Children's Influence on Family Dynamics: The Neglected Side of Family Relationships

Children's Influence on Family Dynamics: The Neglected Side of Family Relationships. Ann C. Crouter & Alan Booth (Eds.). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum. 2003. 269 pp. ISBN 0-8058-4271-3. $59.95. Many years of diligent study have informed our understanding of child development in the context of the family. Through this work, robust and consistent findings have shown that parents are the key in predicting child developmental outcomes. What has been given less attention, both in research and in popular literature, is the possibility that children are capable of influencing their parents. In a provocative volume, Ann Crouter and Alan Booth, in Children's Influence on Family Dynamics: The Neglected Side of Family Relationships, bring to bear work from some of the leading researchers in the field of child development to explore this intriguing question. This edited volume is presented in four sections. Each section is dedicated to a particular age group or research question relating to how children are substantially influential in evoking behaviors, thoughts, and/or emotions from their parents that differentially affect the child's development. Using a unique and dialectic format, the editors present seminal papers at the beginning of each section, followed by responses to those particular papers. The first section of the book is dedicated to an in-depth discussion of behavioral genetic research and its relation to environmental research. The authors provide the reader with a thorough discussion about the work in behavior genetics and the role that genetics have in explaining how children influence various family interactions. David Reiss suggests that our old way of partitioning variance to explain genetic and environmental effects is an ineffective way to understand family relationships. The authors pose questions about how genes manifest themselves over the course of development, discuss the importance of abandoning the "Equal Environment Assumption," and present potential adoption and intervention designs. In the second section of the book, temperament becomes the focal point of dialogue. Susan Crockenberg and Esther Leerkes acknowledge that 20 years of research relating to child and family interactions includes assessing the effects of negative infant emotionality on maternal caregiving behavior. The authors in this portion of the book bring into question the constructs that we currently use to describe and assess specific behaviors of both infants and caregivers. For example, Cynthia Stifter calls our attention to our definitions of "difficult temperament" and "parenting sensitivity" (p. 79). In addition to questioning familiar constructs, Stifter critiques current methodologies used to study "transactive processes. " James McHale, Kathryn Kavanaugh, and Julia Berkman similarly argue that as researchers, we do not acknowledge the nature of infant signaling and, in light of that, we cannot accurately estimate maternal sensitivity. "So, who is a sensitive parent? " (p. 95.) Further, how do different caregiving adults respond to and ascribe meaning to one infant providing repeated signaling effort? The section is concluded with Pamela Cole discussing how the use of transactional models can be used to map child effects on parents, but is strong in her message that "caregivers can and will play the most crucial role in the path from child effects to child effectiveness" (p. 117). Unfortunately, her argument does not follow with the spirit of the discussion but instead reinforces the consistently powerful belief that regardless of how children come into the world, it is the parent's job to redirect development gone awry. The third section of the book offers what is perhaps the most provocative discussion in the volume: The authors broach the question of how parents monitoring their adolescents can have impact on reducing delinquency. In an incredibly promising study, Margaret Kerr and Hakan Stattin provide evidence that parents who reduce their monitoring efforts of their teenagers who exhibit delinquent behaviors are not causing their child's delinquent behavior but instead are reacting to it. …