Mothers' and fathers' negative responsibility attributions and perceptions of children's problem behavior

Parents' negative responsibility attributions about their child's misbehavior are related to a perception that the child has more behavior problems. This study used a dyadic framework to explore how mothers' and fathers' attributions relate to their own perceptions and to their partner's perceptions of the child's externalizing problems. Participants included 102 couples interviewed when children were 7 years old. Results confirmed that mothers reported more externalizing behavior problems in their children than did fathers, and fathers of boys reported more child behavior problems than fathers of girls. Dyadic analyses suggested that parents' negative responsibility attributions of the child's behavior were associated with greater perceptions of child externalizing problems on behalf of parents and their partners.     

Cutting Motherhood in Two: Some Suspicions Concerning Surrogacy

Surrogate motherhood—at least if carefully structured to protect the interests of the women involved—seems defensible along standard liberal lines which place great stress on free agreements as moral bedrocks. But feminist theories have tended to be suspicious about the importance assigned to this notion by mainstream ethics, and in this paper, we develop implications of those suspicions for surrogacy. We argue that the practice is inconsistent with duties parents owe to children and that it compromises the freedom of surrogates to perform their share of those duties. Standard liberal perspectives tend to be insensitive to such considerations; we propose a view which takes more seriously the moral importance of the causal relationship between parents and children, and which therefore illuminates rather than obscures the stake that women and children have in surrogacy.