Parenting practices and mentally disordered adolescents

Abstract

The aim of this paper was to give an up-to-date and integrative overview of the diverse literature on parental practices and sychopathology published in the last 15 years. Half of the paper deals with parental psychopathology and its effects on parenting practices. The other half focuses on parenting issues associated with child and adolescent psychopathology. These seemingly different topics are closely related. Parents' and/or children's psychosocial problems are considerable family stressors which both affect how parents and children behave towards each other. Parenting problems as encountered by child psychiatric clinicians may be due to difficult or deviant children, or the parents' own psychological problems, or both. To estimate factors that contribute to problematic parental practices, we have to consider the challenges to parenting posed by deviant children as well as the psychological resources of the parent.