support for the ex- istence of group differences in the associations be- tween parenting practices and children’s adjust- ment. Of the 14 comparisons, only 3 were significant. Two of these differences involved gen- der and these differences did not suggest a con- sistent pattern. Parenting Practices and Adolescents’ Self-Reports of Adjustment in Wave 2 The next stage of our analysis turned to adoles- cents’ self-reports of adjustment in 1992–1994. In general, the associations between parents’ reports of support, monitoring, and harsh punishment in 1987–1988 and adolescents’ self-reports of out- comes in 1992–1994 were comparable to those shown Table 3. Parental support predicted chil- dren’s self-esteem (b 5 .06, p , .10) and grades (b 5 .07, p , .05). Parental monitoring predicted lower levels of children’s deviance (b 5 2.17, p , .01). And parents’ use of harsh punishment pre- dicted lower self-esteem (b 5 2.05, p , .10) and grades (b 5 2.08, p , .05). These coefficients were weaker than those reported in Table 3, pre- sumably for two reasons: (a) different sources of data were used for independent (parenting) vari- ables and dependent (child adjustment) variables, and hence, common method variance could not inflate the associations, and (b) children’s behav- ior at T2 was measured 5 years after parents’ be- havior at T1. In a supplementary analysis, we add- ed parents’ ratings of children’s well-being at T1 as additional predictors in the model but respon- dents’ ratings of their parenting behavior contin- ued to have significant associations with children’s well-being at T2 comparable to those just noted. Overall, these associations—although modest— are consistent with the general model of parenting practices described earlier. The third column of Table 4 shows the results of analyses based on multigroup models for the 1992–1994 data. In no comparison were models with constrained parameters significantly different from models with unconstrained parameters. These results provide no evidence that the longi- tudinal associations between parenting practices and children’s outcomes depended on parents’ race, family structure, education, income, or gen- der. Supplementary Analysis One might argue that more is meant by social con- text than simply being Black rather than White, or being a married parent rather than a single parent. Defining an ecological niche in these broad strokes almost certainly underestimates the degree of variability within general social categories. Consequently, it may be necessary to consider the intersection of multiple dimensions of diversity (gender, race, family structure, and class) to delin- eate families that occupy distinctly different po- sitions in the social structure. A difficulty of this approach, of course, is that as the number of di- mensions used to specify groups increases, the number of cases in one’s sample decreases cor- respondingly. Nevertheless, in an attempt to capture the no- tion of context more accurately, we constructed two specific groups from the 1987–1988 data for a more rigorous comparison: White married moth- ers and Black single mothers. The sample sizes for the two groups were 509 and 145, respective- ly, among young children, and 517 and 150, re- spectively, among adolescents. Although we did not rely on income to form these groups, the mean income in the former group was about $37,000 compared with about $9,000 in the latter group. In spite of the obvious differences between these two groups, a multigroup analysis (not shown) re- vealed no significant difference in the overall pat- tern of associations between parenting variables and child outcomes among young children (x2 dif- ference 5 9.2, df 5 9, ns) or adolescents (x2 dif- ference 5 15.48, df 5 9, ns). These results indi- cate that even within these two ostensibly different groups, the general pattern of linkages between parenting practices and child outcomes was comparable. DISCUSSION The goal of this study was to see if the associa- tions between parenting practices and aspects of child functioning vary across basic dimensions of 713Parenting Practices family diversity. We considered two perspectives. The first states that the widely accepted model of effective parenting (high support, high monitor- ing, and avoidance of harsh punishment) is appli- cable in some, but not in all, family contexts. A stronger form of this first perspective holds that the model of effective parenting identified in prior research is relevant mainly to advantaged children (that is, to White, middle-class children living with both biological parents). The second per- spective, in contrast, holds that the benefits of ef- fective parenting are shared widely by children, irrespective of family context. We began by constructing measures of three dimensions of parenting based on parents’ an- swers to questions on the NSFH1 interview. Con- sistent with expectations, these items formed three factors that appeared to correspond to parental support, monitoring, and harsh punishment. Also consistent with prior research, scores on these scales (with the exception of monitoring) were as- sociated in the expected direction with parents’ reports of children’s adjustment, school grades, and behavior problems. We also examined asso- ciations between parents’ reports of parental be- havior in 1987–1988 and children’s reports of out- comes in 1992–1994 using the NSFH2. Because common method variance could not inflate these correlations, this set of analyses provided a more stringent test of the hypothesis that parenting prac- tices are linked with child outcomes. Although the latter analysis yielded associations that were mod- est in magnitude, the general pattern of results was consistent with the parenting literature: Children were doing best when parents exhibited a high level of support, monitored their children’s behav- ior, and avoided harsh punishment. Although the analysis restricted to the 1987– 88 data did not reveal evidence that parental mon- itoring was related to children’s adjustment (Table 3), parental monitoring emerged as a significant longitudinal predictor of children’s deviance in 1992–1994. That is, when parents engaged in high levels of monitoring when children were between the ages of 5 and 11, children reported less de- viance (being truant from school, having sexual intercourse, smoking cigarettes, drinking alcohol, and using marijuana) approximately 5 years later. These results suggest that early parental monitor- ing may help children to refrain from troubling and potentially dangerous behaviors during their adolescent years, perhaps because firm parental control facilitates the internalization of parental values and the capacity to engage in self-control. Having shown that the three parenting vari- ables performed in ways congruent with prior re- search, our next goal was to examine interactions between the parenting dimensions and parents’ race, ethnicity, family structure, socioeconomic status (education and income), and gender. Per- haps the most interesting finding to emerge from this analysis was a trend for parental monitoring to be related to positive adolescent functioning more strongly among single parents than married parents. The importance of monitoring among sin- gle parents presumably reflects the fact that only one parent, rather than two, is available in the household. Hence, single parents may need to be especially vigilant to protect their children from engaging in deviant behavior. Overall, however, our analysis revealed little evidence that the associations between parenting practices and child outcomes differed across groups. Moreover, we found little evidence of contextual effects even when groups as different as (a) White, married, non-poor mothers and (b) Black, single, poor mothers were compared. Our data, therefore, provide the strongest support for the second perspective described earlier, that is, that the dimensions of effective parenting can be generalized across a range of social contexts. This conclusion does not mean that optimal parental behavior is identical for every child. It is likely, for example, that parents living in dangerous neighborhoods need to exercise more caution with their children than do parents living in safe neigh- borhoods. Also, it seems plausible that well-edu- cated parents have to expend less effort to facili- tate their children’s academic success than do poorly educated parents. Nevertheless, our anal- ysis provides little support for the notion that a model of effective parenting based on support, monitoring, and the avoidance of harsh punish- ment is appropriate only for White, married par- ents in middle-class households. The search for group differences in the effects of parenting (or any other family process) may require studies that target more narrowly defined groups occupying more specialized niches in the social order than we were able to accomplish in the project de- scribed in this article. We believe that this conclusion is generally consistent with prior literature taken as a whole. Although some previous studies (contrary to the present study) report variations in the links be- tween parenting practices and child outcomes, these variations appear only for some groups, some parenting practices, and some outcomes, 714 Journal of Marriage and Family with relatively little consistency across or even within studies. For example, Deater-Deckard et al. (1996) found a significant positive association be- tween parents’ use of harsh punishment and chil- dren’s externalizing behavior for European Amer- ican children but not for African American children, at least when children’s behavior was re- ported by teachers or peers. But the association was significant and positive for European Amer- ican and African American children when chil- dren’s behavior was reported by mothers. Fur- thermore, a racial difference was apparent when the investigators focused on parents’ use of mod- erately harsh discipline but not when the investi- gators focused on parents’ use of abusive disci- pline, which was linked to elevated levels of externalizing behavior in both groups of children (Deater-Deckard & Dodge 1997). Similarly, Stein- berg et al. (1991) found that authoritative parent- ing was positively associated with school grades among White and Latino adolescents, but not among Asians or African Americans. Other anal- yses based on their data, however, revealed that the links between parenting practices and chil- dren’s externalizing and internalizing behavior did not vary with racial, social class, or family struc- ture (Steinberg, Lamborn, Darling, Mounts, & Dornbusch, 1994). Support for the hypothesis of contextual effects requires the demonstration of consistent, replicable trends across groups. Al- though a meta-analysis of this literature may clar- ify the current state of knowledge, available evi- dence suggests relatively few consistent, replicable contextual effects. In the absence of strong evidence otherwise, researchers should ac- cept the most parsimonious model consistent with the data. The study reported in this article was not with- out limitations. First, the NSFH interview was not designed to measure parenting in its full complex- ity. For this reason, we were forced to rely on a less-than-ideal pool of items to construct our mea- sures. Although a confirmatory factor analysis in- dicated that the NSFH items clustered into com- ponents that were consistent with prior literature, measurement would have been stronger with a more comprehensive battery of items. For the younger children in our study, the item loadings for monitoring were modest, which may account for the small number of significant findings for this factor. Furthermore, we were forced to omit some dimensions of parenting from consideration, such as induction (providing explanations to chil- dren), support for autonomy, and democratic con- trol (Barber, Olson, & Shagle, 1994; Furstenberg, Cook, Eccles, Edler, & Sameroff, 1999; Gray & Steinberg, 1999). Dimensions of parenting un- measured in the present study may yield stronger evidence of contextual effects than we were able to uncover. Our study also was limited with respect to the range of families that could be incorporated into the design. Even with a large sample, the number of Mexican Americans was relatively low, result- ing in a decline in statistical power to detect group differences. Moreover, there were not enough cas- es of Cuban Americans, Puerto Ricans, or Asian American families for analysis. Group differences might have emerged if a larger range of racial and ethnic groups had been available. In addition, some of our categories, such as single-parent fam- ily, were defined broadly, and the consequences of some parental behaviors might vary with fac- tors such as the presence of extended kin in the household. In summary, our results suggest that a core of parental practices benefits (or harms) children across a variety of contexts. The importance of specific parenting behaviors for child development does not appear to depend on whether parents are poorly educated or well-educated, Black or White, married or single, mothers or fathers. When par- ents spend time with children, help with home- work, talk about problems, provide encourage- ment, and show affection, children do well. When parents provide a high level of monitoring and expect their children to follow family rules, ado- lescents engage in less deviant behavior. Finally, when parents rely on hitting and yelling as fre- quent methods of responding to children’s mis- behavior, children’s well-being declines. As Demo, Allen, and Fine (2000, p. 2) pointed out, family research tends to emphasize differences in the experiences of various groups, but studying family diversity also requires that we attend to the commonalities shared by all types of families. The extent to which a common core of optimal par- enting practices appears across diverse social and cultural settings can be determined through addi- tional studies that explore large, national data sets, as well as studies that focus specifically on fam- ilies occupying particular ecological niches in the social structure. NOTE We thank Nan Crouter and David Johnson for helpful advice on an earlier draft of this article.