Anthony brings up an interesting and relevant point: In essence, to assess long-term effects of parent-initiated behaviors in children, there must be an examination of genetic influences as well as parental patterning behaviors that influence long-term behaviors. Another consideration is that of the adopted child and I mention this because I was adopted at the age of three days.  I have observed, in my own behavior, influences from both my biological parents (genetics) and my experiences being raised by parents quite dissimilar to my biological parents (nurture/patterning).

Excellent research focus - as this will provide a more specific insight into what factors and variance in terms of how a factor comes to assist/influence - and its saliency within lifespan development.

If you are interested in long-term effects rather than correlates, you would need to use a genetically-sensitive design.   What appear to be parent-initiated behaviors can often turn out to be a reflection of the child's genetic makeup. 

Anthony brings up an interesting and relevant point: In essence, to assess long-term effects of parent-initiated behaviors in children, there must be an examination of genetic influences as well as parental patterning behaviors that influence long-term behaviors. Another consideration is that of the adopted child and I mention this because I was adopted at the age of three days.  I have observed, in my own behavior, influences from both my biological parents (genetics) and my experiences being raised by parents quite dissimilar to my biological parents (nurture/patterning).

Alfred Adler considered it very important.  Parent education, the influence of birth order, life style play significant role in individual's personality design. parental patterning behavior is very influential factor and  my work experience with young adults and own life experience  strongly advocate the long term effects of parent- initiated behaviors as  chances of repetition of  patterns are very high.

Thanks to all for your replies. Anthony, are you aware of studies that have attempted to parse out relational from genetic influences, which of course are important to consider in terms of both the youth and adult as potential confounders? I have had in mind to pursue such a study with the twin data set from Add Health study with respect to mentoring relationships for youth, but have not done so -- if anyone has relevant expertise for such analyses and is interested in pursuing a collaboration, please let me know.

David, happy to see your topic. I'd like to follow your work for professional and personal reasons as well. If you'd like to include it in your study, the levels of the Social-Profile.com may be a good measure for the adults, adolescents and children. Very interesting. MaryD

Thanks very much Mary. It is wonderful to learn about your social profile framework and assessment tools! They look very interesting and I'm sure would add richness to assessments of interpersonal functioning at the individual level as well as activity characteristics at the organizational level. I will circulate to those in my professional network. One question: are there any published articles I could read along the lines of either validation studies or simply investigations using the tool? Related to this, I'd appreciate if it you could briefly note what types of psychometric information re: reliability and validity are reported in the manual. Thanks again.

OOOOH be so careful here.  Remember that only a fraction of "mental health" have anything close to biological or genetic roots.  Even the early twin studies that were thought to predict behavior and that were highly correlated with parental mental health and behaviors were found to have lost their validity because there are so many environmental correlates that one could not predict the other.  This was after the identical twins were tested when they had been raised apart.  Then if I recall some of the studies, the results found the correlations were little better than chance.  So what may have been the predictor was that certain parental temperament or attitudes led to certain specific parenting practices and the most direct route to determination of child outcome was from behaviors and environment that the child is submerged in.  Don't forget too, though that there may be a sensitive or multiple sensitive periods of development in which these things could have a stronger or more direct effect.  Makes you think that you just have to look at periods of development (social, cognitive, moral etc) using longitudinal analysis and comparisons of children raised in a variety of family structures.  Oh my lord, I can take the least complicated research question and manage to end up in a career long laboratory :)  Good for getting grants though :)

"Remember that only a fraction of "mental health" have anything close to biological or genetic roots.  Even the early twin studies that were thought to predict behavior and that were highly correlated with parental mental health and behaviors were found to have lost their validity because there are so many environmental correlates that one could not predict the other.  This was after the identical twins were tested when they had been raised apart."

This is a total misrepresentation of the views of mainstream behavior geneticists and twin researchers, which are adequately summarized on the Wikipedia entries I have looked at.  You need to cite up-to-date articles in peer-reviewed journals from those working in the field to back up your assertions, since Google enquirers will be directed here.

"Anthony, are you aware of studies that have attempted to parse out relational from genetic influences, which of course are important to consider in terms of both the youth and adult as potential confounders?"

Not specifically, but any twin researcher should be able to help.   There are lots of relevant articles in the journal Twin Research and Human Genetics.

I don't think it is a question of treating the genes as confounders, they are at the core of the issue.   For example, ADHD has a strong genetic component, and aggressive and hyperactive children are liable to elicit punitive responses from their parents.

David,

did you look into attachment theory and research? Maybe it could work as a theoretical framework, with empirical roots, for your very interesting study. Several longitudinal studies and meta-analyses have examined parent-child relationships and outcomes in adulthood. See for instance:

Bakermans-Kranenburg, M. J., & van IJzendoorn, M. H. (2009). The first 10,000 adult attachment interviews: Distributions of adult attachment representations in clinical and non-clinical groups. Attachment & Human Development, 11(3), 223-263. doi:10.1080/14616730902814762

See also:

Pinquart, M., Feußner, C., & Ahnert, L. (2013). Meta-analytic evidence for stability in attachments from infancy to early adulthood. Attachment & Human Development, 15(2), 189-218.

With attachment theory or any other theory/ies - can we expect a level of causal variances in predicting behavior or development or put another way a composite factors need to be compiled with statistical logarithm to locate factors and their role in terms of significance and saliency from infancy to adulthood 

I think so, Dr J-F. There are numerous longitudinal analyses in attachment theory, precisely for the theoretical nature of its concepts/composite factors. Such concepts lend themselves to longitudinal analyses in order to allow causal inferences. However, I'm only a user of this theory, not a producer of data. I believe other experts in this field could give more detailed responses to your important point.

 "Such concepts lend themselves to longitudinal analyses in order to allow causal inferences"

A cross-lagged longitudinal study should help with the temporal ordering of the action of variables, but ultimate causation will only be revealed if all the relevant variables have been specified and measured, in particular genetic ones.

Hi, if you want to consider long-term retrospective effects focusing on fathers and divorce you might want to take a look at the last 10 - 15 years of my work.