ABSTRACT
Beginning in the 1980s, researchers began to search for the origins of children’s peer competence within the family (Ladd, 2005) and embraced tenets from ecological theory, which hold that the family and the peer culture operate as interconnected contexts within larger social systems (Bronfenbrenner, 1986). As researchers refined their conceptions of the relationships that children form with parents and peers, they began to develop and investigate hypotheses about how these relationships might be linked and, specifically, how parenting processes might contribute to children’s social development.
