Mutuality in Parent-Child Interactions: Supporting Emotion Regulation Strategies and Social Competence in Early Childhoo

1. Mutuality in Parent-Child Interactions: Supporting Emotion Regulation Strategies and Social Competence in Early Childhood Christina Rinaldi, PhD, RPsych University of Alberta crinaldi@ualberta.ca Research funded by the Alberta Centre for Child, Family & Community Research and by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada

2. Background Mutuality in Parent-Child Interactions • Both children and parents are active agents in the process of socialization • Mutuality is a key component of parent-child interactions (Lindsey et al., 1997; Lollis & Kuczynski, 1997) • Traditional approaches to studying parent-child relationships • With a few exceptions (e.g., Denham & Kochanoff, 2002), most research has examined individual influences of parenting on children’s early emotion regulation • Need for longitudinal studies with an early childhood development focus (specifically ages 2-4)

3. Background Contributions of Mothers and Fathers • Emotion socializing • The role of context in parent-child exchanges • Mothers’ and fathers’ socialization practices have been found to be correlated to one another (Calzada et al., 2004) • There appears to be a distinctive role mothers and fathers play in promoting social and emotional development (Denham & Kochanoff, 2002; Isley et al., 1996; Parke, 1996). • Previous studies (e.g., Lamb, 1996; Volling et al., 2002) have found that: • Mothers are more responsive and engage in more caregiving and comfort than fathers • Fathers engage in more high intensity play • One perceived limitation of research with fathers is the over-reliance on self-report measures

4. Background Social Competence and Emotional Regulation Strategies • What does it mean to be a socially competent toddler? • What can parents do to help and support toddlers achieve age-appropriate emotion regulation? • What about generalization to contexts outside the family?

5. Research Objectives To determine: • how individual parent (mother and father) influences, child influences, and dyadic mutuality independently and jointly predict children’s emotional regulation and social competence with peers; • the influence of different tasks on both mother-child and father-child mutuality

6. Methods • Year One (ages 24-42 months) • Parent-Child Observations (across 3 tasks) • Child measures • Temperament and Atypical Behavior Scale (Bagnato, Neisworth, Salvia, Hunt, 1999). • Behavior Assessment Scale for Children – 2 (Reynolds & Kamphaus, 2004) • Parent Measures • Parenting Styles & Dimensions Questionnaire (Robinson et al., 2001) • Year Two (12-month follow-up) • Child Measures • Ages and Stages Questionnaire: Social Emotional (Squires et al., 2002). • Early Childhood Behavior Questionnaire (Gartstein & Rothbart, 2003) (for ages 3 to 7 years) • Behavior Assessment Scale for Children – 2 (Reynolds & Kamphaus, 2004) • Social Competence and Behavior Evaluation Short Form (LaFreniere & Dumas, 1996) • Social problem solving tasks

7. Early Results from Time 1 • Parents’ self-reported parenting styles were positively correlated for authoritative and permissive parenting styles • Parents’ ratings of each other turned out to be moderately correlated on: • Authoritative for both m/d and d/m • Authoritarian for m/d and d//m • Permissive for d/m only

8. Early Results from Time 1 • Correlations between self-reported parenting styles and perceived toddler behavior revealed: • For Fathers: • self-reports of authoritative styles were positively correlated to fathers’ ratings of child adaptive skills • authoritarian styles were positively correlated to externalizing behavior problems • For Mothers: • authoritative style was positively associated with adaptive toddler skills • permissive parenting style was positively associated with both externalizing and internalizing symptoms

9. Project Status • Finishing Data Collection for Time 1 • Time 2 data has been collected on 28 of 58 families from Time 1 • Meeting and feedback with parents • Dissemination of findings

10. Conclusion • Parents are for the most part congruent in rating each other’s parenting practices • In looking at toddler behaviour, the more favourable authoritative style was found to be associated with toddler adaptive skills for both mothers and fathers • Fathers’ authoritarian parenting style was correlated to problematic symptoms, and mothers’ permissive style was associated with behavioural symptoms

11. Conclusion • These findings although preliminary suggest that while mothers and fathers share similarities in parenting, they also may have unique experiences with their children and may differentially contribute to their child’s social and emotional development • Implications and direction for future early childhood parenting research and practice