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PARENT-CHILD INTERACTIONS AFFECT CHILDREN'S SOCIAL DEVELOPMENT
AUBURN, Ala.__-- A child's social skills begin to develop at an early
age and parents interested in nurturing that development can help by
being both good role models and coaches, according to Auburn University
researchers.
"Decades of research have documented that parent's characteristics
-- their ability to be warm and positive or punitive and harsh -- can
affect a child's confidence in a wide range of areas," explained
Jackie Mize, associate professor of family and child development in
Auburn University's School of Human Sciences. Mize and Greg Pettit,
also an associate professor of family and child development, are exploring
how much parents' own tendencies and coaching influences development
of children's social skills.
Both Mize and Pettit are former preschool teachers who saw first-hand
how important social skills are to children. "There is a strong
body of research that shows, at least by the time they attend elementary
school, children do have different styles of picking up on social cues,"
said Mize. "The skills they gain at this age can serve them for
a lifetime."
While some social tendencies are innate, Mize and Pettit also believe
that parents contribute to that development in both direct and indirect
ways.
"We know that the way parents interact with their children is one
pathway that helps children develop social skills," said Pettit.
"We've speculated that there are other pathways that may overlap
or be quite distinct from this one. Part of what children learn about
relationships comes from their relationship with their parents, part
comes from what parents tell them and the kinds of experiences with
peers that parents help provide."
To learn more about this, Mize and Pettit are conducting a study through
the Alabama Agricultural Experiment Station at Auburn. For the study,
parents and children are brought into a "laboratory" setting
-- a room arranged much like a den or living room and complete with
toys. The pairs are allowed time to play, and researchers evaluate how
much interaction occurs between the parent and child during this period.
Later, another child is brought into the room and observations are made
at how the parent facilitates this meeting and how the subject child
reacts to this stranger. Finally, the subjects watch video tapes about
preschool social situations and respond to the circumstances in the
video.
"Our best measure of their relationship quality is something we
call `synchrony' that seems to capture the nature of the parent-child
relationship," said Pettit. Synchrony is the mutual tuning in to
each other, a balance in the relationship where the two people are jointly
observing and responding to one another.
"One of the things that we discovered is that the parent-child
synchrony is a great predictor of how the child is doing in social development,"
said Mize. In addition, they found that when parents are more involved
in the child's free-play, the children are doing better socially. But
the best predictor for social skill comes from parent-child mutuality.
This is defined as how often the parent offers a play suggestion and
the child complies, and vice versa.
The study also has shown that children will mimic their parents social
behavior. For example, if a parent is warm and outgoing to others, the
child will be more likely to react in kind. "It's that old `do
as I say, not as I do' thing," noted Pettit.
Results suggest that there are some identifiable aspects of parent-child
interaction that will directly contribute to a child's social development.
By pinpointing these aspects, child development experts can provide
parents with solid suggestions about how to help their children.
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By:
Katie Smith
May 5/94
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