About this Research Topic

Background

For many decades, parenting has been at the center of interest for practitioners and researchers interested in child social and psychological development. The body of research on children’s socialization has primarily focused on traditional parenting styles and their related practices in the spirit of Baumrind’s and others’ conceptualization of parental control and power assertion (e.g. authoritative, authoritarian, and permissive). This research has revealed many domains of children’s and adolescents’ adjustment and wellbeing that are affected by and affecting parenting quality, but intriguing new parental approaches and types have recently emerged in research literature, such as digital parenting, transcendent parenting, parental alienation, overparenting/helicopter parenting, tiger parenting, and several others, about which more is yet to be learned. Likewise, in recent years, our understanding of the role played by factors such as culture/ethnicity, environmental, and familial background in the relationship between parenting styles and children’s psychological wellbeing and mental health has greatly improved.

However, the question of whether or not there is a global, uniform optimal parenting remains controversial, as more studies are required to better understand the varying impacts of parenting on the child’s well-being within different demographic and familial contexts. This is especially true for families with special needs children (i.e., children and adolescents with developmental and psychological disabilities), where research on parenting styles, in particular, is understudied. Additionally, in the present digital era, there is growing interested in relatively new behavioral outcomes in children and adolescents, such as sedentary behaviors, including eating and nutrition habits, online behaviors, and digital activity vs. physical activity. These and other important contemporary aspects in children’s functioning and behaviors contribute to developmental mental health, and further establishing our knowledge regarding the parental role in these contexts is essential.

The goal of this research topic is to develop a better understanding in various new fields of parenting research, considering their significance in diverse contexts of parent-child relations and children’s developmental and psychological outcomes, especially new and understudied ones. We are specifically interested in papers that address the following issues (but not limited to):

• New parenting approaches and forms, such as overparenting, digital parenting, transcendent parenting, and parental alienation and their effects on children.;
• traditional and novel parenting conceptualizations and forms: How and why the new approaches extend our understanding about parenting and its association with children’s outcome variables;
• parenting approaches in diverse and underrepresented populations, such as immigrants, refugees, and LGBTQ+ families;
• parenting styles in families of children and adolescents with developmental and psychological disabilities;
• the impact of different parenting styles on children's mental health outcomes in different cultural and socio-economic contexts;
• the influence of parenting styles and practices on children’s and adolescents’ physical activity and, in turn, on various aspects of mental health;
• the impact of intergenerational trauma on parenting and parent-child relationships;
• the impostor syndrome in adolescents: how family climate, parenting style, and behaviors matter;
• the association between parenting styles and practices and adolescents’ health-related behaviors.

Keywords: family and parenting, child development, and functioning contexts, including sports and physical activity

Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.

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