Poster #134 - Adolescents' Social Emotional Adjustment and its Associations to Mother-Child Early and Concurrent Emotional Communication

• In Event: 2-055 - Poster Session 06
  In Poster Session: PS 06 Section - Parenting & Parent-Child Relationships

Integrative Statement

This study used a longitudinal and concurrent design to examine the contribution of mother-child dialogues about children's emotional experiences to adolescents' social-emotional adjustment. Parent-child discussions of meaningful events in an open, accepting and emotionally involved manner, and the joint building of coherent narratives, enable children to develop a balanced and reflective perspective on emotional events, and hence encourage their emotional regulation (Parrigon et al., 2015; Oppenheim & Koren-Karie, 2009). Mothers' sensitive guidance of emotional communication was associated with adolescents' fewer emotional and behavioral difficulties (Sher-Censor et al., 2017; Brumariu & Kerns, 2014).
One hundred and eight mother-child dyads (54 boys), who were recruited when children were in preschool, were seen again in early adolescence. At both time points, children and mothers were asked to discuss events that were emotionally meaningful for the child. Mother-child dialogues were coded for their emotional congruence (AEED, Koren-Karie, et al., 2003). This study focused on maternal behavior in both dialogues (see table 1). The Child Behavior Checklist (CBCL-youth; Achenbach, 1991) was used to asses adolescents' social-emotional adjustment. It was hypothesized that sensitive maternal guidance in mother-child dialogues, during preschool and early adolescence, will be associated to lower self-reported CBCL scores.
All CBCL scale-scores were in the normative range (see table 2), and were unrelated to negative life events and gender. Analyses with regard to the hypothesis showed that as expected, both adolescents' social problems and delinquent behavior were negatively related to maternal involvement and reciprocity in mother-child preschool dialogue (r = -.21, p=.018, and r = -.22, p=.012, respectively). Moreover, positive associations between maternal boundary dissolution during mother-child preschool's discourse and several CBCL scores in adolescence stood out. Thus, adolescents' internalizing aggregate scores were positively associated to maternal boundary dissolution (r = .17, p=.050), as well as social problems (r = .22, p=.013), attention problems (r = .20, p=.022) and thought problems (r = .19, p=.029). No other preschool maternal scales were associated to adolescents' adjustment.
In addition, analyses of concurrent association revealed, as expected, negative relations between adolescents' externalizing aggregate scores and both maternal acceptance and maternal containment of negative feelings in mother-adolescent dialogue (r = -.19, p=.026, and r = -.17, p=.048, respectively.) Furthermore, maternal acceptance was negatively associated to social problems (r = -.23, p=.009) and maternal containment of negative feelings was negatively associated to attention problems (r = -.17, p=.041). However, maternal hostility during mother-adolescent discourse stood out in particular, as positively associated to several CBCL scores. Thus, maternal hostility was associated with adolescents' externalizing aggregate score (r = .17, p=.041), as well as to social problems (r = .45, p<.001) and attention problems (r = .17, p=.040). No other maternal scales in adolescence were associated with adolescents' CBCL scores.
These findings illustrate the longitudinal and concurrent associations between maternal guidance and adolescents' adjustment and underscore the importance of parent-child emotional communication to children's emotional adaptation. Sensitive and supportive emotional talk provides children with skills for dealing with intense emotions, and therefore promotes healthier adjustment.

Authors

• Revital Tamari, University of Haifa
  Presenting Author

• Ora Aviezer, Tel Hai College
  Non-Presenting Author