Parenting Representations: Theory, Research, and Clinical Implications(Cambridge Studies in Social and Emotional Development)

The study of parents from their own perspective not just as socializing agents of their children has been long neglected. This book summarizes and presents the new and surging literature on parenting representations namely parents' views, emotions and internal world regarding their parenting. Within this area, several prominent researchers typically coming from the attachment tradition suggested various ways of assessing parenting representations, mostly by way of semi-structured interviews. This book presents their conceptualizations and includes detailed descriptions of their interviews and their coding schemes. In addition, a review and summary of the growing number of findings in this domain and an integrated conceptualization that serves a theoretical base for future research are presented. Finally, the clinical implications of the study of parenting representations are discussed at large. Clinical notions and conceptualizations regarding parenting representations are presented and thoroughly discussed including detailed case studies that demonstrate among other things intergenerational transmission of representations.

Table of Contents:
Part I. Theoretical Perspectives: 1. Studying parenting representations as a window to parents' internal working model of caregiving Ofra Mayseless; 2. Maternal representations of relationships: assessing multiple parenting dimensions Donna Steinberg and Robert C. Pianta; 3. Social cognitive approaches to parenting representations Rudy Duane and Joan Grusec; Part II. Research Applications: 4. Communicating feelings: links between mothers' representations of their infants, parenting, and infant emotional development Katherine L. Rosenblum, Carolyn J. Dayton, and Susan McDonough; 5. Caregiving representations of mothers and their six-year-old children in light of early relational predictors Anat Scher, Judith Harel, Miri Scharf, and Liora Klein; 6. Modeling and reworking childhood experiences: involved fathers' representations of being parented and of parenting a preschool child Inge Bretherton, James David Lambert, and Barbara Golby; 7. Maternal representations of parenting in adolescence and psychosocial functioning of mothers and adolescents Ofra Mayseless and Miri Scharf; 8. Like fathers, like sons?: fathers' attitudes to childrearing as related to their perceived relationships with own parents, and their attachment concerns Ruth Sharabany, Anat Scher, and Judit Gal-Krauz; Part III. Clinical Implications: 9. Intergenerational transmission of dysregulated maternal caregiving: mothers describe their upbringing and child rearing Judith Solomon and Carol George; 10. Good investments: foster parent representations of their foster children John Ackerman and Mary Dozier; 11. Intergenerational transmission of experiences in adolescence: the challenges in parenting adolescents Miri Scharf and Shmuel Shulman; 12. Interplay of relational parent-child representations from a psychoanalytic perspective: an analysis of two mother-father-child triads Hadas Wiseman, Ruth Hashmonay and Judith Harel; 13. Why do inadequate parents do what they do? Patricia M. Crittenden.

About the Author :
Ofra Mayseless received her Ph.D. from the Psychology Department of Tel-Aviv University in Israel in 1984. She is a certified clinical psychologist and a professor of Developmental Psychology at the Faculty of Education at the University of Haifa in Israel. She has taught in UC Berkeley, and Mills College, California, as well as in University of British Columbia and Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, BC, Canada. She is a member of the American Psychological Association, the Society for Research in Child Development (SRCD), International Association for Relationship Research (IARR), International Society for the Study of Behavior Development, and the International Society for Research on Adolescence. She has written over 50 articles and chapters in the area of close relationships, in particular adolescents' and adults' attachment and caregiving manifestations.

Review :
'… a good summary of recent theoretical work in the area of parental representations and some excellent strategies for assessing representations.' Alina Morawska, University of Queensland