Suchergebnisse

Discourses about the dangers of spoiling children and images of grandparents came together in nineteenth-century literature, with the literary figure of the spoiling grandmother emerging as familiar cultural currency. From there, it would become a concern for the generation of psychoanalysts after Freud, for whom the grandmother represented a dangerous supplement to the importance of the mother for a child's psychological development. The literary and the psychological uses of the figure of the spoiling grandmother then intersected in scientific and popular guidance for parents in the battle for authority regarding the right way to engage in childcare.

AbstractObjectiveThe aim of this article is to examine the development of toddlers' overregulated emotions in relation to temperament, as well as to family hostile and emotionally disengaged emotional climates.BackgroundToddlerhood is a time in which children have developed consistent, characteristic strategies for coping with their negative emotions. Temperament plays an important role in the development of emotion regulation strategies. Overregulated emotions are understudied and characterized by children's flat or suppressed affect.MethodThe present study examined mothers' reports of infant temperament assessed at 6 weeks of age and observations of hostile and emotionally disengaged family interactions in relation to observed toddlers' emotional overregulation gathered at 24 months of age. Families (N = 108) were videotaped while interacting in four separate family subsystems. The marital, mother–child, father–child, and whole family subsystems were observationally coded for overt hostility and disengagement. Toddlers were separately observed and coded for overregulation.ResultsInfants with temperaments low in net negative reactivity who experienced disengaged family interactions at 24 months showed the greatest overregulation.ConclusionsTaken together, the results suggest that the way toddlers respond to a disengaged family emotional environment may depend at least in part on temperament assessed at infancy. Findings support the suggestion that overregulation is a unique type of emotional dysregulation and that it should continue to be examined in relation to family subsystems.ImplicationsThis work emphasizes the importance of clinicians examining emotional disengagement within multiple family subsystems and the importance of not overlooking overregulated toddlers compared with underregulated children.

AbstractThis study utilizes the actor–partner interdependence model to examine mothers' and fathers' support of their partner and involvement in parental decision making during coparenting interactions in relation to cooperative and competitive coparenting in a sample of 125 first‐time parents with a 24‐month‐old child. Fathers showed greater instances of support for their partner than did mothers, and mothers demonstrated higher levels of involvement in parenting decisions than did fathers. Mothers' higher support of fathers' parenting was related negatively to competitive coparenting and positively to fathers' involvement. Fathers' higher support of mothers and higher involvement in parenting decisions was related to higher cooperative coparenting. Implications for family intervention and future research are discussed.

AbstractThe purpose of this study was to investigate the relationship between dyadic and triadic family interactions and their association with the development of children's externalizing behaviors. Data were obtained from a longitudinal study of family interactions (N = 125), followed from before parents had their first child until children were 7 years old. Family interactions (marital, father–child, mother–child, and triadic mother–father–child) were observed in separate interaction tasks when children were 24 months old as predictors of children's externalizing behaviors at age 7 (n = 71 children). Results demonstrated that the triadic measure of competitive coparenting and the dyadic mother–child interaction characterized by negative emotional socialization related to children's later externalizing behavior, even after controlling for covariates and effects of all other family interaction variables. Results emphasize the importance of examining the family holistically and provided new information for designing more effective whole‐family interventions to reduce the development of children's externalizing behaviors.