Maternal scaffolding during play with 12- to 24-month-old infants: stability over time and relations with emerging effortful control

Dave Neale,David Whitebread

doi:10.1007/s11409-019-09196-6

Abstract

There is evidence that parents could influence the development of their children’s effortful control in infancy through social interaction. Playful interactions in infancy often involve scaffolding - i.e. the parental provision of support and modelling for problem solving and learning during play. However, previous research has found little consistency over time in this type of parental scaffolding behaviour with infants. The present study had two aims. The first aim was to use a new, tiered coding system to assess the consistency of maternal scaffolding across toys (at the same time point) and over time. The second aim was to assess whether features of parental scaffolding related to concurrent or future measures of child effortful control. Thirty-six mother-child dyads engaged in joint play when children were 12, 18 and 24 months old. The following inhibitory/effortful control tests were administered: The ‘Grasping Task’, an object-retrieval task using a spoon laden with food at 12 months; Two delay of gratification tasks (Snack Delay and Gift Delay) at 24 months. The Bayley Scales of Infant Development Cognitive Scale was administered at 18 months. Maternal propensity to scaffold was the scaffolding behaviour that showed most consistency across toys and over time. Maternal contingency at 12 months predicted children’s effortful control at 24 months. Sequential analysis indicated that maternal contingent interventions leading to children’s successful actions could be the developmental mechanism underpinning the relationship between contingency and later effortful control. Maternal behaviour during play could lay the foundations for the strategic regulation of cognition and behaviour.

Highlights

There is evidence that parents could influence the development of their children’s effortful control in infancy through social interaction
Sociocultural theory proposes that metacognitive development depends on the internalization of symbolic systems through social interaction: the inter-mental use of symbols to regulate behaviour becomes an intra-mental means of regulating behaviour (Wertsch 1979, 1993, 1998)
Based on the preceding review of the literature, the aims of the present study were: 1) to assess consistency in features of maternal scaffolding over time and across toys, and 2) to examine whether features of maternal scaffolding predicted children’s effortful control at 24 months

Summary

Introduction

There is evidence that parents could influence the development of their children’s effortful control in infancy through social interaction. Children who are asked to resist taking a reward for a certain time period perform better if they imagine the reward as something else (Mischel and Baker 1975): they are using something separate from the task at hand (a symbol: the imagined object that replaces the reward) and using it to regulate their behaviour in order to achieve their goal This example shows how Vygotsky’s theory relates to an important and heavily researched aspect of psychology: inhibitory or effortful control. Vygotsky, he emphasised language as the prime example of regulatory symbol-use, claimed that all symbols can serve self-regulatory functions (Vygotsky 1978; Vallotton and Ayoub 2011) This theoretical position highlights the importance of external regulation in infancy as a context for the modelling of regulatory strategies and behaviours, and suggests that an important focus for empirical study is parent-child interactions in which, over ontogenetic timescales, parental regulation gives way to child self-regulation.

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