Stability of father- and mother-child synchrony in a playful setting from preschool to middle childhood

• In Event: Fathers’ and Mothers’ Play: Foundations for Children’s Social-Emotional Development Across Developmental Periods

Abstract

Past studies on father-child attachment (e.g., Grossmann et al., 2002) suggest that traditional assessments of parental sensitivity might not be well suited to the observation of fathers because of their focus on indicators of comfort and nurturance in the parent’s behavior. As part of a research program exploring preschoolers’ attachment to their fathers and mothers, we created an observational paradigm that is 1) adapted to both mothers’ and fathers’ interactive style and 2) adapted to the preschool period. The procedure invited parents to make their child laugh. Children displayed heightened emotions and parents exhibited a great variety of behaviors in this playful setting. These interactions were coded using a modification of an existing and reliable coding system for the preschool and early school years, allowing us to assess 10 dimensions of parent-child synchrony in a playful setting. Our results showed strong associations between the dimensions of synchrony and children’s attachment, with both fathers and mothers (Bureau et al., 2014; 2017, Deneault et al., 2020).
However, parent-child synchrony has rarely been assessed at multiple time points, especially in middle childhood. Therefore, this study aims at extending the applicability of the task to middle childhood by 1) exploring the concordance between dimensions of dyadic synchrony in 85 intact biparental Canadian families over a five-year period (Time 1: 3-5 years-old; Time 2: 8-11 years of age), and 2) examining the association between dyadic synchrony and children’s social-emotional development in middle childhood. Children participated in playful interactions with their father and mother during separate laboratory visits at both time points (counterbalanced order). Inter-rater reliability, calculated on 25% of cases, reached excellent levels at both Time 1 and 2. At Time 2, both parents also reported on their child’s social-emotional development using the SDQ (Goodman, 1997).
Results showed a strong correspondence between the dimensions of playful interactions over time for fathers. As presented in Table 1, paternal sensitivity, pleasure, intimacy between dyadic partners, parental effort, parental intrusion, attention centered on the dyad, and overall coordination were all significantly stable over time. Such associations were not observed for mother-child interactions. These results suggest that playful interactions are better suited to the observation of father-child dyads. However, from a cross-sectional perspective in middle childhood, both mother-child and father-child synchrony dimensions interact in the prediction of children’s social-emotional development as assessed by both parents. The link between the coordination scale and social-emotional development was investigated using an interaction model in which predictors were mother-child coordination, father-child coordination, and their interaction, and gender was a covariate. The model was significant (R2=0.19, p=0.007), and presented a significant interaction (see Figure 1). We probed the interaction and found that coordination only predicted higher behavior problems when children presented low coordination with both parents. These results support the validity and reliability of the Laughing Task procedure in middle childhood, especially for father-child dyads, thus providing a new validated observational measure of the quality of parent-child interactions in middle childhood, a developmental period largely neglected in attachment research (see Kerns & Brumariu, 2016).

Authors

• Jean-Francois Bureau, University of Ottawa
  Presenting Author

• Philip Trepiak, University of Ottawa
  Non-Presenting Author

• Katia Boulerice, University of Ottawa
  Non-Presenting Author

• Audrey-Ann Deneault, University of Calgary (U of C)
  Non-Presenting Author