Faculty Bibliography

BACKGROUND: Recently, there has been a growing awareness of the importance of the roles of fathers in understanding normative developmental processes. Increased attention has been given to the roles of fathers in the area of clinical child research and therapy. However, the presence of fathers in research and treatment in pediatric psychology has not been fully examined. OBJECTIVE: To explore the status of including fathers in both research and treatment in the area of pediatric psychology. METHOD: An extensive review of published research. RESULTS: The findings suggest that pediatric psychology research lags even farther behind clinical child research in including fathers in research designs and analyzing for maternal and paternal effects separately. There is also a concomitant lack of inclusion of fathers in family-based interventions in pediatric psychology. CONCLUSION: These patterns are discussed, with an emphasis on strategies to increase the inclusion of fathers in research and treatment of pediatric psychology issues. Future directions for researchers and clinicians are also included

In 1992, V. Phares published an article titled 'Where's Poppa?: The Relative Lack of Attention to the Role of Fathers in Child and Adolescent Psychopathology'. Since that time, there have been modest gains in the research literature on clinical child issues, but there remains a wide gap between the inclusion of mothers and fathers in clinical child and family research. To provide an update of this issue for the field of developmental psychopathology, the authors of this comment conducted an updated review and analysis of the research on fathers and developmental psychopathology. These current data were compared with the data from the Phares and Compas (1992) study. It was found that there continues to be a dearth of research on fathers and developmental psychopathology

Conducted a pilot study to test the feasibility of a prevention program for promoting parenting in families of preschoolers at high risk for behavior problems. Risk status was based on a family history of antisocial behavior and residence in a low-income, urban community. Thirty preschoolers (ages 21/2 to 5) and their parents were randomly assigned to a 1-year, home- and clinic-based intervention or to a no-intervention control condition. Despite families' multiple risk factors, high rates of attendance and satisfaction were achieved. Relative to controls, intervention parents were observed to be significantly more responsive and use more positive parenting practices. Results support the feasibility of engaging high-risk families in an intensive prevention program. The meaningful changes achieved in parenting suggest that a preventive approach is promising for families with multiple risk factors

Examined the longitudinal relation between children's self-report of witnessing community violence, family environment, and parent report of child antisocial behavior in a sample of 6- to 10-year-old urban American boys (N = 97) at familial risk for antisocial behavior. Boys reported high rates of lifetime exposure to community violence. Boys' reports of witnessing community violence were significantly positively related to changes over 15 months in child antisocial behavior, even after controlling for the possible effects of 3 aspects of parent-child interactions shown previously to be related to problematic child behavior. Furthermore, family environment, particularly the degree to which parents engaged in conflict with their sons, moderated the effect of witnessed violence on changes in antisocial behavior. In families with low conflict, higher levels of witnessed violence predicted increases in antisocial behavior over time. In contrast, in families with relatively high levels of parent-child conflict, high-witnessed violence had no additional influence on antisocial outcome. This is the first prospective longitudinal study to document an association between witnessed community violence and changes in antisocial behavior in young, urban boys at familial risk for antisocial behavior