Effects of interpersonal control, perspective taking, and attributions on older mothers' and adult daughters' satisfaction with their helping relationships.

Older mother-adult daughter dyads (N = 44) were interviewed separately about 3 variables hypothesized to affect satisfaction with the help provided to mothers by their daughters: feelings of interpersonal control, perspective-taking abilities, and attributions made about the self and other dyad member during positive and negative helping interactions. The most important predictors of partner satisfaction were mothers' and daughters' ability to accurately perceive the partner's feelings about the helping relationship and their feelings of interpersonal control. The most salient predictors of mothers' and daughters' own satisfaction were the attributions they made about the partner during a negative helping situation and their feelings of interpersonal control. These findings underscore the importance of considering interpersonal psychological variables in research concerned with helping relationships in later life.

New directions in analyses of parenting contributions to children's acquisition of values.

Traditional theories of how children acquire values or standards of behavior have emphasized the importance of specific parenting techniques or styles and have acknowledged the importance of a responsive parent-child relationship, but they have failed to differentiate among forms of responsiveness, have stressed internalization of values as the desired outcome, and have limited their scope to a small set of parenting strategies or methods. This paper outlines new directions for research. It acknowledges the central importance of parents and argues for research that (1) demonstrates that parental understanding of a particular child's characteristics and situation rather than use of specific strategies or styles is the mark of effective parenting; (2) traces the differential impact of varieties of parent responsiveness; (3) assesses the conditions surrounding the fact that parents have goals other than internalization when socializing their children, and evaluates the impact of that fact; and (4) considers a wider range of parenting strategies.

Parenting cognitions and parent-child conflict: current issues and future directions.

The chapters in this volume explore a number of important issues in parenting cognitions. It is clear that they have opened up several new areas for consideration. We have suggested yet another new direction for researchers interested in cognitions and conflict having to do with the identification of automatic styles of information processing and their separation from more considered approaches. We have come some way in the study of parenting cognitions since the early 1980s; we have some distance yet to go.

Parenting goals as organizers of responses to parent-child disagreement.

Parenting goals are outcomes that parents hope to achieve during interactions with children. Three studies involving 138 men (78 fathers) and 158 women (110 mothers) examined the causes and consequences of parents' focusing on various goals during disagreements with young children. Women were more likely than men to focus on relationship-centered (RC) goals, public situations increased concern for short-term parent-centered (PC) goals, and empathy was predictive of long-term child-centered (CC) and RC goals. PC goals were associated with power assertion, CC goals with reasoning, and RC goals with warm, negotiating, and cooperative parenting behavior. Attributions of intentionality and dispositional causation were possible mediators of the link between power assertion and PC and CC goals. Instructions to focus on PC goals increased negative affective states and decreased sympathy for children, whereas instructions to focus on RC goals had the opposite effects.

Social cognition in parents: inferential and affective reactions to children of three age levels.

The present research proposes and tests an attributional model of parent cognition. Derived from correspondent inference theory, the model emphasizes that parents assess children's behavior primarily by determining whether that behavior reflects children's intentions and dispositions or, instead, constraints on children's control of behavior from situational pressures or developmental limitations in knowledge and ability. In 2 studies, support was obtained for 4 predictions. First, findings show that parents' assessments of children's behavior are closely tied to the developmental level of the child. As children developed, parents thought children's behavior was increasingly caused by personality dispositions and was increasingly intentional, under the child's control, and, for misconduct, understood to be wrong. Second, parents' affective reactions to misconduct were related to their assessments of its cause and, third, became increasingly negative as children developed. Positive affect, in contrast, was unrelated to attributions for children's positive behavior. Fourth, parents' assessments of children's behavior were affected by the behavior's desirability. Parents thought children's altruism was more intentional, dispositional, and under the child's control than children's misconduct. Implications for how parents assess and react to children's behavior are discussed.