Commentary on Grolnick and Pomerantz, “Issues and Challenges in Studying Parental Control: Toward a New Conceptualization”

Grolnick and Pomerantz (this issue) take on the difficult challenge of rethinking how investigators might use the concept of parental control in the study of child and adolescent development. They note that previous conceptual and empirical work has employed a wide variety of definitions of parental control and argue that this broad range of approaches has created problems for the field. For example, they cite Rollins and Thomas (1979), who identified more than 15 different labels for the construct. This multiplicity of definitions, the authors suggest, has led to ambiguity in the interpretation of research findings. In particular, Grolnick and Pomerantz propose that the multiple-forms approach to defining parental control is so fraught with problems that scholars should replace it with another strategy for describing and measuring control and related constructs. They then suggest a new approach that they believe will solve the problem and also increase the theoretical value of research on these types of parenting behaviors. In this commentary, I first discuss their critique of the multiple-forms approach and then analyze their proposed solution to the conceptual difficulties they describe.