911 brings changes: School age children's experience with the Transportation Security Administration's airport passenger screening system, from the parents' perspective

Exposure to the first potential environmental risk factors or new experience (positive or negative) for a school age child may or may not shape that child's continued behavior toward that experience but may be associated with other more influential predictors of the behavior seen elsewhere such as parental influence. In most studies researchers have "accepted as true on inconclusive grounds" certain environmental risk factors or experience of children but fail to take into account the generic tendency for a child's behavior to be linked to that of the parent, and therefore the researchers may fail to evaluate that element of the child's behavior (Blazei, Iacono, & Krueger, 2006). This study examined the phenomenon of a school age child's first encounter and his or her follow-on encounters with the Transportation Security Administration's (TSA's) passenger screening system at some of the more than 400 federally regulated airports, nationwide, and the effect of the child's parental support on the behavior, based on parent's perception.