Relative Effects of Parenting Practices on Child Development in the Context of Family Processes // Efectos relativos de las prácticas de crianza sobre el desarrollo adolescente en el contexto de los procesos familiares

Abstract

Prior family studies predominantly treated parenting behavior as corresponding to family socialization, which is in fact a multifaceted concept. In the present study, two family socialization constructs, family processes and parenting practices, were simultaneously investigated for their relative effects on adolescent children's development of internalizing and externalizing problems. Data for analysis were collected from a sample of 223 Chinese parent-child dyads (mother=179, boys= 124; child mean age= 16.7, SD= 2.16) and hierarchical linear regression models were employed to examine the relationships. Results showed that both positive family processes and effective parenting practices were predictive of less internalizing and externalizing problems in children, but the former was more pronounced than the latter. More importantly the robust predictive effects of parenting resumed after inclusion of the interaction term of parenting by family processes, which lends support to the conditionality of parenting in conflation of the moderating effect of family processes, indicating that parenting functions more potent in the home environment characteristic of low positive family processes and shows convergence in the family context of high positive family processes. Implications of the findings for educational and human development practices and future research directions are also discussed.