Maternal Autonomy Support in the Reminiscing and Emotion Training Intervention

• In Event: Poster Session 10
  In Poster Session: PS 10 Topic - Parenting & Parent-Child Relationships

Abstract

Mothers are the most common perpetrators of maltreatment (USDHHS, 2020), and maltreatment significantly disrupts the mother-child relationship (Valentino, 2017). One important dimension of the mother-child relationship is maternal autonomy support (MAS), or the degree to which mothers sustain or control their children’s contributions (Cleveland & Reese, 2005). Mothers tend to differ in their MAS as observed in the context of mother-child reminiscing about past emotional events.
This study aims to investigate differences in MAS between maltreating and nonmaltreating mothers and to determine if Reminiscing and Emotion Training (RET; Valentino et al., 2019) is associated with improved MAS among maltreating mothers. Maltreating mothers are at risk for controlling their children’s behavior in different contexts (e.g., Cipriano-Essel et al., 2013), thus we predict that maltreating mothers will demonstrate less MAS than nonmaltreating mothers. RET encourages mothers to follow their children’s conversational leads, a technique that is important for facilitating autonomy. As such, we hypothesize that mothers who receive RET will display higher MAS after RET than maltreating mothers who did not receive RET and nonmaltreating mothers. Additionally, because MAS in other contexts predicts children’s socioemotional development (Matte-Gagné et al., 2015) and because engagement in reminiscing, which is related to MAS, predicts children’s emotion knowledge (Laible, Murphy, & Augustine, 2013), we hypothesize that change in MAS from baseline to follow-up will predict children’s emotion knowledge at follow-up.
This study investigates a sample of 248 mother-child dyads consisting of 165 maltreating dyads and 83 nonmaltreating dyads. Families were matched on several demographic characteristics (Table 1). Following a baseline assessment, the maltreating families were randomized to either receive RET (n = 83), a six-week intervention that trains mothers in specific techniques to improve the quality of their reminiscing style (Valentino et al., 2019), or Community Standard (CS; n = 82) condition. Nonmaltreating families served as a nonmaltreating comparison (NC; n = 83). Families participated in a follow-up assessment 8 weeks later. At both visits, dyads completed a reminiscing task following the Autobiographical Emotional Events Dialogue (Koren-Karie et al., 2003), and children completed the Affect Knowledge Task (AKT; Denham, 1986) to measure their emotion knowledge. The mother-child reminiscing videos were coded for MAS using a coding scheme established in the literature (Cleveland & Reese, 2005; Gronlick et al., 1984). Trained coders achieved reliability (ICCs = .70 - .83).
The data will be analyzed using R. To address our first hypothesis, an independent t-test will be used to compare maltreating and nonmaltreating mothers’ maternal MAS at baseline. To address hypothesis 2, a one-way ANCOVA will compare whether the three groups (RET, CS, NC) differ in MAS at the eight-week follow-up visit controlling for baseline MAS. Finally, to address hypothesis 3, a regression analysis will be performed with change in MAS from baseline to 8 weeks as the predictor and child emotion knowledge at the 8-week follow-up as the outcome variable. Data collection and coding is complete. It will be feasible to complete the data analysis prior to the conference.

Authors

• Rachel Noel McClaine, Case Western Reserve University
  Presenting Author

• Katherine Edler, University of Notre Dame
  Non-Presenting Author

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