This single-case study describes a behavioural intervention by a Family Centre social worker with a family whose two eldest children had been registered on the Child Protection Register following an incident of over-chastisement by their mother. Working in partnership with the parents. a behavioural assessment and intervention was undertaken over a four month periood. The assessment suggested that child non-compliance was a central problem behaviour and that mother and child were caught in a trap where each negatively reinforced the other?s aversive, coercive behaviour, since these behaviours were successful in terminating the other?s unwanted or aversive behaviours. The intervention aimed to increase child compliance and reduce child defiance using a positive reinforcement programme, and to increase the mother?s child management skills using a parent training programme. The results showed that child compliance with maternal instructions increased significantly and that this was maintained at eleven month follow-up. Also, mother?s use of command negative decreased significantly; this improvement was also maintained at eleven month follow-up.

In this longitudinal study, the bidirectional relations between parenting and friends? deviance, on one hand, and early adolescent externalizing and internalizing problem behavior, on the other hand, are examined. Of the 650 adolescents (13- to 14-year-olds) who filled out the Youth Self-Report and questionnaires about their parents at two times within a 1-year interval, 141 adolescents could be paired, at both assessments, with the same best friend who also filled out the questionnaires. Stable friends were used as a control for selection effects within friendships. The results showed significant effects of adolescent externalizing and internalizing problem behavior on parenting 1 year later, but not vice versa. Friends? deviance affected adolescent externalizing but not internalizing problem behavior over time. The inclusion of friends? self-reports about their own behavior and the examination of reciprocal effects seems to be a step forward in understanding the processes among parents, peers, and early adolescent problem behavior.

On 1 June 2000 a new court order was implemented in England and Wales. The Parenting Order provided for the extension of state intervention (primarily through youth justice agencies) into family life?. We have recently completed research with regard to youth justice parenting initiatives, and during the course of our research, our interest in, and concern with, the broader question of parenting?, parental responsibility? and the parenting deficit? consolidated. This article sets out our principal concerns by locating the new statutory powers within their wider context. By tracing their historical antecedents, theoretical foundations and policy expressions we aim to critique the latest developments in state intervention. Similarly, by analysing the material circumstances of the parents who are targeted by such intervention, and reviewing the means by which children, young people and parents conceive such intervention, we argue that the new powers essentially comprise an extension of punitiveness underpinned by stigmatising and pathologising constructions of working class families.