Toward an Integrated Science of Research on Families Workshop Report (2011) / Chapter Skim
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4 Studying Family Processes in the Clinical and Prevention Sciences
4 Studying Family Processes in the Clinical and Prevention Sciences
Pages 45-56
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From page 45... ...
This chapter focuses on clinical and prevention research addressing three problems: trauma in young children, depression in parents, and substance abuse among fathers. Different disciplines tend to approach psychopathology and its relationship to normative processes and development in different ways.
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From page 46... ...
. In the Minnesota ParentChild Project, a 25-year longitudinal study of mothers and children in poverty, 12 percent of mothers reported mild partner violence and 25 percent reported severe partner violence when children were ages 18 to 64 months (Yates et al., 2003)
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From page 47... ...
"The way the parent interprets what is happening, the way that they can soothe the child, that relationship is what affects the child." In conducting clinical work and research with trauma-exposed children, Ghosh Ippen considers primary risk factors, protective factors, change agents, and outcomes in the context of the child, the primary caregiver, and the social environment. The primary risk factor is the history of trauma, and the primary protective factor is the parent-child relationship.
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From page 48... ...
, limit setting, and the level of stress in a relationship. But there are also examples of newer, clinically based constructs, such as the caregiver as a protective shield, the ability to make meaning jointly about what has happened, or dyadic affect regulation.
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From page 49... ...
"We need to think of the needs of clinicians and families along with the needs of research. We need contextually informed scientist-practitioner assessment tools." CONDUCTING RESEARCH WITH FAMILIES WITH MENTAL HEALTH ISSUES FROM A PREVENTIVE AND RESILIENCE-BASED PERSPECTIVE A strong knowledge base exists for family-centered strength-based preventive intervention across a wide array of conditions, said William Beardslee, professor of child psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and director of the Baer Prevention Initiatives in the Department of Psychia
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From page 50... ...
Depression among parents affects employment, human capital, household production, parenting, and social capital, all of which have effects on children. And in the past year in the United States, at least 15.6 million children lived with an adult who had major depression.
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From page 51... ...
. In addition, three areas need attention across the life span: tools to cope with specific family adversities, community interventions, and policy.
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Life history theory is a broad conceptual framework borrowed from evolutionary biology that focuses on the way organisms balance or negotiate competing life functions. Life history scholars distinguish between somatic effort, which represents the energy that the organism devotes to growth and survival as an individual, and reproductive effort, which is the effort that the organism devotes to supporting the growth and survival of the species.
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From page 53... ...
However, social policy labels these actions as socially irresponsible, because they typically leave children without the skills or resources needed to support their positive development in a modern technologically oriented culture. In contrast, when children live in stable, supportive early family environments characterized by consistent, sensitive caretaking and adequate family resources, they typically develop secure attachments, a positive view of the future, and a longer term orientation to life.
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From page 54... ...
It provides a framework in which to examine both substance abuse and the family careers of men who are assumed to be at risk of behaving in a socially irresponsible way. It moves beyond looking at parenting behavior to the ways that men produce and parent children over the course of their lifetimes.
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From page 55... ...
Some researchers remain skeptical about whether men, especially socially and economically disenfranchised populations of men like substance-abusing men, can reliably provide information about their reproduction and parenting of children because of gender bias among researchers who assume mothers are better informants about family life. In addition, there has been difficulty recruiting mothers and children to serve as collateral informants, which is a standard practice in family research.
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From page 56... ...
The molecular community has begun to show that there are some links between specific genes and different dimensions of sexual and parenting behavior." No one gene will ever account for a complex behavior, he acknowledged, but multidimensional measures of genetic risk may be possible for some of the reproductive behaviors labeled socially irresponsible.
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