Parenting, Stressful Environments and

Aida B. Balsano & Sophie Naudeau

The focus of this entry is on parenting in socially impoverished settings that hold diverse psychosocial stressors for parents, pose challenges to the parent-child relationship, and act as risk factors in children's healthy development. A developmental systems approach to understanding human behavior and development in general, and to parenting more specifically, considers multiple levels of organization that comprise individuals' lives, as well as the integrative functions of these levels and the bidirectional interactions that exist between them. These multiple levels of organization represent each individual's ecology (e.g., parents, peer groups, and culture), provide micro- and macro-processes of support for the individual, and have the ability to change independently with time (Bronfenbrenner, 1999; Lerner, 2002). The interactions that occur within different levels of one's ecology and between these levels and the individual reflect embeddedness of the individual in his or her context. In regard to parenting, the very presence of the ...

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