Book excerpt: Parents, Children, and Adolescents presents an integrative perspective of the parent-child relationship within several contexts. You can expand your empirical and theoretical knowledge of the parent-child relationship and child development through the book’s unusually holistic, theoretical perspective that integrates three main frameworks: interactional theories on parents, children, and development; contextual (ecological) models; and behavior genetics. This insightful book’s empirical scope is broader than that of most books in that it considers the parent-child relationship throughout the life course as well as within a great variety of contexts, including interactions with sibling and peers, at school, in their neighborhoods, and with professionals. You’ll gain immeasurable knowledge about: parents’child-rearing styles and how they are affected by environmental variables the interaction between parents and children, and between their personalities behavior genetics as one of the explanatory frameworks for the role of genetics and environment negative child outcomes--emotional problems, conduct disorders, and delinquency poverty and other stressors affecting parents and children problematic-abusive, emotionally disturbed, alcoholic parents siblings and peers as contexts for the parent-child dyad the effect of the school system on the family, with a focus on minority families family structure--divorce, remarriage, and families headed by never-married mothers adolescent mothers and their own mothers the psychogenetic limitations on parental influence and cultural roadblocks to parental moral authority Complete with an Instructor’s Manual, Parents, Children, and Adolescents is ideal for advanced undergraduate and graduate classes in family studies and human development, sociology of the family, interdisciplinary developmental psychology, and social work classes that need a thorough perspective on the parent-child relationship. Professionals and scholars in these fields seeking an interdisciplinary framework as well as research suggestions and incisive critiques of traditional perspectives will also find this innovative book a valuable addition to their reading lists.