Communicative styles of mothers interacting with their preschool-age children: a factor analytic study

The aim of this study was to determine if mothers display identifiably different communicative styles in their interaction with their normally developing two- to five-year-old children. In order to investigate this issue an extensive coding system was developed, which assessed the structural organization and the communicative function of the speech of 71 mothers as they interacted with their children. By means of factor analysis three maternal communicative styles were distinguished: non-intervening, explaining and directing. In the non-intervening style there is no direct pressure from the mother on the child to respond verbally. The explaining mother is primarily concerned with providing information to her child in a way that gives the child little opportunity to take the speaking turn. The directing mother is mainly engaged in directing the child's behaviour by means of verbal control. The internal consistency of the three communicative styles appeared to be both satisfactory and related to relevant child and mother features.     

Preschoolers' attention to and memory for attachment-relevant information

This study examined the relation between attachment quality in infancy and attention and memory at 3 1/2 years. Sixty-eight children participated in 2 attention tasks and 1 memory task. In the first attention task, children were shown several sets of drawings; each set depicted a different mother-child dyad engaged in positive, negative, and neutral interaction. Insecure/avoidant children looked away from the drawings more than the other children. In the second attention task, children were shown different sets of drawings; each set depicted a mother-child dyad engaged in positive interaction and an adult dyad expressing neutral affect. Insecure/avoidant and insecure/ambivalent children looked away from the mother-child drawings more than the secure children; when children did look at a drawing, insecure children were less likely than secure children to look at the mother-child drawing. In the memory task, children were read 6 stories in which a mother responds to her child's bid for help. In 2 stories the mother responds sensitively to her child, in 2 stories the mother rejects her child, and in 2 stories the mother provides an exaggerated response to her child. Secure children recalled the responsive stories better than insecure/avoidant children and the rejecting stories better than the insecure/ambivalent children. Findings are discussed in terms of the proposition from attachment theory that attachment experiences influence attention and memory processes.     

The impact of hearsay testimony on conviction rates in trials of child sexual abuse: Toward balancing the rights of defendants and child witnesses.

The authors examined how mock jurors respond to the testimony of hearsay witnesses in trials of child sexual abuse. In Experiment 1, participants watched a highly realistic videotape of a sexual abuse trial. In one condition, the child victim/witness testified on her own behalf, in the hearsay condition, the child's mother testified in lieu of her daughter. Conviction rates were significantly higher in the child condition versus the hearsay condition. In Experiment 2, participants read a trial summary of a sexual abuse case where either the child testified on her own behalf or the child did not testify and hearsay testimony was given by either the child's mother, doctor, teacher, or neighbor. Conviction rates were significantly lower in the child condition versus each of the hearsay conditions but not when the neighbor testified as the hearsay witness. The impact of hearsay testimony may depend on the perceived credibility or prestige of the hearsay witness. Several theoretical reasons are given to resolve the discrepancies in these and other studies that examine the impact of hearsay testimony in trials of child sexual abuse. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Schizophrenic and depressed mothers: Relational deficits in parenting.

Schizophrenic (n?=?53), depressed (n?=?25), and well women (n?=?23) were studied to determine the quality of their parenting and its affect on their 3-month to 5-year-old child's social and intellectual development. Most of the women were single parents; all were poor and Black. Parenting behavior was studied with observations in the lab and the Home Observation for Measurement of the Environment inventory. Children's behavior was measured with an IQ test and social competence observation. Quality of parenting was lowest in schizophrenic women, and more variable in depressed women. Certain parenting practices significantly predicted children's IQ scores and social behavior. The mother's parenting practices, and not her diagnostic status per se, accounted for much of children's intellectual and social competence, supporting an interactional model for transmission of psychopathology from mother to child. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Mothers' interactions with normal and conduct-disordered boys: Who affects whom?

Compared the reactions of 16 mothers of 6–11 yr old conduct-disordered (CD) boys with those of 16 mothers of normal boys. The dyads in the 2 groups were matched pairwise on age and sex of the child and education of the mother. Each mother interacted with her own child (CD or normal) and with 2 other children of the same or different classification over 3 tasks in a laboratory. Mothers' positive, negative, or requesting behaviors and the children's compliance were counted. The 2 groups of mothers did not differ in the 3 behaviors, but they all addressed more negatives and requests to CD than to normal children. CD children were less compliant, irrespective of type of mother. The type of mother?×?type of child interaction did not produce a significant effect on either mothers' or children's behavior. Findings suggest that the child's, and not the mother's, behavioral tendency is the major influence in CD. Mothers of CD children were also more coercive toward their own children than to other CD children, indicating the operation of transactional effects arising from cumulative past interactions. (28 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Identity confusion, bisexuality, and flight from the mother

This paper deals with the effects of an oral-sadistic annihilating mother on her male and female offspring. The all-powerful nature of these mothers, and the corresponding helplessness of the fathers, produce in their offspring a sense of identity confusion, a struggle with their bisexuality, and a need to distance themselves from their mother. Everything unwanted in the mother is externalized onto and into the child, particularly suffering and pain, which are necessary for the maintenance of the (pathological) mother-child relationship. Positive movement (i.e., success) on the child's part threatens the balance of this relationship, is perceived by the child as a hostile and destructive triumph over the mother, and causes the Negative Therapeutic Reaction in therapy. The child's inherent masochism acts to preserve the early infantile omnipotence and leads to his/her assumption of all responsibility for the mother's affective states. The child's self-destructiveness also functions as a release for unconscious aggression toward the mother, due to the lack of boundary differentiation between the two.     

Vocabulary competence in early childhood: measurement, latent construct, and predictive validity

We systematically examined relations among 6 measures of child language derived from 3 sources, including observations of the child's speech with mother, experimenter assessments, and maternal reports. A total of 184 20-month-olds and their mothers contributed complete information about child language comprehension and expression. Correlations of child language measures with socioeconomic status and maternal education were accounted for, as were correlations of child language measures with mothers' verbal intelligence, maternal report measures with mothers' tendency to respond in a socially desirable fashion, and experimenter assessments with child social competence. Structural equation modeling supported (1) strong relations among child language measures derived from observations of the child's speech with mother, experimenter assessments, and maternal reports; (2) the loading of multiple measures of child language from different sources on a single latent construct of vocabulary competence; and (3) the predictive validity of the vocabulary competence latent variable at 20 months, as well as receptive vocabulary specifically, for both verbal and performance IQ (verbal better than performance) at 48 months. Neither an index of child monologing (a nonvocabulary language measure) nor symbolic play (a nonlinguistic representational measure) covaried with vocabulary competence. Girls consistently outperformed boys on individual language measures, but no differences emerged in any model in the fit for boys and girls.     

Object constancy: The illusion of being seen.

Recent theoretical advances in the concept of object constancy have placed it in the context of the child's establishing a separate identity. Although these advances were partly the result of examining the child's growing abilities to evoke a mental image of the absent mother, constancy cannot be well understood as a type of mental representation. It more resembles an illusion, specifically the illusion that the mother is constantly available in her mirroring function. The child's sense of his or her own reality is born in the mother's affectively attuned mirroring, as nothing about the child is real for the child until first seen by the mother. The illusion of the constant object allows the child to construct a sense of his or her own separate reality. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

IQ at age 4 in relation to maternal alcohol use and smoking during pregnancy.

Examined the relationship of prenatal alcohol exposure to the IQ of children at age 4 in a longitudinal prospective, population-based study. Multiple-regression analyses on data from 421 children indicated that use of more than 1.5 oz (44 ml, or approximately 3 drinks) of alcohol per day during pregnancy was significantly related to an average IQ decrement of almost 5 IQ points (? of a standard deviation; p?=?.008), even after adjustment for maternal and paternal education, race, prenatal nutrition, aspirin and antibiotics, child's sex and birth order, mother–child interaction, and preschool attendance. We caution against using these data to describe "safe" drinking levels, because other outcomes, more sensitive than IQ tests, show significant alcohol effects at lower drinking levels. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Using the Marschak Interaction Method Rating System for Chinese families: Relationship between parent-child interaction pattern and child's social behavior.

This study investigated the use of the Marschak Interaction Method Rating System (MIMRS) in assessing parent–child interaction patterns and its relationship with preschool children's social behavior in a Chinese sample. Fifty-two preschoolers and their parents (either mother or father) participated in the study. The MIMRS demonstrated moderate to high internal consistency. There was also a moderate positive correlation between the MIMRS and the Kinship Centre Attachment Questionnaire (Kappenberg & Halpern, 2006). With reference to parent–child interaction and the child's social behavior, a negative relationship was identified between child anger/aggressive behavior and parent's nurturing toward his or her child. In addition, a child's demonstration of exploratory behavior, reciprocity with parent, and regulatory capacities were positively related to that child's social competence and negatively related to the child's anger/aggressive behavior. The practical uses of the MIMRS as a screening tool for working with parents and children in a non-Western culture are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Mother role satisfaction, mother–child interaction, and child temperament: A process model.

Using data from the New York Longitudinal Study (begun by A. Thomas and S. Chess in 1956 and continuing through to the present), the present authors tested the hypothesis that the relation between maternal role satisfaction and child adjustment is mediated by the quality of the mother–child relationship. Data were obtained on 51 children from unemployed mother families and 38 children from employed mother families. Beginning in the 1st mo of the child's life, the parents were interviewed periodically (approximately every 3 mo) for the 1st 2 yrs, and every 6 mo until after 5 yrs of age, after which they were interviewed in adolescence and young adulthood. Using the child's temperamental difficulty as an index of adjustment, results of several path analyses indicate that mothers who were dissatisfied with their roles showed more rejection of the child, and, in turn, had more difficult children. Findings illustrate the use of a process model in explaining the relation between maternal role satisfaction and child development. (36 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Correlates and consequences of harsh discipline for young children

OBJECTIVE: To examine the incidence, predictors, and consequences of harsh discipline in a sample of low-birth-weight children at 1 and 3 years of age. DESIGN: Analysis of data from the Infant Health and Development Program, an 8-site randomized clinical trial of low-birth-weight infants. The sample for analysis consisted of 715 children who were 3 years of age. The independent measurements of primary interest were the mother's hitting and scolding of her child as disciplinary practice. Analyses were run separately for boys and girls. Bivariate and logistic analyses were used to examine the predictors of the mother's hitting and scolding behavior. Multivariate analysis of variance was used to examine the consequences of the mother's harsh discipline on a child's IQ measured at age 3 years. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES: The mother's self-report of whether she used more than 1 physical punishment in the past week, as well as an observer's report from 2 home visits of whether the mother hit or scolded the child during the 2-hour home visit. In addition, the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scale was used to examine the consequences of persistent harsh discipline on child well-being. RESULTS: Findings demonstrate child, maternal, and environmental factors that might aggravate a parent's use of corporal punishment. Boys received higher amounts of harsh discipline on all outcome measures. For boys, growing up in an impoverished home was predictive of the greater likelihood of receiving harsh punishment. Using IQ at age 3 years as the outcome measure, girls were found to be vulnerable to persistent harsh discipline and lack of maternal warmth. Maternal harsh discipline in a context of low maternal warmth was associated with IQ scores for girls that are 12 points lower than the IQ scores of girls who received low punishment and high warmth.     

Adolescent mothers' cognitions and behaviors as at-risk indicators.

Examined how qualities of adolescent mothers (AMs) are related to their child's socioemotional development and the relationship between maternal characteristics and the AM's ratings of her child's behavior. Ss included 39 AMs (mean age 17.9 yrs) and their children (aged 4–22 mo). Multiple measures of parental characteristics were used, including self-report measures of parenting expectations and mood orientation, and a qualitative behavioral measure of involvement. Analyses compared these measures with ratings of the child's coping behavior by trained observers and mothers' ratings of their child using the Parenting Stress Index (PSI). Findings indicate that parenting expectations had a unique and differential power in explaining both objective child observation ratings and the mothers' PSI ratings of their children. Interactions involving maternal positive behavior were related significantly to mothers' PSI ratings of the child's acceptability or reinforcement. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Children's sensitivity to social contexts at 18 months of age.

Investigated whether, in an unfamiliar, semipublic place, children as young as 18 mo of age would be sensitive to variations in the nature of social encounters between their mothers and an unfamiliar adult (E). Measures of the child's distance from the mother at the beginning of each 10-sec interval of the encounter, the percentage of 10-sec intervals spent by the child on the stranger's side of the room, frequency of child vocalizations to the mother, times child made physical contact with the mother, and frequency of smiling show that 18-mo-old children are already sensitive to background contexts. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Verbal interaction in families of normal and expressive-language-delayed children.

Developmental expressive language disorder (ELD) is a condition characterized by a delay in the development of expressive language compared with receptive language and IQ. Conditions that might contribute to the origins or maintenance of ELD are poorly understood. Unusual verbal interactions between parents and ELD children might be implicated in the origins of ELD or might represent parental reactivity to the child's limited expressive skills. We compared verbal interactions in the homes of 28-month-old ELD children, and 17-month-old normal children matched on expressive ability with the ELD children. We analyzed frequencies of major pragmatic categories of parent and child verbal behavior as well as sequential relations involving those categories. Pragmatic interactions in the ELD families were substantially similar to those in the families of the normal younger children and different from those in the older normal children. A measure of the structural complexity of maternal speech (MLU) did not differ across the groups. These results indicate that pragmatic language interactions in the families of ELD children are determined largely by the children's level of expressive ability rather than by their age or receptive abilities. In this regard, the child directed speech of parents of ELD children cannot be considered deviant and cannot be implicated in the etiology of ELD. The sensitivity of parents to their child's level of expressive ability suggests the need for refinement in current hypotheses concerning child directed speech. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Développement langagier et cognitif de l'enfant durant les trois premières années en relation avec la durée des vocalisations maternelles et les jouets présents dans l'environment: étude longitudinale auprès de populations á risque.

This study compares language and cognitive development of children from different socio-economic backgrounds, during the first three years of their life, in relation to the duration of maternal vocalizations and to the number of toys available to the child in his/her environment. A total of 209 mother–child dyads participated in the study. The sample was divided in three groups of mothers: 65 teenage mothers (aged 14–19 yrs), 91 mothers of low socioeconomic status (LSES; aged 20–37 yrs), and 53 mothers of higher socioeconomic status (HSES; aged 22–37 yrs). Results showed that children of teenage mothers and children of LSES mothers had a language development and a cognitive development inferior to those of children of HSES mothers. The duration of maternal vocalization at 6 and at 18 mo of age was related to measures of child development, particularly to child language development at 18 and 24 mo. Furthermore, the number of linguistic and social toys in the child's environment was correlated with some measures of language and cognitive development. Variability in children's language and cognitive development is related to environmental factors which seem more significant at certain times than others in the child's development. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Violence conjugale et qualité de la relation mère-enfant: Effet médiateur ou modérateur de la santé des mères ?

Mothers' health and quality of mother–child relationship are often held as factors that predict the adaptation of children exposed to domestic violence, but the connection between these factors has not been analysed yet. This study verifies if mothers' health has a mediator or a moderator effect on the connection between domestic violence and mother–child relationship. The study was conducted with 111 abused women and their children aged 6 to 12 years. An indicator of physical health and a score of psychological distress were used to measure mothers' health. The mother–child relationship was evaluated from both the mother's and the child's perspective. The results show that the 2 indicators of mother's health have no mediator effect, but have a moderator effect when the mother–child relationship was evaluated by children themselves. The discussion underlines the importance of mother's health as a protective factor for mother–child relationship and the incidence of this result for intervention. The interest of having multiple informants is also underlined. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Children's dispositions and mother–child interaction at 12 and 18 months: A short-term longitudinal study.

57 children were seen, in interaction with their mothers, at 12 and 18 mo of age. The observational sessions included a teaching-learning task in which aspects of the mother's teaching style and the child's task orientation could be assessed. Child's "difficultness" and activity level were also assessed. At 12 mo there was little or no relationship between the mother's teaching behavior and the child's task orientation, but by 18 mo, significant correlations had appeared, indicating the development of coordination between the pair in their teaching–learning functions. Maternal teaching and child task orientation were also essentially unrelated to the children's more general dispositions at 12 mo, but by 18 mo, the mother's teaching effort was related to whether her child was difficult or easygoing. Mothers of difficult 12-mo-old boys reduced their teaching effort subsequently, and the sons of mothers who exerted high teaching effort at 12 mo became less difficult during the subsequent 6 mo. The relationships for girls were different and nonsignificant. Findings are discussed in terms of the mutual influence between mother and child, the possibility that sex stereotypes lead mothers to be less assertive toward sons than daughters, and sex differences in child temperament. (30 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Affective quality of the mother–child relationship: Longitudinal consequences for children's school-relevant cognitive functioning.

This article reports longitudinal data on the link between the affective quality of the mother–child relationship and school-relevant cognitive performance. Sixty-seven mothers and their children participated in the first (preschool) phase of the study; 47 were included in a follow-up when the children were 12 years of age. The affective quality of the mother–child relationship when the child was 4 years of age was significantly correlated with mental ability at age 4, school readiness at ages 5–6, IQ at age 6, and school achievement at age 12. These associations remained significant when the contributions of maternal IQ, socioeconomic status (SES), and children's mental ability at age 4 were taken into account. Our findings suggest that affective relationships may influence cognitive growth in three ways: (a) by affecting parent's tendency to engage and support children in solving problems; (b) by affecting children's social competence and, consequently, the flow of information between children and adults; and (c) by affecting children's exploratory tendencies, hence their willingness to approach and persist in tasks. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Mother–child patterns of coping with anticipatory medical stress.

Studied maternal influences on children's fear and coping behaviors during a medical examination in a pediatric outpatient clinic, using a dyadic prestressor interaction scale to measure anticipatory reactions just prior to contact with the physician. Analysis of 50 mother–child dyads, including children aged 4–10 yrs, revealed that the behaviors emitted by mother and child are likely to influence the child's ability to tolerate the medical experience. Maternal use of distraction and low rates of ignoring were associated with lower child distress and increased prosocial behaviors. Children's active exploration of the situation was more likely to occur when mothers provided their children with information, and it was less likely when mothers reassured their children. Maternal reassurance of children and overt maternal agitation were associated with more maladaptive child responses. Age trends were also found in interactive patterns. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)