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The objective of the present study was to examine parent-child interactions with school-aged children in the context of the parents' marital relationship. Sixty families with a school-aged child served as subjects. Mother-child and father-child teaching interactions were videotaped, from which frequency counts of efficacious teaching behaviors were obtained for each parent-child teaching interaction. Parents completed a self-report measure of marital problems. A dyad score of marital problems was formed by adding the husbands' and wives' scores. A two-level variable of marital problems was then derived by performing a median split on the marital problem dyad scores. Normative comparisons suggested that the couples whose scores fell below the median were characterized as nondistressed and the couples whose scores fell above the median were characterized as slightly discontented with their marital relationship. Few differences in teaching styles were detected between mothers and fathers in the nondistressed group. Mothers in the slightly discontented group used more questions, positive feedback, informational feedback, and verbal task management and intruded less often into their children's learning efforts than did the fathers in this group. Fathers with increased reports of marital problems used less positive feedback and were more intrusive; mothers in this group appeared to compensate for a less than satisfactory marriage by being more involved in teaching their children. In turn, children of slightly discontented mothers were more actively responsive to their teaching behaviors than were children of nondistressed mothers.Just as researchers realized, a decade and a half ago, the limitations of unidirectional models of socialization, they today recognize the limitations of studying socialization in isolation from the larger family context. Researchers and clinicians alike now recognize that families comprise several subsystems (i.e., spousal or marital, parent-child, and the sibling subsystem), each of which affects and is affected by events that occur in the other subsystems (Belsky, 1981). In particular, this transactional or systems approach to socialization suggests that parenting both influences and is influenced by the child; in addition, the quality of parenting is influenced by the marital relationship.Research on the relation between marital quality and parenting that child developmentalists have undertaken has focused on families with infants or toddler-aged children. The results of these research efforts have consistently demonstrated that supportive husband-wife relationships facilitate the adaptation of mothers and fathers to their parental roles during the transition to parenthood (

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The objectives of the present study were to (a) determine the extent to which parents' teaching of children becomes less directive as a function of children's age and communicative status and (b) describe relations between parents' interaction styles and children's verbal IQ. One hundred and twenty families participated in the study. Each family included a target child, a mother, and a father. Sixty families included a communicatively handicapped target child (CH), and sixty matched families had a non communicatively handicapped target child (NCH). Target children were divided into two age groups, 4-yearolds and 5-year-olds, Each parent engaged in a book-reading task with the target child. Parents' interactions with children were classified according to levels of cognitive demand and directiveness. Results indicated that parents were generally more directive and less demanding with younger CH children than they were with older NCH children. Further, different types of parental interaction styles predicted CH and NCH children's IQ. Results are discussed in terms of Vygotsky's (1978) theory of the zone of proximal development.

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