Children Worldwide Discover That Life Is a Mom-and-Pop Operation

He is gone, torn from her life by cancer when she was 15 years old. Seven years later, Connelly Stokes-Prindle still finds herself longing for her father’s advice.

Would he like her boyfriend? What would he say about her decision to take a break from college?

“I wonder every day what he’d think of my life now,” she says.

The strength of the bond, even beyond death, startles her a bit, as does the approval she still seeks from her mother, who lives 800 miles away.

But that tug--that craving for a parent’s approval, even an absent one--is universal.

Child and family experts see it in their research. Teachers deal with its effects every day in their classrooms. Therapists work through it with their patients, often well into adulthood.

It’s that lingering pull that gets to Stokes-Prindle. At age 22, she is independent and, by her own estimation, “a grown-up.”

She has a steady income and has worked a few jobs--from substitute teacher to temporary jobs coordinator--since leaving her religion studies at nearby Earlham College. She owns an aging but trusty Honda Civic. She pays her bills and shares the rent on a weathered, clapboard house, tucked away in a small college and farming town, roughly midway between Indianapolis and Columbus, Ohio.

And still, when it comes to her mother, “It’s impossible to make a choice and not worry about whether she’ll approve or not.”

As maddening as that can be, experts say that, even in adulthood, the bond between a child and parent reaches to the core of who we are; it molds our sense of self and, at its best, gives us a place to belong.

Experts also point to countless studies that show quality child-rearing--developmental psychologist Peter Scales calls it a combination of “warmth, firmness and democracy”--is closely related to everything from school readiness to better mental health.

“No other sources of socialization come close to parents in the breadth and depth of their potential effects on children, both positive and negative,” says Scales, who has compiled results from scores of studies in his work as a senior fellow at the Search Institute, a Minneapolis-based youth research center.

Indeed, many call the relationship with a parent or parent figure--grandparents, stepparents or any adult who steps in as the main caregiver--the most important relationship in a child’s life.

“What seems to be important is having someone there for you, someone who is just for you, 100%,” says James Garbarino, a professor of human development at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y.

For Stokes-Prindle, those someones were the two people who combined lives and last names to create hers.

Geoffrey Stokes, her father, was a gregarious man with a bushy beard who wrote for the Village Voice and the Boston Globe, among other publications. He died in 1995, about a year after being diagnosed with esophageal cancer. Her mother, Janice Prindle, is a quiet woman and a writer who teaches high school and lives in Woodstock, Vt., where the family moved when Stokes-Prindle was 7.

The imprint each left on their eldest of two daughters is obvious.

It can be seen in the almond-shaped, brown eyes that are like her mother’s and the dry wit she shared with her father. It’s also plain that she comes from a literary family: Stacks of books tell of the “addiction for the printed word” that her parents instilled in her.

“It really does help paint a picture of who I am and where I came from,” she says. “Who my parents were shaped who I am to such an extent that it’s hard to separate who I would’ve been without them.”

Many other young people agree with those thoughts, whether the relationships with their parents is good or bad.

“If they didn’t care about how I was doing,” 16-year-old Chito Trinidad of Chicago says about his parents, “I wouldn’t probably care if I succeeded in life.”

Millie Thomas, 21, is a senior at the University of Texas. She says she has “had friends whose parents have disowned them because of people they date or decisions they make in their lives. It’s very sad, and it just seems like both the parent and the child suffer.”

Psychologist John Mayer says problems with Mom and Dad almost always eventually surface in therapy sessions with the many troubled teens who pass through the doors of his Chicago office.

“For well over 90%, parents are the main issue,” Mayer says. “Did the parents cause it? Not necessarily. But either way, they can help them get out of it. They are my agents of change.”

When children do well, parents often get the credit--even from their children.

But when something goes wrong, parents frequently are the first to be blamed and, increasingly, are being made to take responsibility for their children’s actions.

In more extreme cases, including the 1999 Columbine High School massacre in Littleton, Colo., parents have settled million-dollar lawsuits aimed at holding them accountable for their children’s actions.

But while it might be easy to point fingers, experts say we shouldn’t.

“You look at some of these cases and think, ‘But for the grace of God go I,’ ” says Robert Billingham, an associate professor of human development and family studies at Indiana University.

Prindle still worries about the time she wasn’t able to spend with her two daughters after her husband died. They were still in school--and Cecily, her youngest, was only 11. But Prindle had no choice but to return to work full time to support them.

Then her own father fell ill with Alzheimer’s disease.

“At a time when my children were most needy I was less available--physically and emotionally stressed more than they had ever known me to be--and I know this deepened their feelings of loss, and mine,” Prindle says. “I still feel terrible about this.”

Garbarino says the feeling is often much the same for parents of a child who commits a heinous crime, despite their best efforts to get help for that son or daughter.

The professor traveled from Cornell to Colorado to interview the parents of teen Dylan Klebold, one of the Columbine shooters, and found the experience “very humbling.”

To further complicate matters, experts also say it’s not always as easy as simply looking at how a child is being reared to predict how he or she will fare in life.

“Some kids seem remarkably resilient,” says Nadine Kaslow, a professor and chief psychologist in the department of psychiatry at Emory University and Grady Hospital in Atlanta. “And then there are families where the kid got good parenting and things don’t turn out so well.”

There are ways to strengthen the parent-child bond.

Garbarino says children and teens are more likely to open up in a “you-can-tell-me-anything” relationship.

As a teenager, Stokes-Prindle says she didn’t always want to share things with her mother, whom she often saw as the disciplinarian of the family. Then her father died. “I started to see my mom as an adult, as a woman, and not just my mom,” says Stokes-Prindle.