Parenting Behavior as the Environment Where Children Grow

This chapter describes one global parent-child relationship, the coding interactive behavior (CIB), as a window to the study of parenting behavior from infancy to adolescence. It presents the formulation of the language for an observational system of parent-child interactions, and discusses the theoretical and methodological requirements of the CIB. The chapter reviews the results of studies conducted with the system in different ages, pathological conditions, and cultural backgrounds. Associations between specific relational behaviors and specific components of the model, parent and child's physiology, representations, and social relationships, are presented to provide support for the proposed model. Longitudinal studies attesting to the stability of the parent and child's relational behavior and its prediction to stable components of the child's personality, adaptive behavior, and competence are presented using follow-up studies from infancy to adolescen.