Bidirectional Mother-Child Influences in Attempts to Regulate Children's Behavior
- Author
- English, Mary Samantha
- Published
- [University Park, Pennsylvania] : Pennsylvania State University, 2022.
- Physical Description
- 1 electronic document
- Additional Creators
- Eiden, Rina
Access Online
- etda.libraries.psu.edu , Connect to this object online.
- Graduate Program
- Restrictions on Access
- Restricted (PSU Only).
- Summary
- Self-regulation is considered to develop from the bidirectional transactions of children and their parents across microgenetic and ontogenetic timescales (Sameroff, 2009, 2010). Theory posits that the preschool age is an important developmental period for young children's self-regulation, where children shift from reliance on caregivers for external regulation to increasing engagement in autonomous and effortful self-regulation (Kopp, 1982). Most studies emphasizing mother-child transactions in the preschool period examine how earlier interactions relate to later child problem behaviors, with fewer studies investigating moment-to-moment processes between mothers and their preschool age children's regulatory efforts. Given that being able to wait is a common goal that adults have for young children and difficulty waiting is predictive of poorer self-regulation (Mischel et al., 2011), this dissertation aimed to address this gap by examining moment-to-moment exchanges between mothers and their young children in the context of a wait. We hypothesized that each partner's behavior would influence the other partner's behavior over the course of the wait and that these partner exchanges would be moderated by each partners' emotion expression, children's age, and mothers' perception of their children's effortful control. The participants in this study were 154 mothers and their children between the ages of 30 to 60 months during a 9-minute waiting task. A series of actor-partner interdependence models (APIM) provided evidence for bidirectional exchanges between children's and mothers' attempts to regulate children's behavior. The findings indicated that there was some support for children's emotion expression and age moderating these partner effects and no support for a moderating influence of children's effortful control. Implications and future directions for the study of both child and parent effects in understanding children's self-regulation are discussed.
- Other Subject(s)
- Genre(s)
- Dissertation Note
- Ph.D. Pennsylvania State University 2022.
- Technical Details
- The full text of the dissertation is available as an Adobe Acrobat .pdf file ; Adobe Acrobat Reader required to view the file.
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