E. Mavis Hetherington is a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia. She obtained her Ph.D. in Psychology at the University of California at Berkeley. Professor Hetherington is a past President of Division 7, the Developmental Psychology Division of the American Psychological Association, and of the Society for Research in Child Development in Adolescence. Professor Hetherington has been editor of Child Development, associate editor of Developmental Psychology, and is currently associate editor of the Journal of Abnormal Child Psychology. She has authored and edited many books in the area of child development, two of the most recent being The Separate Social World of Siblings (with Reiss and Plomin) and Family Transitions (with Cowan). Her research interests are in the areas of childhood psychopathology, personality and social development, and stress and coping in families. Professor Hetherington is well known for her work on the effects of divorce, one-parent families and remarriage on children's development.

Ross D. Parke is a professor of psychology and director of the Center for Family Studies at the University of California, Riverside. He is a past President of Division 7, the Developmental Psychology Division of the American Psychological Association. He has been editor of Developmental Psychology and associate editor of Child Development. Professor Parke is author of Fathers and editor of The Family, Review of Child Development Research, Volume 7, and most recently is co-editor of Family-Peer Relationships: In Search of the Linkages (with Ladd) and Children in Time and Place (with Elder and Modell.) His research has focused on early social relationships in infancy and childhood. He is well known for his early work on the effects of punishment, aggression, and child abuse and for his work on the father's role in infancy and early childhood. His current work focuses on the link between family and peer social systems.