Dyadic Synchrony in Mother-Child Interaction: Relation with Children's Subsequent Kindergarten Adjustment

Abstract

Key words: aggression, interaction patterns, mother-child observational rating, social competence. Investigations of the linkages between family and peer social systems have demonstrated that qualities of parent-child relationships are associated with children's development of social competence (Cohn, Patterson, Christopoulos, 1991; Pettit & Harrist, 1993; Putallaz & Heflin, 1990). Typically, researchers have related measures of children's peer competence to parenting styles conceived in terms of broad dimensions, such as warmth (e.g., Patterson, Cohn, & Kao, 1989) and restrictiveness (e.g., Dekovic & Janssens, 1992), or to global indicators of the quality of the parent-child relationship, such as attachment security (e.g., Lewis, Feiring, McGuffog, & Jaskir, 1984). Comparatively little research, however, has focused on specific qualities of interaction defined in terms of the parent-child dyad as a unit. One particularly promising measure of the dyad as a unit is synchrony. This term is used to refer to mutually focused, reciprocated exchanges between interactional partners (Isabella & Belsky, 1991; Rocissano, Slade, & Lynch, 1987; Wahler, 1990). Variations in parent-child synchrony have been found to predict children's interpersonal skillfulness with peers (Kennedy & Bakeman, 1984) and children's behavioral adjustment in both home (Wahler, Williams, & Cerezo, 1990) and school (Pettit & Mize, 1993) settings. In the present study, we examined predictive relations among measures of mother-child synchrony and children's social adjustment several months later. In spite of evidence suggesting that parent-child interactional synchrony is associated with important social-developmental outcomes, there is little consensus regarding how synchrony might best be measured. Past studies of interactional synchrony have tended to use samples of mother-infant pairs and have focused primarily on the mother's ability to respond sensitively to her child's cues, either by assessing temporally co-occurring behavior patterns (e.g., Brazelton, Koslowski, & Main, 1974; Isabella & Belsky, 1991), or by more broadly assessing ongoing patterns of responsiveness (e.g., Ainsworth, Bell, & Stayton, 1971). In studies of synchrony among older children and their parents, the child's role is given more attention, yet methodological problems remain: When interaction style has been assessed from a dyadic standpoint (e.g., Pettit & Mize, 1993), ratings of synchrony tend to be global, and may fail to capture more fine-grained variations in style that exist among dyads. When more molecular assessments have been utilized (e.g., Pettit, Harrist, Bates, & Dodge, 1991; Wahler & Dumas, 1986), true dyadic ratings have not been made. Instead, patterns of dyadic behavior have been inferred from individual parent and child behavior (e.g., from rates or probability calculations of mother directiveness followed by child compliance), and may fail to capture the transactional aspects of interaction that are not reducible to individual behaviors, such as balance or mutuality of focus. Also, because the behaviors of interest in such analyses tend to be defined a priori, a large proportion of observed interactions might not be assessed. The need to develop a measure that assesses dyadic qualities of parent-child interaction, then, is clear, and is repeatedly called for (see, e.g., Dowdney, Mrazek, Quinton, & Rutter, 1984; Dumas & LaFreniere, 1993). In the present study, we attempted to address this need by developing a solely dyadic measure of interactional style among preschoolers and their mothers. Although synchrony has been defined in numerous ways, several lines of research (e.g., Ainsworth et al., 1971; Baldwin, 1948; Isabella, Belsky, & von Eye, 1989; Patterson & Dishion, 1988) converge to suggest that at least three dyadic elements are critical for its conceptualization and measurement: engagement refers to the extensiveness or length of a given interaction, and typically has been described in terms of number of back-and-forth exchanges (e. …