The authors developed a 10‐week school‐based therapy program using music for teenagers who demonstrated depressive symptoms. Pre‐ and posttesting indicated a significant decrease in depressive symptoms.

This study assesses whether the stresses associated with parenting a child are indirectly related to adolescent self-concept through parenting behaviors. We examined longitudinal associations among mothers' and fathers' parenting stress at age 10, children's perceptions of parenting at age 10, and adolescents' self-concept at age 14 in 120 European American families. Mothers' and fathers' parenting stress was related to children's perceptions of acceptance and psychologically controlling behavior, and psychologically controlling behavior (and lax control for fathers) was related to adolescent self-concept. We further examined which domains of parenting stress and perceived parenting behaviors were associated with adolescents' scholastic competence, social acceptance, physical appearance, and behavioral conduct. Parenting stress was related to specific parenting behaviors, which were, in turn, related to specific domains of self-concept in adolescence. Parenting stress appears to exert its effects on early adolescent self-concept indirectly through perceived parenting behavior. KeywordsParenting Stress; Parenting Behavior; Self-concept; Adolescence Although parenting is rewarding for most parents (Rogers & White, 1998), parenting a child provides ever-changing challenges as the child grows and develops. Parenting stress (also called childrearing stress) can be attributed to the behavior of the child, to parental difficulty in managing parenting tasks, or to dysfunctional interaction between child and parent (Abidin, 1995). Parenting stress is experienced across all sociodemographic groups and many contexts (Crnic & Low, 2002). In this article, we explore processes by which parenting stress plays a role in children's perceptions of parenting behaviors and how those perceived parenting behaviors then influence children's self-concept during the psychologically vulnerable period of the transition into adolescence.Self-concept (broadly defined as encompassing self-esteem and self-perceptions) is a major component of well-being that has been linked to overall life satisfaction (Diener, 1984;Myers & Diener, 1995), positive emotions (Mahon & Yarcheski, 2002), and protection against anxiety and depression (Ohannessian, Lerner, Lerner, & von Eye, 1994 NIH-PA Author ManuscriptNIH-PA Author Manuscript NIH-PA Author Manuscript concept as our outcome for two specific reasons beyond these global relations between selfconcept and well-being. First, self-concept appears to decline across late childhood and early adolescence (Baldwin & Hoffmann, 2002). Second, in adolescence, self-concept becomes increasingly differentiated (Harter, 2006), and adolescents' self-concepts in different domains are conceptually and statistically independent (Harter, 1988). Measuring only global selfconcept ignores important variations in emotional, academic, social, and behavioral domains of self-concept (see DuBois & Tevendale, 1999). The ability to assess self-concept across multiple domains is especially significant for adolescents who ar...

This study examined unique associations of multiple distal context variables (family socioeconomic status [SES], maternal employment, and paternal parenting) and proximal maternal (personality, intelligence, and knowledge; behavior, self-perceptions, and attributions) and child (age, gender, representation, language, and sociability) characteristics with maternal sensitivity and child responsiveness in 254 European American mothers and their firstborn 20-month-olds. Specific unique relations emerged in hierarchical regression analyses. Mothers who worked fewer hours per week and reported less dissonance in their husbands' didactic parenting, whose children spoke using more vocabulary, and who reported less limit setting in their parenting and attributed their parenting failures to internal causes were observed to be more sensitive in their interactions with their children. Children in higher SES families, whose mothers worked fewer hours and attributed their parenting failures to internal causes, and who themselves used more vocabulary were observed to be more responsive in their interactions with their mothers. Although potential associations are many, when considered together, unique associations with maternal sensitivity and child responsiveness are few, and some are shared whereas others are unique.

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