Introduction
Children's healthy social-emotional, cognitive, and physical development is optimized when parenting is supportive and sensitive to their individual needs. Unfortunately, difficulties in functioning and stressful circumstances for the family can lead to distress in the parenting role that has pernicious short-and long-term effects for parents and children. Chronic stress can set the stage for harsh reactive parenting and interfere with parents' abilities to respond in constructive ways to their children's ever-changing competencies and limitations.
The family functions within a set of broader contexts, including the community, culture, nation, and point in history. Parents and children venture every day outside of the home and are in contact with numerous individuals and institutions such as extended family members, schools, and places of employment. Current perspectives on parenting stress and children's development require theoretical orientations that are open to these various sources of influence, and that derive testable hypotheses regarding connections between the family and others outside of the family. These perspectives also must be attuned to the often acknowledged but rarely tested issue of the generalizability of our empirical models of parenting and child development.
The current special issue is an interesting collection of theoretical ideas and empirical work from experts in this area of psychological and developmental research. This set of papers spans a diverse array of families and approaches to conceptualizing and measuring parenting stress. The child and adult participants in these studies represent a wide range of developmental stages, and a variety of ethnic and cultural groups, socioeconomic groups, and family structures. Parenting stress is operationalized in different ways as well, based on instruments tapping chronic stressors (from severe to mild), harsh reactive parenting practices, and negative views of children. The researchers utilize theoretical orientations spanning social learning and cognitive perspectives.
The first two papers examine parenting behaviour and children's adjustment. In the paper by Crnic et al. (2005), the authors tackle questions regarding the mechanisms through which parenting stress influences young children's