Sharing memories and telling stories: American and Chinese mothers and their 3-year-olds

American and Chinese mothers were asked to talk with their 3-year-old children at home about two shared past events and a story (41 mother-child dyads). Results revealed between-culture variation in the content and style of mother–child conversations when sharing memories and telling stories. American mothers and children showed a high-elaborative, independently oriented conversational style in which they co-constructed their memories and stories by elaborating on each other’s responses and focusing on the child’s personal predilections and opinions. In contrast, Chinese Mother–child dyads employed a lowelaborative, interdependently oriented conversational style where mothers frequently posed and repeated factual questions and showed great concern with moral rules and behavioural standards with their children. Findings suggest that children’s early social-linguistic environments shape autobiographical remembering and contribute to cultural differences in the age and content of earliest childhood memories.     

The cultural bounds of maternal accommodation: how Chinese and American mothers communicate with deaf and hearing children

Children with special needs typically require family accommodation to those needs. We explore here the extent to which cultural forces shape the accommodations mothers make when communicating with young deaf children. Sixteen mother-child dyads (8 Chinese, 8 American) were videotaped at home. In each culture, 4 mothers interacted with their deaf children, and 4 interacted with their hearing children. None of the deaf children knew sign language, nor spoke at age level. We found that mothers adjusted their communicative behaviors to their deaf children, but in every case, those adjustments were calibrated to cultural norms. American mothers, for example, increased their use of gesture with deaf children but stopped far short of the Chinese range—despite the obvious potential benefits of gesturing to children who cannot hear. These findings provide the first cross-cultural demonstration that children are, first and foremost, inculcated into their cultures and, only within that framework, then treated as special cases.     

Functions of Memory Sharing and Mother-Child Reminiscing Behaviors: Individual and Cultural Variations

This study examined maternal beliefs about the functions of memory sharing and the relations between these beliefs and mother-child reminiscing behaviors in a cross-cultural context. Sixty-three European American and 47 Chinese mothers completed an open-ended questionnaire concerning their beliefs about the functions of parent-child memory sharing. They also engaged in a joint-reminiscing task with their child. European American mothers were more likely than Chinese mothers to report social (conversational and relationship maintenance) and teaching/problem solving functions. In addition, conversational functions were associated with increased maternal elaborativeness and evaluations during reminiscing, independent of culture. Results are discussed in light of the functional and cultural contexts of early autobiographical memory development.     

Individual differences in the linguistic competence of referential and expressive subjects

The aim of this work was to examine individual differences in referential and expressive style through a longitudinal study. The composition of the first 50 words, communicative gestures, the conversational style of dyads and the percentage of vocabulary produced from 12 to 24 month-olds were analyzed. The vocabulary was collected through interviews to parents and sessions of mother-infant interaction in the laboratory. Significant differences in the proportion of common nouns and frozen phrases between referential and expressive children in the frequency of communicative gestures and style conversation were found. Thus, referential children and their mothers used more pointing gestures than the expressive children and their mothers. Additionally, mothers of referential children used completing more frequently.     

The mothering of conduct problem and normal children in Spain and the USA: authoritarian and permissive asynchrony

Ninety-two clinic-referred and nonclinical mother-child dyads in Spain and the USA were observed in their home settings under naturalistic conditions for a total of 477 hours. Children in the clinic-referred dyads were considered troubled because of conduct problems. The observations were aimed at assessing two forms of mother-child asynchrony, either of which was expected to differentiate clinic referred from nonclinical dyads. Authoritarian asynchrony was defined as a mother's indiscriminate use of aversive reactions to her child, whereas the permissive form entailed indiscriminate positive reactions. Results showed the American mothers to generate more permissive asynchrony, whereas the Spanish mothers were inclined in the authoritarian direction. Only authoritarian asynchrony differentiated the clinical versus nonclinical dyads in each country. Discussion was centered on the greater salience of aversive as opposed to positive maternal attention, and cultural differences between countries that might have accounted for the different parenting styles.     

Children's and Mothers' Contribution to Joint Reminiscing in Different Sociocultural Contexts: Who Speaks and What is Said

The study compares mothers' conversation with their 4‐year‐old children about two past events in two autonomy‐oriented (35 German and 42 Swedish families), one relatedness‐oriented (22 Cameroonian Nso families) and one autonomy‐relatedness oriented (38 Estonian families) contexts. German mothers were rather similar to Swedish mothers in talking a lot, providing a lot of information and engaging children into conversation, but they differed from Swedish mothers by talking more about social content. Swedish children were more independent conversational partners to their mothers than other children, including German children. Estonian mothers' contribution to conversation was similar to Cameroonian Nso mothers, except that they asked a lot of open‐ended questions to engage children in conversations. Estonian children did not differ from Swedish and German children in their contribution to conversations. Compared to Swedish mothers, past event talk of Estonian mothers was characterized by a bigger proportion of talk devoted to social content, but also to the child, mental states and non‐social content. It was characteristic of Cameroonian Nso mothers that they focused more on other people and actions, and their conversational dominance was larger. Differences in reminiscing were consistent with different cultural models of self and the type of autonomy – psychological or action – promoted. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Emotion Talk in Mother-Child Conversations of the Shared Past: The Effects of Culture,Gender, and Event Valence

We examined how mother-child emotional reminiscing is affected by culture, gender, and the valence of the event. Thirty-one Euro-American and 30 Chinese middle-class mothers and their 3-year-old children discussed 1 highly positive and 1 highly negative experience. Mothers and children in both cultures used a greater variety of negative emotion words than positive emotion words and were more likely to confirm a shared emotional perspective when discussing the positive event but to negotiate emotion when discussing the negative event. Moreover, Chinese dyads used more negative emotion words overall than did Euro-American dyads but Euro-American dyads engaged in more negotiations of emotion than did Chinese dyads. Surprisingly, there were no effects of gender. Implications of these findings for emotional socialization are discussed.     

Talk About School Between Mothers and Children With or Without ADHD

Twenty mother-child dyads including a child with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) and 20 mother-child dyads containing a child without ADHD recorded a conversation about the children's school experiences. Mothers' ratings of their children's school-related performance were also assessed. Mothers of children with ADHD rated their children's behavioral conduct lower than did other mothers, and dyads including children with ADHD discussed behavioral conduct more and academics and interpersonal relationships less than did the other group of dyads. For ADHD dyads, less elaboration about children's interpersonal relationships was related to lower maternal ratings about children's school-related performance. The results are discussed in relation to potentially poorer developmental outcomes for many children with ADHD.     

Socialization of maths in the home environment: using voice recordings to study maths talk / Socialización de matemáticas en el hogar: uso de grabaciones de voz para estudiar conversaciones matemáticas

Abstract

This study examined conversations about maths (maths talk) between mothers and their preschoolers in the home setting. Naturalistic conversational data on 40 mother-child dyads from a Midwestern area in the United States were gathered using the Language ENvironment Analysis System (LENA). A sample of up to four hours of talk during shared meals for each dyad was transcribed, coded and analysed in terms of maths talk. The results showed that all mothers and children engaged in maths talk during the hours recorded, though the amount of maths talk varied from zero to 308 utterances per hour. The main types of maths input involved naming numbers, counting, using ordinal numbers and referring to numbers in the context of time. Most of the maths talk was initiated and dominated by mothers. The results of this study underscore the ways mothers socialize mathematics with their preschoolers in interactions during meals and provide support for the use of voice recordings to study maths input in the home environment.     

Emotional exchange in mother-child dyads: stability, mutual influence, and associations with maternal depression and child problem behavior.

This study examined the stability of the child and maternal affective expression and maternal responsiveness and the mutual influence of child and maternal expression of emotion. The authors tested whether maternal depression and child problem behavior were associated with the pattern of emotional exchange within the mother-child dyads. The sample consisted of 69 mother-child dyads (children aged 2-5 years), with 32 of the mothers having childhood-onset depression. Mothers were mostly stable in their affective expression (positive and negative) and responsiveness, whereas children were only stable in positive expression. Within the dyads, mothers seemed to play a more important role in regulating children's later emotional expression. Maternal depression was associated with concurrent maternal responsiveness and their reduced positive expression over time. Results are discussed in relation to the differential function of parental general positivity and responsiveness and the interpersonal transmission of emotional problems.     

Maternal Input to Twin and Singleton Children Implications for Language Acquisition

Differences in the conversational characteristics of mothers of two-year-old twins and mothers of two-year-old singletons with older siblings were investigated. Three maternal conversational characteristics were examined: discourse features, illocutionary force features, and style parameters. The twins' and singletons' language skills were also compared and the relationship between the maternal conversational characteristics and language development scores was explored. The mothers of twins were found to differ significantly from the mothers of singleton children in their conversational behavior. The twin children were found to score significantly lower than the singleton children on measures of language expression and comprehension. Significant correlations were found between the maternal input features and the children's language scores. It is proposed that twins receive less responsive and less conversation-eliciting maternal speech. The possibility is offered that this style of speech may play a role in their slower rate of language development.     

Mother-Child Conversation Styles and Children's Laboratory Memory for Narrative and Nonnarrative Materials

The study reported here was designed to examine influences of mothers' early conversational styles on children's episodic memory for events experienced outside of the mother-child relationship. Fifty-three 3-, 4-, 5-, and 6-year-old children participated in picture-book interaction tasks with their mothers and with an unfamiliar investigator. Conversational messages were coded for their narrative and paradigmatic content. The children were also administered cued- and free-recall laboratory tasks for object names, object locations, animal facts, and story narratives. Reliable correlations were found between mothers' and children's levels of narrative talk in the mother-child picture-book task and between children's levels of narrative talk with mother and with an unfamiliar investigator. Recall analyses showed that the younger children's levels of narrative talk during picture-book tasks with mothers were positively related to the children's laboratory recall for story materials, unrelated to laboratory recall of object names and animal facts, and negatively related to laboratory recall for the spatial locations of objects. Connections between conversation styles and recall proficiency were less apparent and not reliable for the 5- and 6-year-old children in the sample. Differences between these age effects and those found in research on children's autobiographical memory are discussed.     

Verbal and nonverbal maternal controls in hearing mother-deaf child interaction

Investigators of mother-child relations have concluded that mothers of deaf children are more controlling than mothers of hearing children. Excessive maternal control has been linked to inoptimal developmental outcomes, such as child dependence, social immaturity, and submissiveness. In the present study, the verbal and nonverbal controls employed by mothers of deaf preschoolers (3.00–6.75 years) versus mothers of hearing preschoolers (3.00–6.42 years) were evaluated. Subjects were 14 hearing mother-deaf child dyads and 14 hearing mother-hearing child dyads. Each dyad was observed during a 15-minute free-play period and during a 7-minute teaching period. Dependent measures were submitted to appropriate 2 (hearing status) by 2 (task) analysis of variance for repeated measures, followed by post hoc comparisons. The results indicated that the mothers of deaf children: (a) used higher rates of nonverbal controls than the mothers of hearing children, especially during the free-play period; and (b) employed higher rates of verbal controls than the mothers of hearing children during the free-play period, but not during the teaching period. In addition, the interaction tasks exerted differential effects on the two groups of mother-child dyads.     

Socialization of past event talk: Cultural differences in maternal elaborative reminiscing

This study examines mother-child reminiscing conversations with respect to variation in use and function of mothers’ elaborations, the nature of children's memory elaborations, and the connections between the two, in three Western middle-class cultures where autonomy is valued over relatedness. Mothers participated with their 4-year-old children (35 dyads from Berlin, Germany, 42 dyads from Stockholm, Sweden, and 38 from Tallinn, Estonia). Mothers’ open-ended questions predicted children's memory elaborations in Estonian dyads, mothers’ statements and verbal confirmation did so in German dyads, and verbal confirmations did so in Swedish dyads. Number of children's elaborations was similar in all three groups, but Estonian mothers were less elaborative than Swedish and German mothers. These findings contrast with previous research in which number of child elaborations has been linked to number of mother elaborations. The results suggest that different aspects of elaborative style function differently. The differences are discussed in light of culturally rooted meanings and practices of talking.     

Content of maternal open-ended questions and statements in reminiscing with their 4-year-olds: links with independence and interdependence orientation in European contexts

Mother's open-ended questions and elaborative statements during reminiscing were analysed for their content (child agency, co-agency, non-social, and social context) in three cultural contexts. Participants were 115 mothers and their 4-year-old children: 35 dyads from Berlin, Germany, 42 from Stockholm, Sweden, and 38 from Tallinn, Estonia. Across samples the most prominent content was talk about non-social context followed by co-agency and child agency. Tallinn mothers asked the children to talk about themselves, and Berlin mothers asked the children to talk about themselves together with other people, more frequently than they talked about these contents themselves. The content was related to the cultural orientations of mothers assessed through questionnaires: the Berlin mothers whose independence/ interdependence ratio was higher talked less about other people and asked the children fewer questions about other people; the Stockholm mothers with a higher independence/interdependence ratio talked more about child agency. In Tallinn both correlations existed on a trend level. The results are discussed in the light of common conversational practices and mothers' orientation to independence and interdependence in these cultural contexts.     

Father, Mother and Me: Parental Value Orientations and Child Self-identity in Asian American Immigrants

Relations between Asian American parental value orientations and children’s self-identity in the domains of achievement and relationship were examined. Sixty-nine Asian American youths (15 males) of East Asian origin (51 Chinese, 18 Koreans) interviewed their parents (30 fathers) for their life stories as first-generation Asian Americans. They also told their life stories as second-generation Asian Americans. Fathers and mothers upheld Confucian values, which were associated with children’s autonomous sense of self in achievement domain and relational sense of self in relationship domain. Furthermore, fathers and mothers had differential influences on children’s self-identity, and sons and daughters responded differently to parental value socializations. Findings are discussed with respect to parent–child relationships and continuity of ethnic values in contemporary Asian American families.     

Father-Child and Mother-Child Interactions with Children with Anxiety Disorders: Emotional Expressivity and Flexibility of Dyads

This observational study examined whether emotional expressivity and emotional flexibility differed between parent-child dyads with and without children with an anxiety disorder (AD). Effects of parents’ own AD on emotional expressivity and flexibility of dyads was also studied. The sample consisted of 128 referred children (59.4% girls) with an AD (8–18-year-olds) and both of their parents, and 44 matched non-AD children (63.6% girls) and both of their parents. Father-child and mother-child dyads were videotaped while discussing a conflict. Measures of dyadic emotional expressivity (positive and negative affect) and dyadic emotional flexibility (transitions, dispersion, average duration) were derived from these interactions using state space grid analysis. No differences existed in emotional expressivity of parent-child dyads with or without AD children, however both father-child and mother-child dyads with a child with an AD displayed less emotional flexibility during interactions than healthy controls. Mother-child dyads where both mother and child had AD showed more emotional expressivity and less emotional flexibility compared to mother-child dyads with only AD children and to dyads without AD. In particular, the inability to flexibly move in and out of different emotions distinguishes healthy dyads from non-healthy dyads. Targeting emotional flexibility of dyads with children with an AD, and also emotional expressivity of dyads when mother has an AD, might be a valuable goal for family-based intervention.     

What happened in kindergarten? Mother-child conversations about life story chapters

ABSTRACT

Research indicates that adults form life story chapters, representations of extended time periods that include people, places and activities. Life chapter memories are distinct from episodic memories and have implications for behaviour, self and mental health, yet little is known about their development during childhood. Two exploratory studies examined parent–child conversations about life chapters. In Study 1, mothers recorded naturalistic conversations with their 5–6 year old children about two chapters in the child’s life. In Study 2, mothers recorded conversations with their 6–7 year old children about a particular life chapter—the child’s kindergarten year—and also about a specific episode of their choice. The results indicated that young children are able to recall and discuss information about life chapters and that parents actively scaffold children’s discussion of general information in chapters as well as specific events. Mothers’ conversational style when discussing chapters (e.g., elaborativeness) predicted children’s memory contributions, and was also positively correlated with their style when discussing specific events. The results suggest new avenues for research on the ontogeny of life chapters, the factors that shape them, and their role in development.     

Maternal structure and autonomy support in conversations about the past: contributions to children's autobiographical memory

The authors examined the contributions of maternal structure and autonomy support to children's collaborative and independent reminiscing. Fifty mother-child dyads discussed past experiences when the children were 40 and 65 months old. Children also discussed past events with an experimenter at each age. Maternal structure and autonomy support appeared as 2 distinct and separable components of mothers' reminiscing style and acted in an additive fashion to predict children's memory. Children whose mothers demonstrated both high structure and high autonomy support provided the greatest memory in these conversations, whereas children whose mothers were low on both dimensions provided minimal memory. The authors discuss the implications of these effects for children's autobiographical memory development.     

THE INSULAR MOTHER: HER PROBLEMS IN PARENT-CHILD TREATMENT

Eighteen mother-child dyads were referred for psychological help because of the children's oppositional behaviors and the mothers' aversive reactions to the children. All dyads were from low income families in which the mothers reported themselves to be relatively isolated from social contact in their communities. Following a baseline phase, the mothers were trained to modify their children's oppositional behaviors through time out and a point system. Fourteen of the dyads were observed in three phases of the study: baseline, parent training or treatment, and a 1-year follow-up period. In Phases one and two, child opposition and mother aversive reactions to the children were measured twice weekly by professional observers in the home settings. During Phase three (follow-up), these observations occurred twice per month. In addition, the mothers' self-reported contacts with people in their communities were obtained immediately after each observation. Results showed significant improvement in the mother-child problems during the parent training or treatment phase. However, the problems returned to baseline levels of occurrence during the follow-up phase. The self-report findings indicated that number of mother contacts with friends was an inverse predictor of these problems. On days marked by high proportions of friend contacts, mother-child problems were lower in frequency than on days marked by low proportions of friend contacts. These correlational findings were taken to suggest that a mother's extra-family social contacts may influence her child interaction patterns at home. This possibility was discussed as a factor in the long-term success of parent training as a treatment strategy.