Co-constructing Narratives: Associations Between Parent Reminiscing Style and Children’s Self-Regulation

• In Event: Poster Session 04
  In Poster Session: PS 04 Topic - Language, Communication

Abstract

Objective: Parent-child reminiscing has long established its critical position in children’s development (Fivush, Reese, & Haden, 2006), but few studies have examined its relation to children’s self-regulation (Leyva & Nolivos, 2015). This study investigated parents’ reminiscing style in parent-child co-constructed narratives and its relation to children’s self-regulation skills in diverse populations. The purpose was to understand how parent-child linguistic interactions shape children’s development.
Methods: 35 parent-child dyads from Southern California were video-recorded discussing a past positive experience for two minutes during a two-hour home visit session in the summer after the child’s transitional kindergarten school year. Study participants (Mage= 5) were 51.4% boys, 68.6% Hispanic; 65.7% of the mothers went to college or more, and 17.1% of the parents spoke Spanish during narrative interactions. Children’s self-regulation skills were assessed before the end of transitional kindergarten using: 1) teachers’ reports of children’s emotional self-regulation and student-teacher relationship (Ladd, Herald-Brown & Andrews, 2009; Pianta, 1992); 2) researchers’ direct assessments of the child’s cognitive outcomes and executive function (LeForte, McGrew & Schrank, 2015; Smith-Donald, Raver, Hayes & Richardson, 2007). Parent-child narrative interactions were transcribed verbatim using Codes for the Human Analysis of Transcripts (CHAT; MacWhinney, 2000). Narratives were coded at the utterance level using an adapted coding scheme from the National Early Head Start Research & Evaluation Study. Parent’s utterances were coded as follows: narrative features provide, narrative features request, prompting type (open-ended question, close-ended question, statement), scaffolding strategy (acknowledgment, expansion, repetition), and non-narrative contextualized language (discipline).
Results: Narrative codes were reduced using an exploratory principal-component factor analysis with Varimax rotation. Using both Scree-plot and eigenvalues, four factors resulted explaining 83.50% of the total variance (see Table 1). Correlation analysis indicated that the Co-narrating style was significantly associated with child’s Prosocial behaviors (r = .36, p < .05), Anxious-fearful behaviors (r = -.39, p < .05), and executive function pencil tap (r = .40, p < .05). The Providing style was significantly associated with child’s conflict in teacher-child relationships (r = .36, p < .05). The other factors were not significantly associated with any child self-regulation outcomes. Through a series of hierarchical multiple regression analyses, we examined the contribution of the Co-narrating and Providing styles to children’s self-regulation skills, controlling for maternal education, parent narrative language, and child’s expressive vocabulary. Results showed that the Co-narrating style positively predicted child’s Prosocial behaviors and executive function pencil tap, and negatively predicted Anxious-fearful behaviors (see Table 2).
Discussion: Findings suggest that parents who engaged more in co-narrating behaviors had children with more developed self-regulation skills. It is possible that when parents believed in children’s autonomy, they were more likely to encourage children to take ownership (Leyva & Nolivos, 2015). They facilitated children’s narratives by repeating children’s utterances, asking close-ended questions, and requesting some information while refraining from directly providing information. Hence, children were allowed to contribute more independently to the narratives, which provided them with more opportunities to develop autonomy. Accordingly, they were better at regulating themselves. Future research will continue to examine how home linguistic interactions shape children’s development.

Authors

• Yan Jiang, University of California - San Diego
  Presenting Author

• Christyn Jackson, University of California - San Diego
  Non-Presenting Author

• Alison Wishard Guerra, University of California - San Diego
  Non-Presenting Author

• Shana R Cohen, University of California, San Diego
  Non-Presenting Author