Parents' maladaptive role schemata regarding children and parent-child relationships, negative attributional biases, and poor problem-solving ability form the basis for a documented treatment program for this population. Children's outcomes evolve out of bidirectional interactions to which both parent and child make contributions. Thus, although the chapter focuses primarily on parental responses and intervention with these responses, what the child brings to the dyadic interaction may greatly influence, for better or worse, the nature of parental schema, the effectiveness of their responses, and the meaning the child takes from the transactions. This framework, focusing on interpretive processes in social interaction, is offered as a general model of parenting, and would allow for placing many parenting disturbances, not just abuse, into one framework. Tables, references