Examining Mexican-Heritage Children's Representations of Relationships With Mothers and Teachers in Preschool

Abstract

Using narrative story-completion tasks with a sample of 97 preschool-age Mexican-heritage children from a large urban area, the authors examined differences in children's representations about their mothers and teachers. The authors also looked at teachers' perceptions to determine whether teachers viewed children in the same way as children viewed them. Results indicate that children do sometimes portray different attachment relationships when it comes to their mothers and teachers. Stories about teachers have higher scores on the deactivation dimension and lower scores on the hyperactivation dimension than stories about mothers, suggesting a cultural element of the teacher as an authority figure to be respected coming into play with this population. Findings for child-teacher representations were corroborated by teacher self-reports of their relationships with children; higher levels of hyperactivation were associated with higher levels of teacher-reported conflict. Given the supportive and/or compensatory role that the nonmaternal caregiver might provide for young children, a better understanding of this relationship may aid in understanding children's development in the out-of-home context.