ortant for practicing nurses to be able to tell when psychosocial factors that characterize a mother cause a mother's assessment of her child's behavior to be inaccurate.
One of the three major concepts that guided the study reported in the article was maternal adaptive parenting. The authors defined maternal adaptive parenting as "attitudes and behaviors of the mother that support and enhance the physical and emotional development of the child" (Sachs and Hall, 1991, p. 227). Maladaptive maternal parenting was not specifically defined in the article, leaving the reader to assume that it was maternal behaviors and attitudes that were, to some extent, detrimental to the physical and emotional development of the child. The second of the three major concepts that guided the study reported in the article was the assessment of child behavior. The authors contended that most earlier studies were deficient because they relied solely on maternal assessments of child behavior. In the study reported in the article, the authors defined the assessment of child behavior as a combination of both maternal and teacher assessments of a child's behavior. The third major concept that guided the study reported in the article was child behavior. Child behavior was defined as specific measures of altruism, extraversion, intellectual competence, hyperactivity, antisocial behavior, somatic complaints, depressive symptoms, and apathy. The three concepts were linked by the authors through contentions that child behavior is an outcome of maladaptive parenting, which is, in turn and in part, a manifestation of parental perceptions of a child's behavior, regardless of the accuracy of such perceptions.
A theoretical or conceptual perspective was not clearly identified in the article. In the background material included as a part of the article introduction, however, the authors did introduce the concept of maternal depression, and then linked maternal...