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The Psychology of Parental Control: How Well-Meant Parenting Backfires. Wendy S. Grolnick. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. 2003. 182 pp. ISBN 0-8058-3540-7. $45.00 (cloth). ISBN 0-8052-3541-5. $23.00 (paper).
It would be difficult to overstate the contribution that Wendy Grolnick has made with her volume The Psychology of Parental Control: How Well-Meant Parenting Backfires. The value is seen at multiple levels. First, Grolnick succeeds admirably in the very difficult task of writing at a level that does justice to both the science in which her work is solidly grounded, and to her goal of communicating to audiences who are unfamiliar with the research, unequipped to interpret it, or uninterested in its detail. The occasional use of personal anecdotes warms a text rich in information, systematic in its coverage, and deliberate in its effort to clarify the importance and utility of the information. Grolnick's book can and should be read by a broad array of professional and lay audiences, not the least of which are parents and educators.
The value of the book is evident also at an academic level, indeed at multiple sublevels. The scope of the volume is impressively ambitious. Tackling the historically thorny but highly relevant area of parental control is ambitious in and of itself, but to move beyond just reviewing past work to integrating discrepant conceptualizations and findings, and then to use theory as a guide is very admirable. To then move to distinguishing types and effects of parental control, to trace their pathway to child competence (via internal motivation), and to contextualize and predict facilitative and inhibiting forms of control renders the volume much more whole than most treatments of this topic. Further, to do so by employing information from a variety of disciplines or theories (e.g., psychology, sociology, political science, evolution) communicates an important awareness of the complexity of the...