Contributions of Mother-Child Emotional Reminiscing for the Study of Boundary Dissolution

• In Event: 2-134 - Parent-Child Emotion Dialogues in Families Exposed to Violence and Abuse: Associations with Parenting and Child Outcomes

Integrative Statement

Boundary dissolution (BD) refers to the breakdown of expected parent-child roles (Kerig, 2005). BD occurs in many family stress contexts and poses risk to development across the lifespan (Macfie et al., 2015; Nuttall & Valentino, 2017). Observations of BD in early childhood typically utilize a coding scheme developed by Sroufe and colleagues (1980; 1985). Such work has made a seminal contribution to the study of BD, yet current BD theories (Kerig, 2005) emphasize critical components not yet specifically assessed and examined in this scheme: 1) emotional BD, which empirical work using self-report measures of BD later in development implicate as particularly destructive to development, including self-concept (Wells & Jones, 2000); and (2) distinguishing parent and child engagement in BD; exploitations of children to fulfill parental needs are expected to be particularly destructive to children yet there is a paucity of work making this distinction (Nuttall & Valentino, 2017). We sought to isolate these components of BD to elucidate BD processes in early childhood. We hypothesized that maternal emotional BD would negatively impact self-concept.
Mother-child reminiscing is an observational paradigm explicitly focusing on emotional discussions about past events and may be particularly well-suited to eliciting observations of emotional BD. Reminiscing allows for clearly defined conversational turns between parent and child in order to assess individuals’ engagement in BD. The Autobiographical Emotional Events Dialogue (AEED; Koren-Karie et al., 2000) reminiscing coding scheme has codes for mother and child engagement in emotional BD; BD codes are typically incorporated into a broad composite score (e.g., Koren-Karie et al., 2008; Priddis & Howieson, 2010) because this coding scheme was designed to assess the overall affective quality of reminiscing. Utilized in isolation, these codes could help elucidate processes of emotional BD.
Participants were predominantly low-income and ethnic minority mother-child dyads (N = 110; child age 3-6, Table 3.1). BD was coded from observations of free play using the scheme by Sroufe and colleagues that does not isolate the emotional aspects of BD (e.g., a high code could be given for intrusions of maternal emotional needs such as a request for physical affection or for observations of the mother acting as a playmate); we expanded this coding system to further distinguish mother versus child engagement in these behaviors. Next, BD was coded in reminiscing using the AEED to assesses the mother’s maintenance of emotional boundaries (e.g., accepting the child as a separate person with his/her own perspective) and the child’s maintenance of their role (e.g., does not refrain from talking about events that distress the mother). Self-concept consistency was assessed using the Children’s Self-View Questionnaire (Eder, 1990).
Maternal engagement in emotional BD during reminiscing emerged as a significant predictor of poor self-concept consistency in regression models controlling for child engagement in emotional BD, BD in play (dyadic or mother and child engagement coding) (Table 3.2). Results demonstrate the utility of reminiscing for assessing critical components of BD theory (e.g., emotional BD, parent versus child engagement, impact on self-concept) and may suggest reminiscing as a context for BD intervention.

Authors

• Amy K Nuttall, Michigan State University
  Presenting Author

• Ruth Speidel, University of Notre Dame
  Non-Presenting Author

• Kristin Valentino, University of Notre Dame
  Non-Presenting Author