According to Jay Belsky’s process of parenting model, parenting is determined by characteristics of the parent, child and family social context. Parental personality and parental psychological functioning are important factors in the parental domain. In the child’s domain, a difficult temperament is important. In the social context domain, parents’ work habits, sources of parental social support and marital relationship quality are important. 

Positive parenting refers to dimensions of parenting such as warmth, sensitivity, limit setting, appropriate scaffolding and contingency-based reinforcement. Negative parenting refers to behaviours that are inconsistent, over-reactive, controlling and harsh. Negative parenting has been linked to negative child outcomes (e.g. lower academic achievement) while positive parenting has been linked to adaptive child outcomes. Associations between parenting and child outcomes are stronger in early childhood. Adolescence may also be a critical period.

Fathers have taken up a larger parenting role over the recent years. Research

Evolution refers to the process of change in gene frequencies within populations over many generations. The major principle of evolution is reproductive fitness, which refers to the likelihood that an individual will produce offspring or that that individual’s offspring will produce offspring. Evolution provides an explanation for how a mechanism developed but also why it developed. Previously adaptive mechanisms may not be adaptive anymore in modern society.

Evolutionary developmental psychology refers to a field which looks at development of humans from an evolutionary perspective. It is useful to look at which cognitive operations underlie adaptive behaviour. Psychological mechanisms (e.g. cognitive psychology) may be the missing link between evolution and behaviour.

It is possible that domain-specific mechanisms designed by natural selection to deal with specific aspects of the physical or social environment (e.g. face recognition) evolved. However, evolution has also influenced domain-general mechanisms (e.g. executive

QUASI-EXPERIMENTS
A quasi-experiment differs from a true experiment in that the researchers do not have full experimental control. In quasi-experiments, researchers might not be able to randomly assign participants to one level or the other. They are assigned by other things (e.g: teachers, political regulations or nature).

A non-equivalent control group design is a quasi-experiment in which there is a treatment group and a control group, but the participants have not been randomly assigned. A non-equivalent control group pretest/posttest design is a quasi-experiment in which participants are tested before and after the experiment, but are not randomly assigned to groups. An interrupted time-series design is a quasi-experiment that measures participants repeatedly on a dependent variable. A non-equivalent control group interrupted time-series design is a quasi-experiment in which the independent variable was studied as a repeated-measures variable and an independent groups variable.

There are several