Family Support in Positive and Participative Child and Adolescent Development

Dear Colleagues,

We are delighted to launch this Special Issue dedicated to exploring the family as a vital context for fostering positive development. As the first and most enduring environment for socialization, the family plays a decisive role in shaping an individual’s development, well-being, and quality of life across their entire lifespan. It is within this context that emotional, social, and moral foundations are built, enabling and sustaining positive development.

In a time marked by profound transformations in social and family dynamics, these interactions are becoming crucial in growth, adaptation, and active engagement and participation in society.

Contemporary research consistently demonstrates that cohesive families who have open communication and positive emotional availability and promote responsible and phased autonomy and social participation represent a powerful protective factor, promoting academic success, psychological resilience, self-regulation, psychological flexibility, and positive interpersonal relationships. The development of information and communication technologies and AI have posed major new challenges, with their boundaries not yet being fully defined. It is important to determine how best to harness these technologies while minimizing negative side effects.

For this Special Issue, we welcome the submission of empirical and review studies that explore the family as a promoter of positive development. Possible topics include positive parenting; family communication; family leisure culture; information and communication technologies and the family; family engagement in education; cohesion and support systems; mental health; resilience; self-regulation; healthy lifestyles; psychological flexibility; civic engagement and social participation; and public policies supporting families. Intercultural and interdisciplinary perspectives are particularly welcome, as well as research utilizing the ecological model of human development.

Topics of interest include the following:

• Positive parenting;
• Family engagement in education;
• Diverse family dynamics;
• Challenges in migrant families;
• Challenges in new family compositions and dynamics;
• Social cohesion and support systems;
• Family healthy lifestyles;
• Family psychological flexibility;
• Challenges related to the development of technology and AI;
• Civic engagement and social participation;
• Public policies supporting families.

Prof. Dr. Margarida Gaspar De Matos
Dr. Fábio Botelho Guedes
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the Special Issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-anonymized peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Children is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.