Examples of Successful Proposals

Penn State National Symposium On The Family

Children's Influence On Family Dynamics: The Neglected Side Of Family Relationships

CYFC Level II Proposal Submitted by:

Alan Booth, Department of Sociology

Nan Crouter, Department of Human Development and Family Studies

Abstract

This proposal requests funds to support Penn State's annual symposium on the family. The topic for the December 6-7, 2001 symposium is "Children's Influence on Family Dynamics: The Neglected Side of Family Relationships". The conference brings together an interdisciplinary group of researchers and scholars to consider the features children bring to families that influence family relationships. Also to be explored is how these influences are translated into parental and sibling behavior that affect child development. The four lead speakers and twelve discussants are drawn from the fields of developmental, clinical, and social psychology, human development and family studies, psychiatry, behavioral genetics, demography, and sociology.

Specific Aims And Objectives

The aims of the annual symposium series are (1) to jump-start scholarly exchange on important family issues; (2) to promote scholarly excellence by recruiting talented scholars to participate and by organizing the sessions so that people from different disciplines critique the papers and bring their perspectives to bear on the topic; and, in so doing, (3) to increase Penn State's visibility in the area of family studies. We hope the symposium will attain a reputation akin to the Nebraska Symposium on Motivation or the Minnesota Symposium on Child Development. The aim of the 2001 symposium is consistent with these objectives. We will bring together lead speakers and discussants from the U.S. and Sweden to focus on the influence of infant and early childhood temperament on the development of parent-child relationships, the way adolescents shape their relationships with family members and peers, and the processes by which children affect parents' marriage and other family relationships. For each of these topics the speakers will also address the implications of these changes for child and adolescent development and the processes involved.

Background And Rationale

Any parent who has raised more than one child is likely to be keenly aware of the differences among their offspring. Although siblings raised together in the same family often differ markedly in terms of gender, temperament, abilities, interests, personality, choices of friends and activities, family specialists are been slow to acknowledge the importance of these differences. The disciplines differ in terms of how much attention they have paid to this issue. While most developmental psychologists at least recognize the importance of "child effects", family sociologists have been reluctant to embrace the notion of individual differences. The central premise of the symposium is that children bring personal qualities to their relationships with other family members that help shape family interaction and parenting practices. The mark that children's personal qualities make on families, in turn, influences children's subsequent development.

The topic of child influences on family dynamics is blossoming into an area in which there will soon be substantial amounts of family research. Knowledge is growing in part because of recent advances in behavioral genetics research which has expanded beyond estimating the relative influence of genetic and environmental factors on families to examining the ways in which the social environment influences genetic expression and the ways in which genetic factors influence the way people shape their environment. Interest is also growing in response to further developments in family systems theory which emphasize the connections between personal and social aspects of family relationships and the ways in which they are reciprocally related. The volume from this symposium may be the first book length publication on the topic in many years and would therefore make a significant contribution to contemporary research and teaching efforts.

The first topic to be addressed is the range of children's features that shape family relationships and the ways in which they alter family interaction. This will be a broad overview that emphasizes the utility of genetically-informed research designs to examine the contributions of children's personal qualities to relationship dynamics. From there, the symposium will move to a consideration of the role of child temperament and emotional regulation in the development of family relationships in infancy and early childhood. Children's temperaments pose opportunities and constraints for caregivers that are important to understand. At the same time, caregiving can moderate infant behavior and arousal. As part of this topic, research on the effectiveness of interventions with mothers and their infants will be reviewed. The third topic focuses on the way in which adolescents shape their relationships with parents, siblings, and peers. The speakers have attracted wide attention for their provocative claim that "parental monitoring", often assumed to be a set of parent behaviors, is best predicted by adolescents' willingness to disclose information to their parents. Thus, at the heart of an important parenting dynamic is a child characteristic that we need to learn more about. Finally, the concluding session addresses the way in which children affect parents' marriages, sibling dynamics, and other family relationships. The lead speaker, an illustrious developmental scholar who has emphasized the importance of gender in shaping relationships, will doubtless draw attention to differences in sons' and daughters' family experiences.

The proposed symposium is the ninth in a series of annual symposia on family issues held at Penn State. Each year, we arrive at a topic by convening a group of about 20 Penn State scholars who specialize in children and families to brainstorm about possible topics and possible speakers. We look for topics that can be fruitfully addressed by scholars from multiple disciplines, particularly topics that are not currently receiving widespread attention in other forums.

The symposium consists of four sessions held over two days. Each session includes a lead speaker and three discussants, deliberately chosen so that they have diverse, complementary perspectives. We go to considerable lengths to make sure that the lead speakers produce papers of high quality. Outlines are received in May, at which point the lead speakers and conference organizers have a conference call to discuss points of overlap, critical omissions, and integration so that the four central papers fit together well. Lead speakers produce a first draft in October and receive feedback at that time from each other and the co-organizers. The discussants receive the first draft as well as the polished draft (due in mid-November), so that they have plenty of time to develop their remarks. Everyone who pre-registers receives a copy of the lead papers in advance so that the audience is prepared to respond to the ideas in the papers at a higher level than would otherwise be possible. Final drafts of all papers, including the discussants' remarks, are due shortly after the symposium to ensure that the manuscript goes to the publisher in a timely fashion. Books based on the previous symposia have all been published, or are in the process of being published, by Lawrence Erlbaum or Greenwood Press, prominent publishers of scholarly works on child development and family issues.

Relevance To The Children, Youth, And Families Consortium

We think the symposium is very relevant to the Consortium and its activities. Specifically, three of the CYFC missions are to promote interdisciplinary activities, to foster outreach, and to support research that provides a foundation for prevention and intervention efforts. We address each mission briefly. The symposium is an interdisciplinary forum that attracts an interdisciplinary audience of typically about 200 people (from approximately 20 states and Canada; the audience for the books, of course, is much larger). Importantly, the symposium historically has attracted many faculty members, graduate students, and even undergraduates from Penn State. We believe that the symposium serves an important function of pulling together people at Penn State who share an interest in families and enhancing the intellectual climate of the University. We deliberately organize symposia so that they address basic and applied research issues and include policy and program perspectives in the hope that the symposia generate a new generation of basic and applied research of high quality. Finally, the symposium also serves an outreach function of a particular kind: Each year, the number of attendees from foundations, state agencies, and community organizations increases.

Last year's symposium, focused on cohabitation, fell squarely in the CYFC theme of "Family Change in a Changing World". This year, we have purposefully swung the pendulum in another direction, one that we think will please our more psychologically- and developmentally-oriented colleagues and students. The theme of the 2001 symposium is very much in line with two other CYFC themes, particularly, "Understanding and Promoting Cognitive, Social, Civic, and Academic Development" and, to some extent, "Preventing Health Risk and Problem Behaviors". Social development will be a thread in all of the presentations. Two of the presentations (Reiss's and Stattin and Kerr's) will focus a great deal on dynamics underlying adolescent problem behavior.

Anticipated Outcomes

The primary outcome is the symposium itself--and the growing tradition of annual family symposia at Penn State. The most difficult-to-document outcome is whether or not we have succeeded in stimulating additional research. It may take some years before we know the answer to that. We do know of five research projects (three at Penn State; two elsewhere) that emerged from earlier symposia (one on step-families and one on family-school links). While we were successful in obtaining funds from NICHD two years ago, it was not at the level we had expected; we have NICHD funding of $6,000 per year for five years. In the meantime we lost $5000 in internal funding and our costs (airfares mostly) have gone up by $2000 in the last three years which is why we have increased our CYFC request by that amount. We are continuing to work very hard to obtain a source of permanent funding through Penn State's capital campaign. We have identified a potential donor and are cultivating that potential source.

Personnel

The co-organizers of the 2000 symposium (Booth and Crouter) are listed on the title page. They represent two departments and perspectives. They are ably assisted by Kim Zimmerman, staff assistant at the Population Research Institute. Symposium participants are listed in Appendix A.

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