Parenting Primary School Age Children

1. Parenting Primary School Age Children Dr Louise Keown Faculty of Education

2. Focus • Primary school age children • 5-11years • Key social and behavioural developments • Key parenting issues and optimal parenting practices • Atypical behavioural development – NZ findings • Fathers’ impact on children’s adjustment

3. Key changes in children’s behavioural development • Develop greater capacities for self-control and self-regulation, and social responsibility • Linked to: • Decreases in impulsive behaviour • Growth in understanding of self and emotions • Growth in cognitive abilities – redirect attention, longer term focus, perspective taking

4. Key Parenting Issues • Strategies for positive behaviour development • Co-regulation (Maccoby, 1992) • Parents stay informed • Effective use of contact time for teaching and feedback • Foster children’s ability to self-monitor behaviour • Children inform parents of whereabouts, activities, problems • Monitoring a key component • Supervising children’s behaviour from a distance

5. Key Parenting Issues • Strategies for positive behaviour development • Parenting style • Standard setting • Reasoning about appropriate behaviour and consequences • Clear communication • Warmth and acceptance

6. Key changes in children’s social development • Social contexts and relationships • The roles of peers and family become increasingly complementary • Peers provide a context to develop social and cognitive skills, test new behaviours • Friends provide emotional support and validation of one’s own thoughts, feelings, and worth

7. Key Parenting Issues • Fostering emotional development and social competence • Parent as a role model • When positive emotion prevalent in the home, linked to children’s positive emotional expression and social skills. (Halberstadt et al., 1999). • Parents’ reactions to children’s emotions. • Supportive rather than dismissive reactions to children’s emotional upsets: • help children regulate emotional arousal; • linked to children’s social competence and adjustment (Eisenberg et al., 1998).

8. Abilities that are key to competent social functioning • Emotional Intelligence (EI) components: • Motivate oneself • Persistence when frustrated • Impulse control • Delay gratification • Identify one’s own feelings • Identify other’s feelings • Regulate mood • Regulate emotions • Empathy • EI predicts how well people do in life

9. Individual differences • Temperament – individual differences in emotional, motor, and attentional reactivity, and self-regulation (Rothbart & Bates, 1998). • A child’s temperament style contributes to his/her social competence and adjustment.

10. Individual differences • Children’s adjustment predicted by temperament plus parenting practices. Child temperament and parents’ socialisation efforts influence each other over time (Belsky et al. 2007).

11. Atypical behavioural development • Keown (2011), 6-8 year old boys with behavioural difficulties followed-up from early childhood • Most frequently reported challenges • Defiance, disobedience • Challenging boundaries, argumentative

12. Atypical behavioural development • Keown (2011) • Both mothers and fathers of boys with behaviour problems reported higher rates of child-parent conflict than parents of comparison boys. • What is the risk posed by ongoing child-parent conflict involving both parents? • What can be done to help? • Behavioural family intervention • Triple Positive Parenting Progam (Sanders et al., 2003)

13. Does fathers’ parenting make a unique contribution to children’s well-being? • Maternal and paternal behaviours often highly related in many studies • May reflect fact that effective mothers encourage fathers to be highly involved with their children

14. Fathers’ impact on children: Research evidence • Contribute uniquely to children’s social and behavioural competence • Paternal sensitivity, warmth, appropriate regulation of negative emotion, positive control • Positive involvement (shared activities, praise, affection) associated with fewer child behaviour problems (Amato & Rivera, 1999).

15. Key Messages • Both fathers and mothers can provide interactions with their child that are advantageous to the child’s development. • Children as well as parents play an active role in the process of development – interactive patterns of influence will apply in all cases (Woodhead et al., 2005).