wk 5 final

Annotated Bibliography

Shauna Deville

ECE 405

Instructor Lara

October 14, 2013

Phyllis Bronstein, JoAnn Clauson, Miriam Frankel Stoll and Craig L. Abrams. Parenting Behavior and Children's Social, Psychological, and Academic Adjustment in Diverse Family Structures. Family Relations, 1993

The study by The National Council of Family Relations got conducted to measure up the difference in parenting and the children social, psychological and even the scholarly acclimatization across varied family structures. The family structure that got reviewed included two married biological parents, single parents, divorced, never married mothers, step parents, and remarried couples. The contents of the research revealed that the parents who remained strong in marriages remained more positive in handling their parental responsibilities as compared to families with different configurations. This was similar case for both adoptive and the biological parents. Additionally, children in these families showed positive adaptation to the academic and social matters. The research indicated that, there was greater problem to children adjusting from remarried couples. Actually, the children from these families showed that remarrying brought more problems in parenting than staying divorced. Significant variation got observed as well relating to the child’s gender. This was irrespective of the family structure that the child came from.

Considering the divorced, the research showed that younger children were more affected than their older counterparts were. However, the structural transitions elevated the stress level that the child experienced. The children who moved to step families responded negatively. The research went further to find out the individual and interpersonal factors that affected the child adjustments. Parenting behavior, family conflict and child gender were among the factors that the National Council of Family Relations concentrated with. The study showed that custodian parent’s performed better in parenting than the single parents after divorce. However, the case is opposite for the divorced custodians. The family conflict after divorce also affected the rate of child’s response to academic, psychological and social matters. The gender of the child in accordance to the parents’ divorce remained inconsistent. In some cases, girls got more affected by divorced parents than the boys. However, studies showed that the opposite got noted as well. This showed that the effect was on both sides of the gender.

The article from the National Council of family conflict is quite relevant to my chosen theme. This is because, the article explains on different family structures and how they affect the development of children. Additionally, it tackles on different structures bringing into limelight the structures that have not been into the public knowledge such as the divorced custodians. From the article, I learnt that, all students could never perform equally. This is not because of poor understanding and brain development but other factors such as family structure. It now becomes very easy to understand why some children perform poorly in class and why they do not relate positively with their peers.

The scope of the article is well covered. The writers of the research scrutinized all family structures, leaving insignificant number of structures that have not been tackled. However, the researcher seemed to have concentrated more on the divorced than the other structures. One would quickly conclude that only the divorce issue affects children social, academic and psychological adjustments. Additionally, the article is authentic since a body that deals with family matters has written it. The researchers are very conversant with the topic they handled. The article has really changed my perspective on family structures. The reason behind this is that the perception that I had was that, custodians never make good parents.