Children’s Social Competence, Peer Status, and the Quality of Mother- Child and Father-Child Relationships

Abstract

This study examined links between parents’ and children’s interactive style at home and children’s social competence among peers defined in terms of both prosocial, aggressive, and isolate behavior and social success at school. Participants were 34 children (7–9 years of age) who were observed at home and videotaped twice during 10 min free-play dyadic interactions separately with their mother and father over a 2-week period. Interactions were coded on global measures of positive, negative, controlling, disconfirming, and correcting behaviors and neutral conversation. Sociometric techniques based on peer nominations were used to assess children’s behavioral orientations and social success at school. The structural relationship of the parental behavior categories and the links among this structure and children’s social competence among peers were analyzed both by traditional statistical methods and multidimensional scaling techniques. Mothers’ negative interactions and disconfirming correlated negatively with prosociality and positively with aggression, which in turn associated negatively with mothers’ involvement in neutral conversation. Popular children were situated in a relationship structure where mothers were less controlling, less negative, less correcting, and less disconfirming and displaying more positive behavior than was the case for rejected and average children. There were few associations among fathers’ interactions and children’s social competence. Nevertheless, when a multidimensional scaling approach was used rejection appeared to be located within a harsh relationship with both parents. Children who were negative, controlling, and disconfirming when interacting with their parents at home, and who were more aggressive to peers, were more rejected at school.