Maternal emotional availability relates to two-year-olds’ behavior in a challenging cooperative interaction

Abstract

Cooperative interactions are an essential aspect of human life, which children start to engage in the course of toddlerhood. Cooperation can often be challenging and requires repair and realignment. So far, little effort has been made to investigate how young children deal with emotionally challenging cooperative interactions. Therefore, we examined which factors explain 24-month-old toddlers’ (n = 90) behavior to interruptions in two frustrating cooperative interactions, that is, their disengagement from the task, approach to the mother, active help seeking, and reengagement. We focused on child temperament (i.e., shyness) and child cognitive skills (i.e., language and self-control), and were especially interested whether mother–child interaction quality (i.e., sensitivity and non-intrusiveness) contributes beyond child characteristics. Results indicated that maternal intrusiveness significantly predicted more child disengagement and more approach to the mother. Furthermore, toddler self-control was positively associated with approach to mother, while toddler language skills were positively related to active help seeking. Reengagement was neither predicted by child characteristics nor by maternal emotional availability. We discuss how the findings of the current study expand our knowledge of the factors that impact toddlers’ social competencies and coping strategies in emotionally challenging cooperative interactions with others.