Elizabeth T. Gershoff - Böcker

In the last half century, developmental scientists have become increasingly interested in studying contexts beyond the home environment that contribute to children's growth and development, including physical contexts such as schools and neighborhoods, as well as social contexts such as poverty. During this same period, a number of social trends have significantly impacted children's daily lives, including shifts in gender roles and expectations, the emergence of an early care and education system, and the proliferation of media technology.Societal Contexts of Child Development provides comprehensive literature reviews for six broad contextual influences on children's development that have emerged as key areas of inquiry in contemporary society - gender, child care, culture and ethnicity, poverty, schools and neighborhoods, and media. In the spirit of applied developmental science, this book considers these six contextual domains in a series of two linked chapters written by experts in the interdisciplinary field of developmental science. The first chapter in each section is organized as a review of basic research relevant to a particular context, including a discussion of prominent theoretical and methodological issues. The second chapter in each section then addresses the same context from an applied research perspective, examining and documenting how research has been, can be, or should be used to enhance the everyday lives and developmental outcomes of children and their families through interventions and/or social policies. The book concludes with a chapter specifically dedicated to making connections between research and practice and an epilogue that situates the book's chapters within the field's study of contexts. Societal Contexts of Child Development will appeal to a broad audience of scholars, students, practitioners, and policymakers from the disciplines of psychology, sociology, economics, human development, and public policy.

These two special issues of Applied Developmental Science include eight major studies of the impacts of the September 11th, 2001, terrorist attacks on children, youth, and their parents. Issue 1 includes a report of the impact of September 11th on New York City youth in comparison with that of everyday violence, as well as three studies which demonstrate the impact of the attacks on the metal health and coping strategies of adolescents throughout the country, despite being physically distant from the event. Issue 2 includes a study of separation anxiety in school age children in New York City following the attacks, the results from two national surveys of parents' roles in helping children respond to or process the attacks, and a study of the impact of such a "distant trauma" on rural youth.

Adolescence is often thought of as a period during which parent–child interactions can be relatively stressed and conflictual. There are individual differences in this regard, however, with only a modest percent of youth experiencing extremely conflictual relationships with their parents. Relatively little empirical research, however, addresses individual differences in the quality of parent–adolescent interactions concerning potentially conflictual issues. The research reported in this monograph examined dispositional and parenting predictors of the quality of parents’ and their adolescent children’s emotional displays and positive and negative verbalizations when dealing with conflictual issues. Of particular interest were patterns of continuity and discontinuity in the factors related to conflicts. A multimethod, multireporter (mother, teacher, and sometimes adolescent reports) longitudinal approach(over 4 years) was used to assess adolescents’ dispositional characteristics (control/regulation, resiliency, and negative emotionality), youths’ externalizing problems, and parenting variables (warmth, positive expressivity, discussion of emotion, positive and negative family expressivity). Parentadolescent conflicts appear to be influenced by both child characteristics and quality of prior and concurrent parenting, and child effects may be more evident than parent effects in this pattern of relations.

This brief examines the U.S. foster care system and seeks to explain why the foster care system functions as it does and how it can be improved to serve the best interest of children.

This Brief reviews the past, present, and future use of school corporal punishment in the United States, a practice that remains legal in 19 states as it is constitutionally permitted according to the U.S. Supreme Court.