Belsky (1984) conceptualized parenting and child outcomes as significantly influenced by three main factors: parental characteristics (developmental history, personality), child characteristics (temperament, activity level), and social context.

Foss (1996) builds on Belsky's model, which she believes does not adequately address economic issues, family adversity, or stressful life events. Though Belsky's model considers contextual variables, research has largely neglected the cultural context when examining the family. Foss focuses specifically on immigrant populations and outlines the contextual determinants of parenting for these groups. These include premigration, migration, and postmigration experiences, ethnicity, and the social and economic environment.

Accepting these assumptions forces professionals in the field of child development to focus on the family and social environment. Kagan (1976) felt that children who receive food, protection from excessive disease, and physical comfort do not require any specific actions from adults to develop optimally. He based this conclusion, in part, on cross-cultural studies of American, Japanese, and Guatemalan children who were found to be equally adapted to their societies, even though these societies had different conceptions of children. There is always the potential for a debilitating effect when the environment provides social toxins such as poverty, abuse, inappropriate affect, and isolation (Axelrad & Brody, 1978). These reports suggest that children respond to a stable, healthy environment and an emotional bond with adults. They do not identify specific behavior required from parents for children to develop optimally given a stable, healthy environment. See Harris (1998) for the contemporary point of view that parents are not a major determinant in how children develop.

Parents, however, often ask professionals to describe the critical behaviors in successful child rearing. In general, parenting research suggests that parental “responsiveness, ” “sensitivity, ” and/or “support” are the important variables in the development of children (Belsky et al., 1984; Rollins & Thomas, 1979; Wahler & Meginnis, 1997). In addition, parents should set some developmentally appropriate limits (Baumrind, 1971, 1975), while encouraging environmental exploration and learning and emphasizing age-appropriate independence (Beckwith, 1990; Kendler, Sham, & MacLean, 1997). Therefore, the responsive, stimulating parent of an infant, the authoritative parent of the preschooler, and the increasingly less restrictive parent of an adolescent share a common skill: the ability to recognize and respond to the developmental capacities of their children and the challenges the children face (Belsky et al., 1984).

A knowledge of child development helps parents make age-appropriate demands and grant children the degree of independence (and support) that they are ready to assume. The professional must be careful not to assume that because parents are effective with a child at one developmental level they will be at others. For example, parents may have difficulty with the clinging dependence of the toddler but thrive on the independence of the adolescent. In addition, parents who feel they are being successful at one developmental level may retain specific strategies that become inappropriate as the child moves on to another developmental level (e.g., spanking the 10-year-old may not be nearly as appropriate or effective as it was for the toddler).

Socialization between children and parents is a two-way process. For example, parents may foster intellectual competence and curiosity in the infant. If the preschooler develops into a child who asks questions of parents and teachers, receives informative answers, and, as a consequence, continues to display intellectual gains, then parents may assume that their behavior directly determined the subsequent intelligence of their child. However, complex reciprocal pathways of influence make connecting parental behavior during infancy to developmental outcome beyond the first years of life extremely difficult. . .

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