Russian parenting styles and family processes: Linkages with subtypes of victimization and aggression.

Abstract

During 1995, we gathered extensive parenting, marital, family interaction, and child behavioral data from ethnic Russian families residing in Voronezh, Russia. We first provide a brief overview of the social and historical context in which this investigation occurred. To begin, we explore whether parenting styles and patterns of family-marital interaction can be identified in prior writings about Russian family life. This is followed by a synthesis of the Western literature describing subtypes of children's aggression and victimization in the peer group as related to parenting styles and patterns of marital and family interaction. We then describe the measurement of the parenting, marital, and family interaction constructs, as well as different forms of aggression, victimization, and responses to provocation in our Russian data set. We highlight child social cognitive and emotional mechanisms that may account for linkages between parenting-family processes and children's aggression and victimization. Subjects for the study were parents (207 mothers and 167 fathers) and their preschool-age children (207 children out of a potential 255 eligible children; ages 3.6 to 6.6 years). A series of 2 (sex) X 2 (high-low parenting or family-marital variables) multivariate analyses of variance was used to investigate the individual and interactive contributions of gender as well as parenting, family, and marital variables to preschoolers' subtypes of aggression and victimization. The concluding section centers on our findings regarding Russian parenting-family process linkages with different forms of children's aggression and victimization in the peer group. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2013 APA, all rights reserved)