When parents practice understanding, their relationships with their children generally improve and result in fewer conflicts as children advance from adolescence to adulthood. Providing parents with information about child development is a highly cost-effective human service. Cognitive Development When children grow up, positive parenting improves their cognitive, social and problem-solving skills. Parent-child interaction and stimulation can help them recognize problems, time management, disciplinary traits, and effective problem-solving skills.
This combination of the way children learn and the human tendency to oversimplify creates important work for parents. First, parents must be able to recognize their own weaknesses and inconsistencies before themselves. This is important for positive co-parenting. Until parents know what they are good and bad at, they can better teach their children.
Reflexive comprehension is based on empathic compassion combined with investigative research. And parents must develop a reflective understanding of their own problems in order to talk to their children about them. This and other observational studies also show that parental knowledge is associated with better parenting and the quality of the family environment, which, in turn, is associated with children's outcomes (Benasich and Brooks-Gunn, 1996; Parks and Smeriglio, 1986; Winter et al. This increased knowledge may reflect differential access to accurate information, differences in parents' trust in the information or source of information, and parents' comfort with their own abilities, among other factors.
Barbarin and Jean-Baptiste (201), for example, found that poor, African-American parents employed dialogic practices less frequently than parents who were not poor and Americans of European origin in a study that used in-home interviews and structured observations of parent-child interactions. Here at The Thoughtful Parent, my goal is to translate academic research on child development and parenting into a format that busy parents can quickly read and understand. Parents' values and goals related to parenting, both in general and for specific demographic groups, may also change from generation to generation in the United States depending on changing norms and viewpoints within social networks and cultural communities, and on parents' knowledge and access to new research and information provided by educators, healthcare providers, and others who work with families. The findings show a significant increase in effective parenting strategies and in parents' beliefs about personal controls, as well as a decrease in children's behavioral problems.
Based on a survey of parents of children from a large public school system, Goldring and Phillips (200) found that parental participation, not their children's satisfaction with school, was associated with school decision-making. The importance of parental knowledge about child development is a major theme of many efforts to support parenting. In addition, Stormshak and colleagues (2000) found that punitive parent-child interactions were associated with higher rates of disruptive behavior problems in children, and that low levels of warm participation were characteristic of parents of children who displayed opposing behavior. Another experimental study examined a 13-week population-level behavioral parenting program and discovered the effects of the intervention on mothers' knowledge of parenting and, among families at higher risk, greater participation in children's early learning and better behavior management practices.
There are few causal analyses available to test whether parental attitudes actually affect parenting practices, positive parent-child interaction, and child development. Brotman and his colleagues (200) discovered that a program designed to reduce the use of negative parenting by parents and increase their provision of stimuli for children's learning increased social competence with their peers of young African-American and Latino children who had a sibling who had been involved in the juvenile justice system. The values and traditions of cultural communities can be expressed as differences in parents' opinions regarding gender roles, in parents' goals for children, and in their attitudes related to parenting. Self-efficacy can also apply to parents' confidence in their ability to carry out specific parenting practices.
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