Distinguishing between poor/dysfunctional parenting and child emotional maltreatment.

Objective: This paper was intended to distinguish between poor parenting and child emotional maltreatment (CEM), to inform child welfare and public health policymakers of the need for differentiated responses.

Methods: Scientific literature was integrated with current practice and assumptions relating to poor/dysfunctional parenting and child emotional maltreatment, with a primary focus on the parent-child relationship context (rather than abnormal parent behavior alone). Numerous factors that impinge on the distinction between these acts were considered, such as the child's age, the frequency, and severity of behavior shown by caregivers, cultural norms, and parental beliefs and goals in childrearing.

Adolescents' explanations for romantic dissolutions: a developmental perspective.

Our objective was to examine the prevalence and developmental significance of romantic break-ups in adolescence, a relatively unexplored area of study. We examined their occurrence in a sample of 910 adolescents, first noting the frequency of these events across age, gender, and romantic experience, and then analyzing the dissolution explanations provided by a subsample (N=211) who experienced a break-up within the past 6 months. Break-ups were reported by 23% of youth, especially those with extensive romantic experience.

Conflict negotiation and autonomy processes in adolescent romantic relationships: an observational study of interdependency in boyfriend and girlfriend effects.

This study examined the association between conflict negotiation and the expression of autonomy in adolescent romantic partners. Thirty-seven couples participated in a globally coded conflict interaction task. Actor-partner interdependence models (APIM) were used to quantify the extent to which boys' and girls' autonomy was linked solely to their own negotiation of the conflict or whether it was linked conjointly to their own and their partners' negotiation style.