The Cambridge Handbook of Environment in Human Development: Rural versus Urban Environments

This chapter presents a brief historical background to how the parenting environment has been understood and outlines some of the most recent knowledge that contemporary attachment theory and research has elucidated. The optimism in relation to the influence of relational environments gave way to a nihilistic attitude as findings from behavior genetic studies increasingly implicated genetic transmission and deemphasized the importance of gross measures of parenting environments. Twin and adoption studies repeatedly demonstrated that most individual difference attributes, including normal personality and various psychological disorders were best understood as genetically determined. The chapter describes the behavioral and cognitive aspects of parenting that appear to mediate the link between the parent's internal working model of attachment and that of the child. It also discusses features of the parenting environment that are relevant in the investigation of early attachment and development: parental psychopathology and the parental couple relationship.