Maternal mental illness and mother-child relations

The notion that parenting is a skill has led to detailed analyses of parenting strategies that differentiate between competent and ineffective parents. They have confirmed that the outcomes of parenting interchanges are understandable in terms of opérantconditioning on both parent and child. Inadvertent conditioning accounts for around half the variance for significant child misbehaviour (Patterson et al, 1989). Parental mistakes that lead to children misbehaving may increase the likelihood of them receiving further inappropriate parenting, resulting in a 'vicious circle'. This may produce