Jay Belsky: Article Analysis

Jay Belsky wrote the article that I am summarizing in 2013, at the University of California, Davis & King Abdulaziz University. It remains the case that most work still focuses on effects of environmental exposures and developmental experiences that apply equally to all children—so-called main effects of parenti7ng or poverty or being reared by a depressed mother—thus failing to consider interaction effects, which reflect the fact that whether, how, and how much these contextual conditions influence the child may depend on the child’s temperament or some other characteristic of individuality. Most students of child development probably do not presume that all children are equally susceptible to rearing (or other environmental) effects; a long history of research on interactions between parenting and temperament, or parenting-by-temperament interactions, clearly suggests otherwise. …show more content…
Commonly tested are diathesis-stress hypotheses derived from multiple-risk/transactional frameworks in which individual characteristics that make children ―vulnerable‖ to adverse experiences—placing them ―at risk‖ of developing poorly—are mainly influential when there is at the same time some contributing risk from the environmental context (Zuckerman, 1999. Research on parenting-by-temperament interactions is based on the premise that what proves effective for some individuals in fostering the development of some valued outcome—or preventing some problematic one—may simply not do so for