Honoring the Work of Robert McMahon: a Commentary on This Special Issue

Abstract This commentary reviews papers prepared for this Special Issue on the work of Robert McMahon, who served as Editor of Prevention Science and who has played a major role on multiple aspects of parenting research and its relation to conduct problems in children and youth. The Special Issue papers are discussed in the context of the four main foci of Dr. McMahon’s work: (1) parenting practices and child development; (2) risk and protective factors in the development and maintenance of conduct problems; (3) family-based treatments for conduct problems; and (4) multicomponent preventive interventions for conduct problems. The papers emphasize the interplay between family dynamics, parenting practices, and developmental trajectories and underscore the importance of considering these factors within the parent the child and the social and cultural context. A clear finding across multiple papers is the importance of inhibitory control and emotion regulation in both predicting conduct problem outcomes across time for children as well as an important treatment focus for improving parenting. These papers re-emphasize McMahon’s research, which underscores the importance of early, sustained, and contextually sensitive parenting interventions for promoting lifelong positive outcomes in children and families, as well as the need for longitudinal studies that can reflect these pathways across time. This richly packed issue of papers in honor of Bob McMahon’s research and long-term Editorship of Prevention Science is quite remarkable, and it is an honor to write this commentary as his friend and colleague of over 35 years. The papers here focus on four key areas of Dr. McMahon’s research career, which focused on multiple aspects of parenting and the development of conduct problems and psychopathology. Broadly speaking, McMahon’s work can be divided into more basic and more applied, treatment-focused research. His more basic work centers on the understanding of how conduct problems (and other problem behaviors) develop in children and adolescents, their developmental course over time, and how various risk and protective factors influence their manifestation and stability. On the intervention side, from early in his career his persistent interest was how to effectively prevent and treat these problems with a focus on parenting interventions. As the primary family focused researcher in the (Conduct Problems Prevention Research Group, The Fast Track program for children at risk: Preventing antisocial behavior, Guilford Press, 2020), he led the Fast Track intervention work on the development and efficacy of a parenting intervention within the context of a large, multicomponent intervention for children with early, serious conduct problems that is still being studied more than 30 years later. His outstanding, multifaceted career involved both basic and applied research on parenting but always with a focus on how research can impact and improve practice. Here, I review these papers in the light of the four main foci of McMahon’s work: (1) parenting practices and child development; (2) risk and protective factors in the development and maintenance of conduct problems; (3) family-based treatments for conduct problems; and (4) multicomponent preventive interventions for conduct problems.