The first three years of the project concentrated upon a description of what fathers were doing within the family. Did the father have a direct effect on the child with his family management style, or was his effect indirect through the mother? During the first 2.5 years of the project, we developed composites for family management variables such as Discipline and Problem Solving from the paper and pencil tasks and observations in the home. From our data, we concluded that the father's style of family management had a direct effect on child outcome measures. However, mother-father agreement had a direct effect quite apart from the actual family management practices. We predicted poor child outcomes (problem behaviors, failures with peers, etc.) better than we predicted competency in children. In the next three years, we propose to concentrate on parent instruction variables, examining microsocial data collected from a variety of laboratory tasks as well as from home observations. The components of parent instruction we have chosen to study are the rules (affect), and the responsiveness of the parent to the child in applying theses rules (behavior interaction). We plan to study children from 3 to 7 years of age; from our past studies, this appears to be the crucial time for the parent teaching activities. We will study children in both in-tact families and in families who are in transition (divorced with joint custody and step-father families).
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