Maternal Autonomy Support and Control in the US and China: Moment-to-Moment Transactions with Preschoolers’ Behaviors

• In Event: Cultural Influences on Children’s Coping with Everyday Stressors

Abstract

Benefits of parental autonomy support and harm of parental control on children’s functioning are argued to be weaker in China than in the U.S. (Chao 1994; Markus & Kitayama, 1991). Among the few cross-cultural studies conducted during early childhood, preliminary evidence for such differences has emerged but only concurrent associations have been tested (e.g., Olsen, 2002), making it difficult to tease apart mother-to-child and child-to-mother effects. Another limitation of the existing studies is that maternal and child behaviors are typically measured in a global way (e.g., using questionnaires or aggregated ratings), such that researchers miss the opportunity to investigate cultural differences in the dynamics of mother-child interaction as it unfolds in real time. Indeed, during interactions both the mother and the child change their own behaviors in response to the other person from moment to moment. Such a transactional process is a major context of socialization (Sameroff, 2009) and may differ across cultural contexts (Bornstein, 2009).
In this study, we compared the transactional process of mother-preschooler interaction in small urban areas in the U.S. (n = 99, 52 boys, M = 56.05 months, SD = 6.44) and China (n = 101, 46 boys, M = 57.41 months, SD = 6.58). From video recordings of mother-child interaction during a 5-min challenging puzzle task, maternal autonomy support and control and child agency and defeat were rated by separate teams of native speakers on 4-point scales during 15-second intervals (ICCs = .65-.79). Additionally, 20% of both the U.S. and Chinese cases were rated by coders with a bi-cultural background to exclude discrepancy in how behaviors of the two samples were coded (ICCs = .65-.79).
Using residualized dynamic structural equation models (Asparouhov & Muthen, 2019), we examined (a) within-person fluctuations of maternal autonomy support and control in a given moment (i.e., 15-sec interval) as predictors of child agency and defeat in the next moment and (b) country as a moderator of these mother-to-child lagged effects. In these models, we also explored child-to-mother lagged effects and controlled for concurrent associations between maternal and child behaviors and autoregression of the residuals.
The results (see Table 1) showed that (a) increases in maternal autonomy support predicted increases in child defeat, but only for Chinese children (see Figure 1), (b) increases in maternal control predicted decreases in child agency for both samples, and (c) increases in child defeat predicted increases in maternal autonomy support for both samples.
Our study extends existing cross-cultural research by focusing on early childhood and taking a dynamic perspective. Our findings provide some evidence for cultural specificity. Chinese children are generally expected to restrain emotional expression, and momentary increases in maternal autonomy support may give them temporary permission to express defeat. Nevertheless, more evidence for cultural commonality emerged. Children in both countries became less agentic after receiving more maternal control. In addition, although Chinese mothers were less autonomy supportive than U.S. mothers on average, mothers in both countries responded to increases of child defeat with more autonomy support.

Authors

• Xi Chen, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
  Presenting Author

• Nancy McElwain, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
  Non-Presenting Author

• Eva Pomerantz, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
  Non-Presenting Author