Parent and child

Children learn from their parents’ emotional expressions because one’s parents are the main source of social information, especially on an emotional level. Depression hinders the parents’ ability to express these emotions, in turn, hindering the child’s ability to identify and express emotions as they get older. Parents self-reported their everyday depressive symptoms and were placed into two depressive categories: high and low. By means of a story-telling paradigm, each parent read 2 stories to their child, one positively and one negatively valanced. This study looked at the parent-child dyadic interaction, as well as behavioral patterns of interactions in both children and parents. Parents’ depressive symptoms affected their ability to be expressive during emotionally valenced situations. Parent-child pairs also had less dyadic unity when depressive symptoms were prevalent. Depressive symptoms in the parent also led to the child expressing fewer relevant emotions and having lower comprehension of emotions. The findings suggest that depressive symptoms in the parents, even at a subclinical level, not only affect the parents’ emotional expressivity but also leads to weaker emotional processing skills in their preschoolers.

This study examines how children learn emotional information and management from their primary caretakers during interactions with positive and negative narratives. Fifty-six preschoolers and their parents participated in a storytelling and discussion task, where each parent presented a happy and a sad story. Preschoolers were coded for their involvement, emotional comprehension, and concern, while parents were rated on their support, scaffolding, and expressiveness. Findings reveal that warm responsive and expressive parental behaviors contribute significantly to children’s cognitive and emotional skills during both positive and negative narrative interactions. Parents high in support and expressiveness (both during the task and within the home) had children who showed higher total expression, in addition to being more positively expressive, more involved, and more understanding of emotional concepts. These results reinforce previously established beliefs on the importance of emotionally open, positively expressive, and cognitively stimulating parent-child interactions on emotional, social, and regulatory competence.

Children exhibit neotenous, or physically immature, features, such as a large
rounded head relative to body size, adult-sized eyes, round cheeks, a small chin, and a
short narrow nose. Bowlby (1969) and others (Eibl-Eibesfeldt, 1989; Hrdy, 2005)
propose that, in species whose young depend on care from an adult, these features could enhance offspring survival. Lorenz (1943) argued that adult humans are particularly attracted to these features, and that these characteristics, which he termed
Kindchenschema or “baby schema,” trigger a cognitive system that processes and reacts specifically to infantile features for the purpose of enhancing motivation to engage in caretaking behaviors. The goal of the studies proposed here is to examine the behavioral, attentional, and emotional effects of baby schema.

School success is associated with parent- and peer-relationships. To study the connection between these alliances and school success, 30 African-American and 30 European-American 6th graders were given the Relationship Closeness Inventory, Network of Relationships Inventory, Self-Perception Profile, Revised Class Play, and Youth Self-Report. A parent and best friend also completed surveys. Results show parent and peer support relates to the social competence of youth. Father support is associated with female aggressive-disruptive behavior, and best friend support is associated with sensitive-isolated behavior in boys. African-American parents do more social events with their children than European-American parents do with their children. European-Americans and males have higher socioeconomic status than African-Americans and females.

This phenomenological study reveals the meaning of the experience of parenting a child with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder. The research participants were six parents who were contacted through a local community based support group or by professional referral. The methodology used for this study was a descriptive qualitative research process with a phenomenological design. Hermeneutic phenomenology as described by van Manen (1990) provided the method of inquiry and analysis for this study. Participants were asked to participate in open-ended, audiotaped interviews describing their subjective experience of parenting. Five essential themes emerged from the analysis of the participants' narrative descriptions.

This study examined the hypothesis that cognitive immaturity may serve an adaptive purpose for children at a time in ontogeny when they are not capable of ensuring their own survival. Participants were presented pairs of scenarios of 3- and 9-year-old children expressing either immature or mature cognition. Participants were asked to select the child (immature vs. mature) which best reflected each of 11 different psychological traits that were ultimately grouped into 3 trait dimensions: cute, deceptive, and smart. Participants received one of 6 pairs of scenarios reflecting examples of either intuitive cognition or nonintuitive cognition. Participants selected the immature child as being more cute and less deceptive than the mature child for the intuitive vignettes, but not for the nonintuitive vignettes. This pattern suggests that some forms of immature cognition do indeed bias adults to feel more favorably toward the children who express them and may foster positive parent-child relationship.

This study examined influences of perceived parental behaviors and attachment styles on change over time in preadolescents' feelings of self-worth. In each of two successive years, four measures of perceived parental behavior (harassment, over-protectiveness, monitoring, and affectionate contact), two measures of attachment style (preoccupied coping and avoidant coping), and one measure of global self-worth were collected from a sample of 106 children ( M age = 11.1 years in Year 1). Results support the idea that children's perceptions of their parents and attachment styles influence, both individually and jointly, their subsequent feelings of self-worth. Perceived parental monitoring and perceived affectionate contact predicted increases in self-esteem, whereas perceived parental harassment predicted decreases in feelings of self-worth over time. Children's attachment styles also predicted change in global self-worth and in fact mediated the relations between perceived parenting practices and subsequent feelings of self worth.

Victimized children display debilitating thoughts, feelings and behaviors that may originate in family interactions and generalize to the peer group, causing children to be victimized by aggressive peers. This study tested the hypothesis that children's mental representations of their family experiences cause them to have reactions during peer interactions that lead to their victimization by peers. It was suggested that a perception of the self as helpless and a perception of the parent as controlling or threatening causes children to exhibit debilitated behavior among peers that contributes to their victimization. Also, certain perceptions of self and parent may contribute to aggression toward peers. Results for boys were in accord with hypotheses, in that both victimization and aggression were predicted by interactions of perceptions-of-self with perceptions-of-parent. Results for girls were less predictable from the formulation.

This study examined early adolescent perceptions of daily disagreements and negative interactions in relationships with mothers and fathers and their association with adolescent reports of self-esteem, self- and mother reports of behavior problems, and school grades. An I-States as Objects Analysis (ISOA: Bergman, 1998) identified seven distinct conflict patterns in parent-adolescent relationships: amiable, squabbling, discordant, hostile, labile, tranquil, and avoidant. These groups exhibited structural and interindividual stability, with groups characterized by constructive conflict processes demonstrating more stability than adolescents in groups characterized by non-constructive conflict processes. ISOA procedures failed to identify coherent adolescent adjustment groups. Person-oriented analyses indicated adolescents in the amiable, labile, and tranquil groups tended to have the best adjustment outcomes, followed by adolescents in the discordant and avoidant groups, with the worst adjustment outcomes reserved for adolescents in the squabbling and hostile groups. Variable-oriented analyses indicated that conflict rate and relationship negativity predicted concurrent and subsequent adolescent adjustment; behavior problems predicted concurrent and subsequent characteristics of parent-adolescent conflict. Person-oriented failed to reveal statistically significant associations involving change in parent-adolescent conflict and adolescent adjustment aver time. Variable-oriented analyses indicated adolescent adjustment predicted changes in parent-adolescent conflict variables more consistently than parent-adolescent conflict predicted changes in adolescent adjustment variables.

The current study examined changes in mother-child and father-child relationships of 210 participants in a 3-year longitudinal study during the 6th through the 8th grade. In each relationship, latent growth curve models found that negativity had a gradual increase over the course of early adolescence, while the change in positivity during this period depended on the initial levels of positivity during the 6th grade. For those high in positivity during the 6th grade, positivity remained stable from 6th to 8th grade, while for those low in positivity during the 6th grade, positivity decreased substantially during this period. In addition, an examination of the links between the relationship features and adjustment measures, such as internalizing and externalizing problems, found that models with initial rates of the relationships predicting changes in adjustment were ideal in comparison to models with both initial rates of and changes in relationships linked to changes in adjustment.