Poster #234 - Asian American Mothers’ Verbal Hostility, Marital Relationship, and their Children’s Social Problem-Solving Skills

• In Event: 2-110 - Poster Session 07
  In Poster Session: PS 07 Section - Social Relationships

Integrative Statement

Children’s social problem-solving skills (SPS) include their strategies to achieve personal goals during challenging social situations (Rubin & Rose-Krasnor, 1992). Children are more likely to generate negative (e.g., aggressive) SPS strategies when their parents display hostile parenting practices (e.g. Rose-Krasnor et al., 1996). Within the interdependent family system, marital relationship quality may exacerbate or buffer the negative effect of hostile parenting on children’s aggression (Garriga et al., 2018). However, no study to date has systematically examined these interactive associations, particularly in Asian American children. Potential contributions to Asian American children’s SPS skills are important to examine, as these chidlren are at risk for acculturative challenges and peer victimization (Chen & Tse, 2010). Thus, we examined the moderating role of Asian American mothers’ marital relationship on the association between their verbal hostility and children’s SPS strategies, specifically, agonistic and manipulative strategies.
Asian American children (N = 223; Mage = 4.41; SD = 0.91) were interviewed on their SPS skills (Rubin, 1983). Children generated solutions to obtaining a toy from another child during 2 hypothetical dilemmas and their agonistic and manipulative answers (e.g. commanding without reasons, using physical means, and manipulating affect) were coded by native English-, Chinese-, and Korean-speaking researchers. Percent agreement between coders was 95%. Proportion scores were created by dividing agonistic and manipulative strategies by total number of solutions. Mothers (Mage = 36.76; SD = 4.03) reported their verbal hostility (Robinson et al., 2011) and marital relationship (Busby et al., 1995).
Regression analysis with hierarchical entries was performed to examine the moderating role of marital relationship in the relation between mothers’ verbal hostility and children’s SPS solutions (see Table 1). There was a main effect of mothers’ verbal hostility on children’s antisocial SPS strategies. This effect was further moderated by the levels of marital relationship quality, after controlling child age and gender, b = -.12, t(229) = -2.67, p = .008. The interaction was probed by testing simple slopes (see Figure 1) and the findings revealed that mothers’ verbal hostility significantly predicted children’s agonistic and manipulative SPS strategies only when their marital relationship was in lower levels, b = .13, p = .019.
When mothers display hostile parenting behaviors, their children are more likely to generate aggressive SPS solutions because they may observe and internalize parents’ hostility (Crockenberg & Lourie, 1996). This negative effect of parental hostility on children’s SPS skills may be exacerbated by a poor marital relationship as the adverse effects may cumulate and children may model agonistic and manipulative interactions between the parents (Garriga et al., 2018). As a family is an interconnected system (Cox & Paley, 1997), it is important to consider multiple relationships among family members to support children’s positive social development. Implications of these findings will be further discussed within the cultural and immigrant contexts.

Authors

• Hyun Su Cho, University of Maryland, Baltimore County
  Presenting Author

• You Jung Seo, UMBC Department of Psychology
  Non-Presenting Author

• Jing Yu, NICHD
  Non-Presenting Author

• Charissa S. L. Cheah, University of Maryland, Baltimore County
  Non-Presenting Author