1 Psychology and human development1.12 Stages of human development
1.12.4 Family relationships and parenting practices
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Written by Resident Doctor Committee · Published
Reciprocal influence
Reciprocal influence means the child's temperament, disability and behaviour shape the care they receive, and that care in turn shapes the child.
In Patterson's coercive cycle, a parent withdraws a demand when the child protests, so the protest and the withdrawal are both reinforced and conflict escalates.
Parenting styles
Baumrind classed parenting by two dimensions: responsiveness (warmth) and demandingness (control).
Style | Responsiveness | Demandingness | Rules and discipline | Child outcome |
|---|---|---|---|---|
Authoritative | High | High but flexible | Firm limits, explained and negotiated, with attention to the child's view | Generally complies; better self-regulation, competence and adjustment |
Authoritarian | Low | High | Imposed without explanation or negotiation; obedience valued for itself; power-assertive or punitive | Compliant but less content, more withdrawn and lower in self-esteem |
Permissive (indulgent) | High | Few or no demands or limits | Occasional unpredictable harshness | Poor self-control, impulsivity, difficulty accepting limits, conflict with authority, school underachievement |
The other two styles in the grid are uninvolved, low on both dimensions and added by Maccoby and Martin, and neglectful; these go with broad developmental difficulties.
Authoritative and authoritarian parents both set firm limits, but only the authoritative parent is warm and explains them.
Systemic concepts
Systemic approaches look for recurring patterns across the family and its couple, parental and sibling subsystems.
Circular causality means each member's behaviour is both a response to and a cause of the other's, as in pursuit and withdrawal, so a reciprocal loop maintains the problem.
Circular causality replaces linear cause and effect and is the basis of circular questioning.
Family homeostasis is the system's tendency to resist change: when one member changes, a negative feedback loop cancels the change, even when the old pattern no longer suits development.
First-order change adjusts behaviour within a pattern, whereas second-order change alters the pattern itself.
Boundaries
Minuchin placed family boundaries on a continuum from diffuse to rigid.
Pole | Boundaries | Features |
|---|---|---|
Enmeshment | Diffuse | Overinvolvement; members speak for one another, privacy feels like disloyalty and moves to independence cause distress, eroding a separate identity and autonomy |
Disengagement | Rigid | Marked autonomy; the family reacts only to extreme stress |
Overprotection is excessive parental control and shielding from age-appropriate challenge, and it maintains child anxiety through a reinforcing loop of parental rescue.
Enmeshment erodes a separate identity, whereas overprotection restricts age-appropriate activity.
In treating anxiety, parents can support gradual exposure and cut back unhelpful accommodation.
Drawing a child into couple conflict
Pattern | Theory | What happens |
|---|---|---|
Triangulation | Bowen's family systems theory | A strained couple openly draws the child into their conflict as ally, informant or go-between, forming a rigid triad that eases the tension between them |
Detouring | Minuchin | The couple's submerged conflict is routed through the child, who becomes their shared focus as the bad child or the sick child |
In triangulation the conflict is open and the child takes a part in it; in detouring the conflict stays hidden behind concern about the child.
Psychosomatic family
Minuchin's psychosomatic family model of adolescent anorexia nervosa names enmeshment, overprotectiveness, rigidity, poor conflict resolution and involvement of the child in parental conflict.
The model is historical and does not show that families cause the disorder.
Family circumstances and child outcomes
Circumstance | Outcome in the child |
|---|---|
Being first-born | Higher scores on cognitive and intelligence tests than later-born siblings, the one birth-order effect large sibling studies confirm |
Family instability (repeated transitions) | Externalising problems |
Persistent or intermittent poverty | Internalising symptoms and lower cognitive and language attainment |
Parental separation or divorce | Emotional, behavioural, academic and longer-term relationship difficulties, not improved functioning |
Loss of a parent before 18 | Raised risk of adult depression |
Loss of a parent counts death or separation of six months or more, and Rutter located the harm in the inadequate care that follows.
After separation, persistent conflict, lost safe relationships, financial strain and repeated moves add to the risk.
Relationship quality, stability and safety explain more than household structure, and children can thrive in single-parent, blended, adoptive, foster and same-sex parent families.
A bereaved child's adjustment depends on the relationship lost, how well surviving carers function, and later changes in home, school or income.
Child maltreatment
Risk factors include a parental history of abuse, parental substance misuse, young child age and a hard-to-soothe infant.
A family history of schizophrenia is not a recognised risk factor.
Supportive relationships outside the parent and child, such as relatives, friends or a stable partner, protect against maltreatment.
No diagnosis or single risk factor establishes abuse, and disorganised attachment is neither inevitable after maltreatment nor proof of it.
Family life cycle
Duvall, Carter and McGoldrick described stages from forming a partnership, through children arriving, adolescence and children leaving home, to later life, each requiring old patterns to be revised.