Children's classroom behavior: The unique contribution of family organization

Sixty-three 2-parent families participated in a study examining whether family organization-cohesion, parental leadership, and strong family subsystems-is related to teachers' perceptions of children's classroom behavior in Ist grade. Independent observers assessed whole-family organization and the quality of the interaction process in marital and parent-child dyads from videotapes of mothers, fathers, and children working together on a structured (difficult puzzle) and unstructured (building a model) task. Results indicate that adaptive family organization during the difficult puzzle task makes a significant, unique contribution to the prediction of children's externalizing behavior, over and above the quality of marital interaction and parenting style. No significant relationship was found between adaptive family organization in either task and teachers' perceptions of children's internalizing behavior.