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 30 months 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, father-mother 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 second three years, we concentrated 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 chose to study were the rules systems laid down by the parents (cognition) the affect parents used in applying these rules (affect), and the responsiveness of the parent to the child when applying the rules (behavioral interaction). We studied children from 3 to 7 years of age. From our past studies, this appears to be the crucial time for parent teaching activities. In the next five years, we propose to examine parenting processes: One- parent, two-biological-parent, and divorced shared-custody families, all of whom have a child in the 5- to 8-year-old range, using the parenting composite and child outcome variables developed in the past six years. We have added measures of temperament and self-regulation so that we can examine child effects on the development of competence. We will be collecting three years of data, and will concentrate on analysis in the last two years.
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