Responsive Parenting and Child Socialization: Integrating Two Contexts of Family Life

Developmental and behavioral research traditions differ in their prioritization of certain interpersonal contexts. Developmentalists focus on what might be called the attunement context and investigate how parent responsiveness impacts child symbolic capacities and social behavior. Behaviorists, on the other hand, focus primarily on limit-setting encounters and how reinforcement impacts rates of coercive and cooperative child behavior. The present paper discusses parental attunement from a reinforcement perspective. It illustrates that child behavior is related not only to how parents respond to prior episodes of coercion and cooperation, but to a wide range of child social behaviors.