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Typologies of Family Functioning and Children’s Adjustment During the Early School Years
Author(s) -
SturgeApple Melissa L.,
Davies Patrick T.,
Cummings E. Mark
Publication year - 2010
Publication title -
child development
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 3.103
H-Index - 257
eISSN - 1467-8624
pISSN - 0009-3920
DOI - 10.1111/j.1467-8624.2010.01471.x
Subject(s) - psychology , developmental psychology , context (archaeology) , observational study , child development , longitudinal study , medicine , paleontology , statistics , mathematics , pathology , biology
Guided by family systems theory, the present study sought to identify patterns of family functioning from observational assessments of interparental, parent–child, and triadic contexts. In addition, it charted the implications for patterns of family functioning for children’s developmental trajectories of adjustment in the school context across the early school years. Two‐hundred thirty‐four kindergarten children (129 girls and 105 boys; mean age = 6.0 years, SD = 0.50 at Wave 1) and their parents participated in this multimethod, 3‐year longitudinal investigation. As expected, latent class analyses extracted 3 primary typologies of functioning including: (a) cohesive, (b) enmeshed, and (c) disengaged families. Furthermore, family patterns were differentially associated with children’s maladaptive adjustment trajectories in the school context. The findings highlight the developmental utility of incorporating pattern‐based approaches to family functioning.