Abstract
Children are confronted with an increasing amount of choices every day, which can be stressful. Decision-making skills may be one of the most important “21st century skills” that children need to master to ensure success. Many aspects of decision-making, such as emotion regulation during stressful situations, develop in the context of caregiver-child interactions. This study examined whether mindful parenting predicts children’s individual and social decision-making. The current study included 63 mother-child dyads from The Netherlands (Child Mage = 5.11, SD = 0.88, 50.8% girls). Mothers completed the Dutch version of the Interpersonal Mindfulness in Parenting Scale (IM-P). A “Choice Task” was developed to measure individual decision-making skills, and a “Sharing Task” was created to measure social decision-making in young children. Higher maternal mindful parenting significantly predicted more sharing after controlling for covariates (child age, sex, SES, maternal education level; Wald = 4.505, p = 0.034). No main effect of maternal mindful parenting was found for any of the individual decision-making measures. These findings suggest that mindful parenting supports children’s social decision-making. Future research should investigate if the combination of mindful parenting and children’s early decision-making skills predict key developmental outcomes.
Highlights
Specialty section: This article was submitted to Clinical and Health Psychology, a section of the journal Frontiers in Psychology
We explored the role of mindful parenting in fostering individual and social decision-making
We focus on the association between mother-reported mindful parenting and the child’s behavior on an individual decisionmaking task (“Choice Task”) and a social decision-making task (“Sharing Task”)
Summary
Specialty section: This article was submitted to Clinical and Health Psychology, a section of the journal Frontiers in Psychology. Many aspects of decision-making, such as emotion regulation during stressful situations, develop in the context of caregiver-child interactions. This study examined whether mindful parenting predicts children’s individual and social decision-making. No main effect of maternal mindful parenting was found for any of the individual decision-making measures These findings suggest that mindful parenting supports children’s social decision-making. The quality of mother-child interactions has been found to be associated with the children’s development of adaptive social behaviors including positive emotion expression and assertiveness (Denham et al, 1991). Whether mindful parenting could be advantageous for a child’s specific 21st century skills that involve emotion regulation, such as social decision-making behaviors, is still unknown
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