The tasks of parenting are complex and diverse. This has led to the perception of parenting as one of the most difficult roles with the least amount of preparation (McIntire, 1973; Edmister, 1977; Gordon, 1970). Perhaps it is for this reason tha t much concern is now being given to providing parents with more knowledge and skill. The state of Maine, for example, has promoted a "positive parenting" program and publishes a magazine entitled Maine Parent which offers pract ical tips on child rearing. Wheelock College in Boston, Massachusetts and Metropolitan State College in Denver, Colorado both have a Center for Parenting Studies. The latter also offers an undergraduate minor in parenting education. Types of parent group intervention vary from free-flowing, open-ended discussion groups (Auerbach, 1968; Hereford, 1963) to highly structured and systematic training programs aimed at developing specific targeted behaviors (Carkhuff, 1971). Between these two polarities ar e several popular standardized programs. These include Parent Effectiveness Training (PET) (Gordon, 1970), the Adlerian Parent Study Group (APS) (Berrett, 1975), Systematic Training for Effective Parenting (STEP) (Dinkmeyer & McKay, 1976), Parent In volvement Program (PIP) (McGuiness & Glasser, 1978), Responsive Parenting (Lerman, 1984), Active Parenting (Popkin, 1983), and many others. These interventions are primarily directed toward teaching parents specific techniques from a particular the oretical orientation which explicitly or implicitly holds itself up as the one true approach. Often the do's of one approach are the don'ts of another. Each has its own jargon.

The success of these programs is frequently based upon measurable behavioral changes such as the duration and frequency of responses, improvements in attitudes, or laudatory testimonials. The assumption of many (but not all) of these interventions is that parents are desperately reaching out for practical child reari ng techniques which will alleviate their pressing and immediate concerns. Thus, if parents are taught skills directly, then both their attitudes and behavior toward their children will undergo marked and lasting change. Sometimes eternal bliss is intimated.

There is some evidence to suggest the contrary - that many parents are less concerned with solving particular troublesome childhood behaviors and more interested in knowing about why children do what they do. They may want to be 'forewar ned' so as to be 'forearmed' (Clark-Stewart, 1978). Another consideration is that programs which focus on "correct" methods for dealing with specific child behaviors often have limited generalization or transfer value (Tavormina, 1974). The u se of parental attitudes as criteria for success in parent intervention programs has also been questioned (Chilman, 1970; Newberger, 1977). The reasons given for this is that attitudinal changes may be transient in duration and not reflect internal str uctural changes indicative of increased conceptual development. From this perspective, parents may

feel better about some things for a while but may not comprehend at a higher or deeper level. Reversion to customary ways of perceiving and beha ving would likely follow. Therefore, it is possible that many parents are not getting what they want out of parenting programs and that the success of these programs may be questioned due either to limited carryover and/or to measures which may not ass ess real and lasting changes.

Given this state of affairs, it seems reasonable that intervention aimed at cognitive restructuring may lead to problem-solving of a general nature while that geared to developing specific skills may be limited t o the ability of parents to solve only those problems identified during a given "training" program. This could be likened to having tools without the development of the mind set of "tool use". An intervention aimed at developing ins ight could also prove to be more preventive.

Grimes (1974) conducted a study in which she presented Kohlbergian moral dilemmas to parents and children together. Varied levels of moral reasoning among group members served as the basis for divers e conflict resolutions. Significant gains in cognitive-moral development were made by both the parents and the participating children. In 1981 Savage replicated Grimes' study and achieved similar encouraging results.

The study reported here was undertaken in order to enhance the conceptual awareness of parents across several dimensions which include developmental influences, subjectivity, personality, communication and trust, resolving conflict, discipline and authority, meetings needs, and le arning and evaluating parenting. These dimensions were extracted from literature on child rearing and parent education and clinical experience with parents (Newberger, 1977). By providing parents with detailed information about various aspects of child development and exposing them to parent-child conflict dilemmas, perhaps it would enable them to "unloose the old ties of old ideas and feelings and examine them...[leading the way for] new development and effectiveness" (Auerbach, 1968, p.16 ). Such an achievement would hopefully result in cognitive-developmental growth represented by the construct of Parental Awareness which is defined as
 

The four levels of Parental Awareness are:

1. Egoistic orientation : The parent understands the child as a projection of his or her own experience, and the parental role is organized around parental wants andneeds only.

2. Conventional orientation : The child is understood in terms of externally derived (tradition, culture, andauthority) definitions and explanations of children. The parental role is organized around socially-definednotions of correct practices and responsibilities.

3. Subjective-individualistic orientation : The child is viewed as a unique individual who is understood through the parent child external definitions of children. The parental role is organized around identifying and meeting the needs of this child rather than as the fulfillment of pre-determined role obligations.
4. Process or interactional orientation : The parent understands the child as a complex and changing psychological system. The parent, as well as the child grows in his role, and the parent recognizes that the relationship and the role are built not only on meeting the child's needs but also on finding ways of balancinghis or her own needs and the child's so that each can be responsibly met (Newberger, 1980, p. 50).

With improved Parental Awareness, parents and their children would perhaps be able to report improved parental behavior. Such improved parental behavior could result in improved child behavior which, in turn, could further improve parental behavior resulting in an upward spiral effect in the parent-child relationship.

Procedure

Parents and their children between the ages of 8 and 11 served as subjects (N = 52) and were randomly placed into a treatment and control group (Tables 1 & 2). There were 11 parents and their 16 children in the treatment gro up and 11 parents and their 14 children in the control group. The groups themselves had 18 persons each within them. In other words, six people in each group were not measured. Only the parents were directly involved in the intervention program. Partic ipants were voluntary and were solicited through local advertising. A flyer was developed describing the program and an orientation session was held so that the participants could be given an overview of the content, format, and goals of the program. A ll of the parents were white and, with the exception of one, were between the ages of 20 and 40. They represented a lower-middle to middle class socioeconomic level. Most members completed high school and some had college degrees. The participants were drawn from an industrialized city and its bordering suburbs approximately 30 miles north of Boston, Massachusetts.

Parents in the treatment group met weekly for two hours for a total of 12 sessions. Each meeting involved a didactic presentation of child development information which included Erikson's psychosocial stages, Piaget's cognitive-developmental stages, Kohlberg's moral cognitive-developmental stages, Gesell's normative age profiles, the role of play in child development, and disci pline from a developmental perspective. Much discussion was interspersed in order to avoid a pure lecture format. In addition, hypothetical parent-child conflict dilemmas were presented which served to stimulate the parents to offer their own actual on es for group resolution. Further, their responses to these dilemmas reflected the differences in their views of children and the parental role. Since their reasoning about their behavior and the behavior of their children reflected their respectiv e levels of Parental Awareness, the dilemmas allowed those at lower Parental Awareness levels to be exposed to new perspectives. These new perspectives theoretically would create cognitive conflict and usher in greater conceptual understanding. The par ents were given a total of five handouts representing age levels birth to 1 (Session 1), ages 2 to 3 (Sessions 2 & 3), ages 4 to 5 (Sessions 4 & 5), ages 6 to 11(Sessions 6-9), and ages 12 to 16 (Sessions 10-12).Following discussion of a particu lar age level, a parent-child conflict dilemma (Appendix A) relative to that age level was introduced in order that parents could use developmental issues and limitations as the bases for strategies rather than developing strategies arbitrarily. This is the basic rationale for combining child development information with the dilemmas.

The sessions as well as the interviews were given by the researcher who is a school psychologist with 10 years of public school experience which includes six ye ars of leading parent education groups and 12 years of part-time college teaching in the area of child development. The study was done to fulfill the requirements of a doctoral degree in human development and education.

The sessions were well attended with an average attendance rate of 11/12 sessions. Some members had perfect attendance and most missed at least one. The parent who made the greatest gain in Parental Awareness (T-5, Table 1) missed three sessions. One couple who was not in t he measured sample had sporadic attendance and finally dropped out. One treatment group interviewee (T-10) dropped out due to back surgery and one control group interviewee (C-3) dropped out because of a death in the family. There are at least two poss ible reasons for good attendance. One is that the participants found the program stimulating. The other is that they knew that the researcher was writing his dissertation on its results. In terms of the latter, the parents may have wanted to persevere so as not to undermine the researcher's study.

The Parental Awareness Measure (PAM) designed by Newberger (1977) was used to assess the level at which parents reasoned about their conceptions of the child as a person, the parent-child relations hip, and the parental role. This measure is a semi-structured reflective interview in which the parents are questioned on eight issues (dimensions) which represent tasks inherent in the parental role such as entering the child's frame of refere nce (subjectivity) and meeting the child's needs. These eight issues are scored on a 4-point scale with level 1 representing the lowest level of Parental Awareness and level 4 the highest. In scoring the protocols, the issues are assigned both full and half scores. These are then added and averaged in order to derive an overall issue score. The measure itself was based upon interviews with 51 parents across social, family, and racial backgrounds with varying family size and childrens' ages. Ten of t he interviews were rated by independent raters with a resulting Pearson correlation of .96. Three years subsequent to this, in a study of an independent sample of parents, the manual was found to discriminate among parents yielding a reliability rating of .88 between independent raters. For the present study, two independent raters scored 10 randomly selected interviews resulting in a reliability coefficient of .86. Also, a blind scoring method was employed by scoring issue segments from 10 randomly selected interviews. This was done to determine whether or not the researcher was influenced by previous interviews rated as unities. As part of this process the coded numbers were concealed as well as previously assigned issue scores. A Correlatio nal analysis of the two sets of scores resulted in a Pearson r of .85. Validity studies for the Parental Awareness Measure are in progress.

In order to assess the parents' and childrens' perceptions of improved parental behavior a modified ver sion of the Children's Report of Parental Behavior Inventory (CRPBI) designed by Schaefer (1965) was used. The original Inventory is a 260 item 3-point Likert-type scale which measures children's perceptions of parental behavior in terms of specific ob servable behaviors which represent more intermediate concepts of abstractness such as possessiveness, ignoring, and lax discipline. These, in turn, comprise the higher molar dimensions of love versus hostility and autonomy versus control. The concepts t hemselves were chosen on the basis of a conceptual model derived from psychologists' ratings of parental behavior. In developing this instrument three psychologists independently evaluated 520 specific parental behavior items for clarity of the behavio ral description, relevance of the item to the concept, applicability of the item to both father and mother, and high variance predictability. The scales were then administered to a group of white seventh-grade children (85 boys and 80 girls) in a subur ban parochial school and to a group of 81 institutionalized delinquent boys from unbroken families. The normal boys and girls ranged in age from 12 to 14 and the delinquent sample ranged in age from 12 to 18. This latter group included both black and w hite subjects and represented a somewhat lower socioeconomic group. Intelligence levels, literacy, intactness of families, and testing conditions were all controlled. Internal consistency reliabilities computed with the Kuder-Richardson Formula for all 26 items revealed scores of .84 for love, .78 for hostility, .69 for autonomy, and .66 for control. Further, the discriminative power of the scales was tested by a comparison of the differences in results between the normal boys and the delinquent boys . The Mann-Whitney test was used to test the significance of the
differences between distributions of total scores of the two groups for each scale. Of the 52 differences, 26 were significant beyond the .05 level and 14 were significant beyon d the .01 level.

Since this scale was intended for older children to rate their perceptions of parental behavior, it had some limitations for the current study. One limitation was that it only allows for the children to rate the parents and not for the parents to rate themselves. Another is that the large number of items could have an adverse affect on younger children whose fatigue thresholds are lower. Finally, the sophisticated language may confuse younger children even if the items are r ead to them.

Thus, Schaefer's (1965) original scale was not deemed suitable for children between the ages of 8 and 11 and their parents. With permission and suggestions from Schaefer, the original scale was modified. For example, the wor ding of items for both parents and children was made equivalent; the language was made more simple; and the number of items were considerably reduced to a total of 40. The four conceptual areas represented included autonomy/individuality, meeting needs , communication and trust, and discipline and authority. A deliberate attempt was made to have the behavioral measure correspond to the conceptual one provided by the Parental Awareness Measure. Each of these concepts was represented by 10 items which w ere similar for the parent and child forms. For example, under the category of discipline and authority, one item on the parent form is "When s/he does something wrong, I explain why it was wrong and what could have happened because of it" (i nductive discipline). The equivalent item on the child form reads, "Explains to me what I did wrong and why it was wrong." Under the category of meeting needs, one item on the parent form is "I forget to help my child when s/he needs ass istance on something". The child version is, "Forgets to help me when I need it." For the purpose of this study, this modified version is referred to as the Perceptions of Parental Behavior Inventory (PPBI). This scale utilizes a 3-point Likert-type scale to which the respondent can circle L (like), SL (somewhat like), and NL (not like) to a given item. Parents rated themselves while the children rated their parents. The children only rated the parent(s) who participated directly in th e program or who served as a control. The highest attainable score was 120 and the lowest was 40.

Although there are numerous validity studies attesting to the soundness of Schaefer's original scale, these cannot apply here because of the modif ications made. Therefore, the PPBI only assumes face validity. In order to assess reliability, the PPBI was administered to a randomly selected intact fifth grade class of 17 students on a test-retest basis. The reliability coefficient was .90.

Both of these measures were given to both groups and their children within the parents' homes prior and subsequent to the program and to the treatment group members and their children four months later.

The control group could not be utilized again for this purpose because during the four month interim, its members had been exposed to the program (their incentive for serving as controls).

A Course Evaluation Questionnaire consisting of open-ended questions and a 5-point Likert-ty pe scale was also administered in order to solicit personal and subjective reactions to what the parents liked most and least about the program, what could be improved, and whether or not there were any observable differences in their relationships wit h their children. It was also used to rate content, presentation, materials, level of instruction, and the length and pace of the course on a scale from 1 to 5 on 12 items.

Results

An Anal ysis of Covariance of the PAM scores (Table 3) indicate that parents participating in the treatment group significantly increased their levels of Parental Awareness in comparison to parents in the no-treatment control group, F = 5.5, P < .03. When t he parents of the treatment group were retested four months following the intervention, their scores on the PAM (Table 4) showed a significant further increase in comparison to their posttest scores, t = 2.19, p < .05.

The results of an Anal ysis of Covariance on the scores of the PPBI (Table 5) indicate that in comparison to the no-treatment control group, those parents in the treatment group significantly improved in self-perceptions of parental behavior, F = 4.13, p < .05. However, w hen retested four months after the intervention program, parents did not make any further gains in their perceptions of improved parental behavior (Table 6) even though their Parental Awareness scores continued to increase. Tables 7 and 8 indicate the subjects' raw scores on both measures before and after the intervention.

Children of the participants and of the controls did not report changes in their perceptions of their parents' behavior either following or four months subsequent to the in tervention (Tables 9 & 10).

On the rating scale part of the Course Evaluation Questionnaire the total average score was 4.76 with a range of 1 to 5 with 1 representing poor and 5 as excellent. Out of a total of 216 items all but one were 4 s and 5s. The exception was a 3 (satisfactory) on Quantity of Content Covered. Since this person also rated the course as being too short, s/he probably meant that there was slightly too much material covered for the time allotted. Seventeen respondents rated the level of instruction as average while one saw it as too simple. Fifteen of the subjects felt that the pace of the course was average while three saw it as too fast. Also, 15 parents said that the program was too short while three reported it as average. Analysis of the anecdotal part of the Questionnaire indicated that parents tended to perceive the intervention as helpful, worthwhile, and informative. Some of their comments include:
 

Discussion

These results suggest that parents increased their levels of Parental Awareness as a result of the intervention. A more important finding is that during the four month hiatus subsequent to the intervention, the participants in the treatment gro up continued to make gains in Parental Awareness. Such growth in the absence of further stimulus conditions suggests that the Parental Awareness Measure reflects an internal cognitive maturational process and not simply a feeding back of learned materia l. This is in marked contrast to studies of the results of other types of intervention which report short-lived effects upon follow-up testing. Although the parents in the intervention program significantly improved in their perceptions of their own be havior directly following the program, their lack of further gains upon follow-up testing suggests that there is not a direct or immediate expression in parental behavior of changes in Parental Awareness. However, if Parental Awareness matures and beha vior continues to change in a positive direction as measured by the Perceptions of Parental Behavior Inventory, those changes are not acknowledged by parents who have simultaneously become more self-critical. In other words, as their Parental Awareness increased, their defensiveness could have decreased. With less defensiveness there may have been a greater likelihood of self-appraisal and with it a tendency not be impressed by slight behavioral improvements in themselves.

There were no sig nificant differences in the childrens' reports of parental behavior either between the treatment and control group children or before and following intervention. One possible explanation is that the behavior of the parents of treatment and control group children did not change, at least in terms of what was listed on the measure. It is also possible that behavior change on the part of parents with increased parental awareness did occur, but was not directly perceived by their children who, between th e ages of 8 and 11, may be more likely to take notice of only marked differences in parental behavior. Children within this age group would fall into Piaget's Concrete Operations Stage which allows for more either/or and black/white perspe ctives as opposed to both/and and gray ones. If maturational growth did indeed occur on the part of the parents, such growth would be more progressive than dramatic and therefore less noticeable.

Another possibility is that Parental Awareness i s a forerunner of changes in behavior so that a longer incubation period is required to have children be cognizant of them. Thus, a four month follow-up may have been a premature one. The age level of the children may also have to be increased to 12 or 13 so that they would remain within the Formal Operations stage for the duration of a year or more interim before follow-up testing. This age level would reflect the epitome of vigilance and make them more sensitive to nuances of parental behavior change.

In conclusion, these findings lend some degree of support and hope to the hypothesis of social cognitive development in parenthood and suggest in a very preliminary way that development can be facilitated through intervention. It i s less clear whether changes in Parental Awareness are directly or immediately reflected in parental behavior or whether this linkage exists at all. It is equally unclear whether this particular intervention uniquely facilitates the development of Paren tal Awareness, or whether such developments would be fostered by other interventions as well - those which would combine cognitive insights with behavioral strategies (Meichenbaum, 1977). More intervention and assessment studies are clearly needed in or der to better understand how parental understanding and behavior can best be linked, measured, and enhanced.

It is further recommended that leaders conducting studies of parent group intervention be well grounded in child development theor y and group dynamics. Such leaders should also have pedagogical skills and facilitative interpersonal dimensions. Psychologists, school counselors, social workers, nurses, early childhood teachers, and home economics teachers are likely prospects for th is endeavor.