from Part II - Parent–Child Relations and Attachment
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 September 2025
Jay Belsky’s Determinants of Parenting: A Process Model, published in 1984 in the journal Child Development, identified three sets of factors that account for individual differences in parenting practices, including parent personality traits, child characteristics, and the broader social context. I describe the model’s novelty and its legacy in terms of reshaping research on parenting and child development. The model was novel in shifting the focus in mainstream research on child development from the consequences of parenting – the domain of socialization researchers – to the precursors of parenting and in articulating a developmental model of parenting that emphasized the role of childhood experiences on adult parenting practices. I claim that the determinants of parenting process model reshaped the literature on parenting in at least four ways: by (1) focusing attention on parenting as an outcome of development, (2) focusing attention on fathers, (3) focusing attention on social contextual factors beyond the family, and (4) inspiring research on the biological determinants of parenting.
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