The Toronto Lesbian Family Study.

Twenty-seven lesbian mothers completed standardized tools chosen to assess current functioning, followed by a video-taped interview. Verbal children were also interviewed. Questions involved perceptions of the mothers' and children's experiences of being homosexual or being raised by homosexual parents, knowledge and fantasies about the donor/father, feelings regarding the role of fathers, parents' experiences of being fathered, legal issues, and development.

Discourse deficits associated with psychiatric disorders and with language impairments in children.

The purpose of the current study was to examine whether types of discourse deficits were associated differentially with psychiatric disorders (PD) and with language impairments (LI) in children. Discourse analyses examining the occurrence of different types of discourse deficits in language structure, information structure, and flow of information were performed on the spoken narratives of 111 children aged 7 to 12 years who comprised 4 groups: (1) psychiatrically referred children with LI (PD + LI), (2) psychiatrically referred children with normally developing language (PD), (3) nonreferred children with language impairments (LI), and (4) nonreferred children with normally developing language (controls). Discourse deficits in language and information structure characterized children with LI, whereas disruptions in the flow of discourse characterized children with PD.

Mediators of the risk for problem behavior in children with language learning disabilities.

A developmental-organizational perspective was employed to explore underlying risk for problem behavior in children with language learning disabilities. The independent and relative influences of social discourse and social skills on problem behavior were examined in 50 children with language learning disabilities (LLD) and 50 control children (children without LLD) aged 8 to 12 years. Hierarchical regression analyses revealed that when examined independently, both impaired social discourse skill and poor social skills accounted for the negative effect of LLD status on children's problem behavior.

Parents' sense of "entitlement" in adoptive and nonadoptive families.

The literature suggests that problems with developing a sense of entitlement are unique to adoptive families, but this assumption has not been examined empirically. In this study, a questionnaire was constructed to define operationally those characteristics associated with the construct of entitlement, and was administered to adoptive and nonadoptive families with children averaging 11.5 years in age who presented either for mental health service or were recruited as a comparison-control sample.

Transpersonal processes: a bridge between object relations and attachment theory in normal and psychopathological development.

This paper has three aims: (a) to present the further development of the concept of transpersonal processes and the bimodal theory of relational cognition; (b) to show how the bimodal concept illuminates developmental theory and facilitates the move from object relations theory toward a relational systems model; and (c) to show how the attachment paradigm and the notions of internal working models (Bowlby, 1973) and self-reflective capacity (Fonagy, 1991) are both congruent and synergistic with the transpersonal and bimodal concepts.