| Abstract: | The article examines the relations between mothers' reports of the size of their social support networks and observations of their behaviour with their 5-year-old children in a sample of 281 children entering kindergarten. Results indicate that maternal network size was correlated with mothers' competence in interaction with their children, even after controlling for variance in maternal education and child cognitive ability. Further analyses, when the sample was divided according to demographic or child risk, indicated that the relation between network size and maternal competence interaction was higher in the high-risk groups than in the low-risk groups. The results extend the literature on social support to large, normal samples of school-age children and are discussed in terms of ecological models of development. |
