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This study aims to explore how working parents use personal technology to manage parenting responsibilities and to identify how technology use might help to support work–family balance.

In-depth telephone interviews with US and UK working parents with children under the age of 18 were conducted.

Findings suggest that personal technology can facilitate work and family activities and reduce work–family conflict by enabling parents to perform certain parenting duties remotely. However, parental attitudes toward technology and children’s rights to privacy influence both technology use and work and family outcomes.

By better understanding employee personal technology use, and how this use facilitates reduced conflict between work and family roles, organizations might look to creatively expand their benefits offerings to include access/discounts to personal technology platforms that support parenting activities (e.g. Uber One, Amazon Prime and DoorDash).

While substantial research has been conducted on employee use of work-enabled technology to facilitate work–life balance, less attention has been paid to how working parents are using personal forms of technology to achieve this same outcome. This exploratory study establishes certain parenting functions that are facilitated by personal technology use and identifies some parental attitudes that influence technology adoption.

Finds research shows that while parents are potentially an important source of information and support to their children on sexual issues, in practice many parents feel that they lack the skills and confidence to play a direct role in these matters. Presents findings from a pilot project undertaken by Health Promotion Wales and FPA Cymru to enhance parents’ sex education skills. Details a series of workshops which were run for groups of parents with differing needs in relation to their children’s sex education. Describes how participants took part in pre‐workshop interviews to identify their concerns and in post‐workshop interviews to assess the impact of the workshops. Presents findings from the workshop evaluations, together with some lessons learned from the project. Advises that the long‐term outcome of the project, a resource pack on sex education for parents, is now available.

The gap between management theory and practice has been much criticized. To help bridge the divide, a synthesis of empirical, theoretical and practice literature is offered, along with an application of the widely used VRIO framework, to contend that developing a focused corporate parenting approach as a core competence serves as a source of competitive advantage for diversified companies.

A synthesis of empirical, theoretical and practice literature is presented, beginning with a discussion of why and how firms diversify; the relative performance of firms that pursue related and unrelated diversification; an application of the resource-based view, core competencies and the VRIO framework; a description of focused corporate parenting as a core competency; a prescription for how diversified firms can implement a focused corporate parenting approach; and implications for research.

Developing a focused corporate parenting approach as a core competence serves as a source of competitive advantage for diversified companies.

The synthesis of empirical, theoretical and practice literature presented provides a foundation for future research into the impact of focused corporate parenting on diversified firm performance.

The paper includes a prescription for how diversified firms can implement a focused corporate parenting approach.

The application of the resource-based view and core competency theories to corporate parenting provides managers with the rationale for and methodology to focus their corporate parenting activities.

Explores the reasons behind parents’ food purchases for their children, relating this to the part that advertising is alleged to play in the purchase of unhealthy food, and in particular the issue of “pester power” or the nag factor. Reports a study of 1530 families in the UK sponsored by the Food Advertising Unit, which explored the questions of whether parents know enough about healthy diets, how they react to pestering, what they think about advertising to children, and the relation of income level to attitudes. Finds that parents do have reservations about advertising to children, with most of them feeling that advertisers manipulate children; but at the same time parents accept this as a fact of life in a consumer society and still feel that they have more influence on their children than do the advertisers.

The purpose of this study was to investigate the similarities and differences in single‐ and dual‐parent family households in their selection and acquisition of children's clothing. Respondents included 247 parents of students enrolled in grades K‐12. Significant differences were found in the following items considered. Lack of money was more of a problem for single‐parent families than for dual‐parent families, p = 0.002. Single‐parent families paid for clothing more often by cheque or cash than did dual‐parent families, p=0.009; dual‐parent families used store credit cards more frequently than single‐parent families, p=0.03. No significant differences were found in sources, important purchase factors or satisfaction when selecting and acquiring children's clothing. For all parents, the four most important factors considered when selecting children's clothing were fit, what the parent likes, care required and price. Please note that in the US most children begin school at age 5 in kindergarten (K); ele‐mentary school continues through age 10 at grade 5; middle school encompasses ages 11–13 in grades 6–8; and high school includes ages 14–17 in grades 9–12.

This research analyses the in‐store behaviour of children and their parents while shopping for children’s clothing. Data were collected by unobtrusively observing and recording the behavior of parents and children in retail stores. Results indicate that a purchase was more likely where both parties were highly involved in the search, the interaction was collaborative, the parent had positive evaluations of quality, price, practicality and style, the child had positive evaluations of price, style and colour, and the salesperson addressed the needs of both the parent and the child. It is recommended that retailers′ strategies for merchandise selection, salesforce training and in‐store promotions, address the needs of both parent and child.

Describes research on the processes and outcomes of consumer socialisation; it investigates the importance of the family as the main socialisation agent for young children. Shows how parents influence child behaviour directly through instruction in consumer skills, indirectly as models of consumer behaviour, and by supervision of the child’s consumer opportunities; also by influencing cognitive abilities, motivating the child to use its cognitive abilities in consumer situations, and teaching consumer skills which are unrelated to cognitive ability. Relates changes in US family demographic patterns to children as consumers: more single‐parent families and working mothers may mean less contact and socialisation of children by parents, while greater ethnic diversity and mixed‐race families affects the way that children are socialised. Test four hypotheses: that parents of younger children engage in less direct instruction of consumer behaviours than parents of older children; that parents engage in more direct consumer instruction, co‐shopping and co‐viewing with daughters than with sons; that more highly educated parents engage in more direct consumer instruction, co‐shopping and co‐viewing than do parents with lower levels of education; and that ethnicity is a factor in parental consumer instruction, co‐shopping and co‐viewing. Discusses the results of the survey questionnaire used for this US study of parents with children between two and eight years old; the results roughly confirm the first three of these four hypotheses.

According to international conventions and UK government policy, parents with intellectual disability have a right to have children and should have access to support to help them bring them up successfully. Government good practice guidance sets out what form that support should take, but in practice parents with intellectual disability are still disproportionately at risk of having their children taken from them. This article reviews the challenges parents face in holding on to their children and the support they need, both from professionals and from the wider extended family where appropriate. The importance of having access to independent advocacy, especially in child protection or court proceedings is highlighted; such advocacy is not widely available, despite recent policy commitments in this area.

There is increasing awareness of the needs of parents who have a learning disability with the emphasis being on the requirement to provide ‘good enough’ parenting to their children. This paper explores these issues and considers how these parenting needs might be addressed.

Social distancing and school closures have changed the lives of many parents around the globe. In addition to these problems, parents of children with developmental difficulties (DD) have faced additional stressors that make them even more susceptible to higher stress levels and the onset or worsening of anxiety or depression. Consequentially, these stressors may have an indirect effect on parental functioning and children with DD owing to the spillover effect.

The purpose of this paper is to draw attention to parents of children with DD through an overview of possible additional stressors that have appeared during the coronavirus pandemic in Croatia. In writing this viewpoint paper, three sources were consulted: official state documents, communication with professionals (e.g. speech therapists) and online support groups for parents of children with DD.

Restrictive measures during the lockdown led to a lack of both formal and informal support for parents of children with DD. Moreover, the possibility of infection led to higher levels of fear among these parents; children with DD also encountered problems coping with both the restrictive measures and the demands of distance learning.

This paper may present a good starting point for both governments and NGOs when discussing and planning further advancement in the quality of response to the COVID-19 pandemic and a “recovery” response after the crisis. This overview may provide better insight into COVID-19–related consequences among parents of children with DD, which is vital to increasing the effectiveness of future measures and actions.

Although some negative effects of the pandemic on children have already been discussed by several authors, little attention has been paid to parents, and even less so to parents of children with DD. This paper may even represent a pioneering work in exploring the consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic on this population group.