College of Education
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Item Mother-child and father-child "serve and return" interactions at 9 months: Associations with children's language skills at 18, 24, and 30 months(2023) Chen, Yu; Cabrera, Natasha J; Human Development; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Infants learn language through the back-and-forth interactions with their parents where they “serve” by vocalizing, gesturing, or looking and parents “return” in a temporally and semantically contingent way. My dissertation focuses on these “serve and return” (SR) interactions between 9-month-old infants and their mothers and fathers (n = 296 parents and 148 infants) from ethnically and socioeconomically diverse backgrounds by examining the variability in SR interactions explained by maternal and paternal psychological distress, the association between SR interactions and children’s language skills at 18, 24, and 30 months, and the moderation effect of maternal and paternal SR interactions on language outcomes. Psychological distress was indicated by parent-reported depressive symptoms, parenting stress, and role overload, and SR interactions were transcribed and coded from video-taped parent-child toy play activities during home visits. I report three major findings. First, neither maternal nor paternal psychological distress was significantly associated with and SR interactions at 9 months, controlling for demographic factors. Second, fathers who responded to their child’s serves more promptly and mothers who provided more semantically relevant responses had children with higher receptive and expressive language skills, respectively, at 18 and 30 months. Third, fathers’ semantically relevant responses were negatively associated with children’s receptive language skills at 24 months; however, this main effect was moderated by mothers’ semantically relevant responses. Understanding how mothers and fathers engage in temporally and semantically contingent social interactions with their children during the first year, especially among families from diverse backgrounds, would enable programs and policies to more effectively promote early language development and reduce gaps in school readiness.Item Paths to compliance: Differing influences of maternal behavior in temperamentally fearful and exuberant infants(2007-04-15) Ghera, Melissa Marie; Fox, Nathan A; Human Development; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The goal of this study was to describe the expression of compliance in temperamentally positive and negatively reactive children and the factors that contribute to individual differences in expression of compliance within and between these groups. As part of a larger project examining temperament over time, 244 infants and their mothers were evaluated at 9- and 36-months of age. At 9 months of age, maternal responsiveness and sensitivity (see Kochanska, 1998) were evaluated and infants underwent the Laboratory Temperament Assessment Battery (Lab-TAB; Goldsmith and Rothbart, 1999), while mothers and infants were jointly evaluated for expression of mutually positive affect (Kochanska, 1998). At 36 months, maternal discipline and child compliance were observed in the home (see Kochanska & Aksan, 1995). Regardless of temperament, children displayed more situational compliance during a forbidden toy paradigm as compared to a clean-up context. During forbidden toy, temperamentally positive children displayed more situational compliance than their negative counterparts, while no such differences were found during clean-up. Structural equation modeling techniques revealed differential contributors to the display of compliance based on child temperament and context of interaction. During clean-up, no direct contributors to the display of compliance were found for temperamentally positive children; however avoidant behavior on the part of the child led to suboptimal maternal behavior. For temperamentally negative children, approach behaviors were associated with more optimal maternal behavior. Maternal responsiveness led to increased situational compliance for these children. In the forbidden toy context, the path from avoidance to affect was significant and negative for both temperamentally reactive groups. For temperamentally negative children, increased avoidant behavior was associated with decreased gentle discipline, while approach behaviors were associated with increased gentle discipline. Additionally, any type of discipline, gentle or punitive, was significantly, negatively predictive of committed compliance. For temperamentally positive children, displays of avoidance decreased displays of mutually positive affect. Also, use of gentle discipline was significantly, inversely related to child displays of committed compliance, as well as significantly, positively related to their displays of situational compliance. Discipline also mediated the relation between affect and compliance, as well as responsiveness and compliance, for the temperamentally positive group.