Emotional Dependency and Social Skills in Young Chinese and British Children: Role of Maternal Attitudes

• In Event: Social and Emotional Development Within the Family

Abstract

Children’s emotional dependency, which refers to their clingy and over-reliant behaviors toward their caregivers, has been assumed to impede their psychosocial adjustment (Sroufe, 2020), especially in Euro-American settings. However, recent empirical evidence has challenged the universality of this assumption (Gregoriadis et al., 2020; Zhang, 2015). The purposes of the current study were threefold: (1) to examine the cultural difference in the relation between emotional dependency and social skills in young Chinese and British children; (2) to investigate the cultural difference in mothers’ attitudes toward their children’s emotional dependency; and (3) to explore how mothers’ attitudes moderated the relation between children’s emotional dependency and social skills.
Participants were 130 mothers of young children, including 63 mothers from Edinburgh, United Kingdom (child sex: 35 girls and 28 boys; child age: M = 61.56 months, SD = 4.56 months), and 67 mothers from Nanjing, China (child sex: 37 girls and 30 boys; child age: M = 60.04 months, SD = 5.44 months). The mothers were asked to report their children’s emotional dependency and social skills using a questionnaire. They also reported their positive and negative attitudes toward their children’s emotional dependency using a hypothetical scenario.
The results showed significant cross-cultural differences in the relation between children’s emotional dependency and social skills in that the relation was negative among British children but not statistically significant among Chinese children. Significant cross-cultural differences were also found in maternal attitudes toward children’s emotional dependency. Specifically, mothers in China had more positive and less negative attitudes toward their children’s emotional dependency than their counterparts in the United Kingdom. Finally, mothers’ positive attitudes toward their children’s emotional dependency moderated the relation between children’s emotional dependency and social skills (engagement and empathy in particular): emotional dependency was negatively associated with empathy and engagement skills when mothers exhibited fewer positive attitudes (1SD below the mean), whereas the relation had a positive trend when mothers had more positive attitudes (1SD above the mean).
The findings underscore the importance of two intertwined contextual factors—namely, culture and maternal attitudes—in understanding the adaptive meaning of a child’s emotional dependency. They also highlight the need for better awareness of the potential difference in this adaptive meaning in a cross-cultural context.

Authors

• Weiyi Xie, The University of Hong Kong
  Presenting Author

• Xiao Zhang, The University of Hong Kong