Our attempts to understand of adult human behavior have increasingly focused on the events occurring in early childhood, especially when those experiences involved trauma (Hays-Grudo & Morris, 2020; Masten et al., 2021). There is likely no greater influence in the life of a child than parents. Although there has been rapid growth in the field of developmental psychology over recent decades, we have much to learn about how parents affect children and how the experience of parenting affect parents.

I am pleased to present this special section of Current Psychology titled Parents and Children. This collection of 22 papers makes contributions to our understanding of the topic. A strength of the collection of articles is that it provides perspectives from around the world. There are contributions from scholars representing ten countries. These include Belgium, China, Croatia, Northern Cyprus, Germany, Guatemala, Israel, Poland, Portugal, Taiwan, and the United States.

The topic of developmental psychology is deceptively accessible. We all have experienced childhood. We all have beliefs about the factors that might have contributed to our own difficulties in life and beliefs about what factors might have contributed to our strengths and resilience. Nevertheless, our preconceptions can be an impediment in analyzing research studies and accepting surprising findings. As the articles in the section show, research in this area is diverse, drawing on many theories, and employing a wide variety of methods.

Five articles make contributions in the area of psychometrics, either through the development of new scales or advancement in understanding about existing scales. Two articles describe newly developed scales, one assessing parental awareness of childhood sexual abuse and one assessing individual differences in responding to circumstances differently than patterns experienced in childhood. Three articles describe examinations of existing scales in new cultural contexts, which include China, Portugal, and Poland.

Nine articles investigate how parenting behavior are related to outcomes for children. There are contributions that focus on parenting styles and other ways of classifying parenting behavior (e.g., parental control or use of harsh parenting). One of the nine explores how beliefs about parenting may be transmitted across generations within families, and two, examine the benefits of mindful parenting. The remaining articles cover a variety of topics, including, but not limited to, attachment, how parent personality relates to child well-being, parental burnout, and differences in the parenting practices used by mothers and fathers.

I would like to thank Professor Ric Ferraro, editor-in-chief of Current Psychology, and Morgan Ryan, senior editor for Psychological Science and Research Psychology for Springer, for their support of this special section. I am particularly grateful for the thoughtful introduction that Ric has provided. I also extend my many thanks to numerous reviewers who contributed their time and thoughtful comments to the 22 articles that were selected for this section, and also for the numerous others that were reviewed and not accepted.