Moment-to-Moment Within-Person Associations between Maternal Autonomy Support and Child Defeat Predicting Chinese Preschoolers’ Behavioral Adjustment

• In Event: Emotion Socialization in China: The Influence of Culture on Beliefs, Emotion, and Behavior

Abstract

The parent-child dyad can be conceptualized as a dynamic system, in which both the parent and the child modify their affect and behaviors with respect to the ongoing affect and behaviors of each other. Such a process is referred to as co-regulation (Fogel, 1993). In coordinated co-regulation processes, the parent facilitates the child’s self-regulation and goal-directed behaviors, and the dyad is able to repair disruption of the ongoing activity (Olson & Lunkenheimer, 2009; Tronick, 1989). Experience of such coordinated co-regulation processes is proposed to be important for children’s psychological and behavioral adjustment, yet empirical evidence regarding the developmental implications of parent-child co-regulation beyond infancy is still limited.
During the preschool period, parental autonomy support may serve as an important approach to facilitate children’s self-regulation and goal-directed behaviors (Grolnick et al., 2019). In this study, we examined the moment-to-moment within-person bi-directional associations between maternal autonomy support and child defeat (i.e., expression of frustration, incapacity to complete the task or giving up) during a challenging puzzle task and examined their predictive effect on preschoolers’ behavioral adjustment. We tested these effects in a Chinese sample (N = 101, 46 boys, Mage = 57.41 months, SD = 6.58) to enrich cultural diversity of existing studies about parent-child co-regulation, which were conducted predominantly in Western countries.
We hypothesized that (a) a more positive lagged association from child defeat to maternal autonomy support and (b) a more negative lagged association from maternal autonomy to child defeat would predict lower levels of child externalizing and internalizing problems and higher levels of child prosocial behaviors at T2, after controlling for (a) T1 levels of child externalizing and internalizing problems and prosocial behaviors and (b) mean levels of maternal autonomy support and child defeat throughout the task.
From video recordings of mother-child interaction during a 5-min challenging puzzle task, maternal autonomy support and child defeat were rated by separate teams on 4-point scales during 15-second intervals (ICCs = .75-.79). Mothers and fathers completed the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire (SDQ, Goodman, 1997) and the Adaptive Social Behaviors Inventory (ASBI, Hogan et al., 1992) both at the same time point when mother-child interaction was observed (T1) and six months later (T2). Mothers’ and fathers’ reports were positively correlated and averaged to obtain scores of child externalizing problems, internalizing problems and prosocial behaviors.
In partial support of our hypotheses, the results (see Table 1) showed that (a) children whose mothers provided more autonomy support in response to increases of child defeat had lower levels of externalizing problems six months later, and (b) children who showed less defeat after increases of maternal autonomy support had higher levels of prosocial behaviors six months later. The predictive effect of these moment-to-moment associations on internalizing problems was nonsignificant. These findings suggest positive implications of the coordinated mother-child co-regulation for Chinese children, in which the mother provided more autonomy support in face of the child’s dysregulation and the child was able to better regulate his or her emotion and behaviors with maternal autonomy support.

Group Authors

Wang & Huang

Author

• Xi Chen, East China Normal University
  Presenting Author