ABUSIVE HOME ENVIRONMENTS AS PREDICTORS OF POOR ADJUSTMENT DURING ADOLESCENCE AND EARLY ADULTHOOD Lew Bank and Bert Burraston Oregon Social Learning Center  Unskilled discipline practices form the basis for three abusive elements that occur in the home environment: child maltreatment, neglectful supervision, and sibling conflict. Furthermore, we hypothesized that in the context of unskilled discipline, the abusive home environment variables would be predictive of a variety of adjustment outcomes as children moved into adolescence and early adulthood. We examined concurrent and longitudinal data for 182 Oregon Youth Study (OYS) boys across a variety of developmental outcomes over a 10-year span. Multiple agent and method assessments of the boys, their siblings, and parents included direct observations, interviews, and questionnaires. Path analyses revealed that the consequences of each abusive home environment construct were, with little exception, consistent with the hypotheses. Thus, the enduring and powerful impact of an abusive home environment is apparent. This work also supports the idea of a continuum of parenting behaviors and a parenting skills deficit model across all families, rather than a “bad parent” versus “good parent” model. © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. The authors gratefully acknowledge the support provided by MH50714 from the Personality and Social Processes Research Branch and the Child and Adolescent Treatment and Preventive Intervention Research Branch; MH46690 from the Prevention Research Branch; and MH40024 from the Center for Studies of Violent Behavior and Traumatic Stress, National Institute of Mental Health, US Public Health Service. We wish to thank Lee Owen for the careful data management and analyses, Jane Wilson and her assessment team for the energetic and comprehensive data collection procedures, and Jan Mustoe for her expert preparation and editing of the manuscript. We are indebted to our colleagues, John Knutson and John Reid, for the many discussions, shared ideas, and insights into the mechanisms of family interaction and behavior. Correspondence to: Lew Bank, Oregon Social Learning Center, 160 E. 4th Avenue, Eugene, OR 97401. E-mail: lewb@oslc.org ARTICLE JOURNAL OF COMMUNITY PSYCHOLOGY, Vol. 29, No. 3, 195–217 (2001) © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.