Maternal Discourse Research Articles

Concepções maternas sobre o desenvolvimento da criança deficiente visual

este estudo teve por objetivo apreender as concepções maternas sobre o desenvolvimento de crianças deficientes visuais (cegueira e baixa visão severa), na faixa etária dos dois aos sete anos de idade. Participaram dez mães, com idades entre 22 e 39 anos e com nível educacional igual ou superior ao ensino fundamental completo. Foram realizadas entrevistas estruturadas com uso de um gravador digital e de um roteiro de perguntas com questões sobre o desenvolvimento da criança bem como sobre a percepção materna a respeito do momento do diagnóstico e suas implicações. As entrevistas foram transcritas integralmente e analisadas à luz da análise de conteúdo categorial temática, com categorias que foram definidas a partir do objetivo do estudo e dos discursos maternos. Quatro categorias foram elaboradas: detecção da deficiência visual; reações frente à descoberta da deficiência visual; avaliação das características da criança, a partir das subcategorias: motor, linguística e das relações sociais e a percepção do desenvolvimento atual da criança deficiente visual. As verbalizações maternas evidenciaram que o atendimento especializado desde cedo é importante para lidar com as possíveis expectativas em relação ao desenvolvimento infantil. Considera-se, portanto, que o acesso às concepções maternas é relevante, haja vista que estas concepções podem revelar o modo como as mães interagem com os filhos. Sugere-se que novos estudos sejam realizados e que contemplem tanto as concepções maternas sobre o desenvolvimento infantil, mas que também analisem a interação mãe-criança com deficiência visual, para subsidiar a elaboração de programas de intervenção.

Temperament and maternal discourse about internal states as predictors of toddler empathy- and aggression-related behavior

Sixty-five mothers reported on their toddlers’ attention regulation and negative emotional intensity and provided information about the toddlers’ empathy and aggression. Toddler concerned attention was also observed during a laboratory session as was mothers’ discourse about mental states. Toddlers reported to have better attention regulation and lower negative emotional intensity were reported to be less physically aggressive. Mothers who made more references to needs, intentions, and desires had toddlers who were lower in both aggression- and empathy-related behavior as assessed with maternal report and observation.

Predicting elements of early maternal elaborative discourse from 12 to 18 months of age

To date, much of the research investigating maternal–child discourse has focused on the preschool period of children's development, with little attention paid to how these styles develop. The current study aimed to assess whether maternal elaborative discourse elements seen in preschool are also evident during the toddler years, and whether the use of these elements is predicted by children's temperament, maternal mind mindedness, and attachment security. Results revealed that elaborative discourse elements are used by mothers during discourse with 12- and 18 month-old children, and that child temperament, attachment security, and maternal mind mindedness at 12 months predicted maternal use of these elements when children were 18 months old. These results provide evidence that elements of maternal discourse style begin forming prior to children's active involvement in discourse interactions and that child, maternal, and relationship characteristics assume important roles in shaping early discourse styles.

Conversations about emotion in high-risk dyads

Early emotional understanding is fostered by mother–child conversation in which mothers elaboratively enhance children's understanding. Little is known of the broader relational and risk factors influencing maternal discourse style, how discourse content and quality are associated with children's emotion language, and how these predict emotion understanding. In this longitudinal study of a high-risk sample, attachment security and family risks were assessed when children were 2 years old. One year later, observations of mother–child emotion conversation yielded measures of maternal discourse content and quality, and children's emotion words and emotion labels. Child emotion understanding was independently assessed one year later as well. Central findings were: (1) content and quality of maternal discourse was negatively related to family risk factors and positively associated with secure attachment; (2) child emotion language in conversation was positively associated with secure attachment beyond the effects of child language and maternal discourse content; and (3) differences in emotion language ability predicted children's emotion understanding.

Mothers'andFathers' Use of Internal State Talk with their Young Children

AbstractThe present study extends previous results demonstrating a relation between maternal discourse and child social understanding to include paternal discourse. Emotion understanding (EU) and theory of mind (ToM) were considered as two distinctive aspects of social understanding. Participants were 106 children (54 boys and 52 girls) studied at 3.5 and 5 years. Discourse measures came from separate parent–child conversations during a picture‐book task; measures of EU and ToM came from children's performance on social cognition tasks. Differences in parental talk translated into important differences in the influence of each parent on children's social‐cognitive understanding. Mothers' references to emotion and emotion causal explanatory language predicted children's concurrent EU. Fathers' use of causal explanatory language referring to desires and emotions predicted children's concurrent and later ToM. These results highlight important differences between mothers and fathers in their use of internal state language and its impact on children's social‐cognitive understanding.

Maternal discourse, attachment-related risk, and current risk factors: Associations with maternal parenting behavior during foster care visits

This study examined relations among mothers' discourse about experiences in their families of origin and with child protective services (CPS), attachment-related and current risk factors, and the quality of mothers' parenting behavior with their young children during supervised visits. Twenty-nine 2- to 6-year-old children in foster care and their biological mothers participated. Clinical interviews with mothers assessed the quality of maternal discourse and the presence of risk factors. Videotaped observations of visits between mothers and their children assessed parenting behaviors. Results revealed that mothers who discussed their experiences in a coherent and flexible manner and expressed affection for their children in their discourse were more supportive of their children's socioemotional functioning during visits. Moreover, in addition to current risk factors such as substance abuse and mental illness, mothers' experience of attachment-related risk factors in childhood or adolescence was particularly important for understanding the quality of their discourse and parenting behavior.

Mothers and Daughters in Post-Revolutionary Mexican Literature by Teresa M. Hurley (review)

ii34 Reviews the Comic Mind of his Age will foster informed reflection and debate on the sources and dynamics of Cervantine comedy. University of Toronto Stephen Rupp Mothers and Daughters in Post-Revolutionary Mexican Literature. By Teresa M. Hurley. London: Tamesis. 2003. vii + 2i2pp. ?45. ISBN 1-85566-086-5. Teresa Hurley's study considers the novels offourimportant Mexican women writers: Nellie Campobello's Cartucho and Las manos de mama; Rosario Castellanos's BalunCandn ; Elena Garro's Los recuerdosdel porvenir; and Elena Poniatowska'sLtf 'Flor de Lis' (1989). Hurley's analysis, drawing on aspects of psychoanalytical feminism and Bakhtinian theory,forms what she terms a 'psychoanalytically-based dialogism' (p. 6) in her consideration of the mother-daughter relationship as portrayed in the novels. Drawing on Hirsch's notion of an 'ideal psychoanalysis', Hurley suggests that these novels, rather than portraying the child-mother relationship from the conventional viewpoint of the child, where the mother's voice is absent, instead allow the mother to speak. For Hurley, it is the heteroglossia of the novels she examines that gives the mother a voice. Chapter 1 provides a useful contextualization for the novels discussed, and also an overview of theories of autobiography, suggesting how these works differfrom male-authored autobiographies. Hurley also considers genre, and proposes that the novels she considers, rather than fittinginto any one category such as the novela de la Revolucion or the novela indigenista, share features with a variety of differentcate? gories, including autobiography. In Chapter 2, focusing on Nellie Campobello's Cartucho and Las manos de mama, Hurley argues that Campobello portrays the mother's discourse not only as mother, but as a woman in her own right. For Hurley it is precisely the heteroglossia of the two works that provides for a maternal discourse that challenges the silent role that psy? choanalysis conventionally assigns to women. Hurley shows how sensory impressions are important in Campobello's narrative in the expression ofmemory froma gendered perspective, and links the emphasis on touch and physical contact to Kristeva's notion of the semiotic. The chapter that follows, on Castellanos's Balun-Candn, continues with the focus on sensory perception, proposing a similar binary of sight/touch to that of Campobello's works. Hurley links this to gender roles, noting a distinction between active male roles associated with sight, and passive female ones. Chapter 4 studies Garro's Los recuerdos del porvenir, and takes as one of its focal points Garro's concept of time. Hurley proposes that this can be read in gendered terms, whereby linear time is associated with historical progress, Europe, and the masculine, while circular time is associated with indigenous culture and the feminine. However, Hurley then indicates how Garro goes on to subvert this binary, with mas? culine characters ruled by feminine time, and vice versa. Chapter 5 considers the little-studied firstnovel of the prominent writer Poniatowska , La 'Flor de Lis', and explores the parallels between the mother and the mother country, both of which are seen to be influential in the perpetuation of gender roles. Hurley makes innovative use of Kleinian theory in her consideration of the ambiva? lent attitude Mariana has towards her mother, and provides an illuminating analysis ofthe conflict between love and hatred feltby the protagonist. Hurley's book is a refreshing take on the work of these prominent writers, and her employment of psychoanalytic theory proves persuasive when discussing the dy? namics of the text. What are perhaps less convincing are the moments when Hurley attempts to read the symptoms of the text back to the author (e.g. p. 153). However, MLRy 100.4, 2005 1135 these moments are infrequent, and the strengthof this book lies in its original analysis as it provides an innovative and accomplished discussion of these important writers. University of Liverpool Claire Taylor A pie de obra: escritos sobre teatro. By Marcos Ordonez. Barcelona: Alba. 2003. 488 pp. ?21. ISBN 84-8428-165-5. The fact that a theatre critic has decided to compile a volume of his work that was ori? ginally published in the press and has found a publishing house willing to bring it out is an uncommon occurrence, although there are...

‘You be the big sister’: Maternal‐preschooler internal state discourse, perspective‐taking, and sibling caretaking

AbstractMaternal–preschooler internal state discourse, preschooler perspective‐taking, and sibling caretaking for 32 dyads (preschooler M age=46.4 months, toddlers=14 months) was examined across three contexts varying in emotional demands: (a) naturalistic home observations, (b) mother–preschooler book reading (Parent–Child Affect Communication Task; Zahn‐Waxler, Ridgeway, Denham, Usher and Cole, 1993), and (c) a laboratory maternal separation session. Preschooler perspective‐taking was positively associated with emotional understanding during book reading. However, mothers did not adjust their internal state discourse in any of the three contexts to reflect preschoolers' perspective‐taking skills. Both preschooler internal state language during sibling conflict and maternal leave‐taking discourse were associated with sibling caretaking. Findings are discussed in light of the role of family discourse and dynamics in the development of children's social understanding. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Patterns of Attachment and Maternal Discourse Effects on Children's Emotion Understanding From 3 to 5 Years of Age

Abstract Two studies examined the influence of maternal discourse style and security of attachment, and their interaction, on preschoolers’ emotion understanding. The first, with 3‐year‐olds, unexpectedly found no significant prediction of emotion understanding from attachment and discourse, and the interaction of the predictors yielded theoretically unpredicted associations with emotion understanding. Consequently, measures of attachment and emotion understanding were obtained again on these children at age 5 in a second study. At this age, consistent with expectations, secure attachment predicted higher emotion understanding, especially in the context of maternal use of elaborative discourse from the earlier assessment. The findings suggest that during the period of significant representational advance between ages 3 and 5, the influence of maternal discourse and attachment security are developmentally transformed as children's conceptions of psychological states rapidly change. By age 5, however, maternal elaborative discourse in the context of attachment security fosters deeper emotion understanding in preschoolers.

The Death of Loving: Maternal Identity as Moral Constraint in a Narrative Testimonial Advocating Physician Assisted Suicide

This article considers the narrative testimonial as a rhetorical form in the service of public judgment, with particular attention to the witness's credibility and communicative competence. The author argues that a narrator and witness, as a participant-observer of the events recounted, must generate a story that does not compromise her credibility as a moral agent within the text, and that the capacity to do so is largely a function of communicative competence. Carol Loving's recent book concerning her son's physician assisted suicide is critically assessed to illustrate the primary argument. The critique attempts to show that she neither creates a substantial argument for physician assisted suicide, nor does she warrant her role as a spokesperson for the issue because her narrative violates formative features of maternal identity. Loving's narrative also unintentionally reveals motivational clusters that conflict with and compromise the primary argument, thereby subverting the process of persuasive appeal. Whereas mothers are often mediators for their children in health matters ranging from colds, to psychiatric issues, to matters of death and dying, the failure of Carol Loving in this text, as well as its analysis, should be instructive and cautionary to health professionals who rely on maternal discourse in handling patients, as well as audiences who rely on narrative testimonials as content in their deliberation of public issues.

Mother-child discourse, attachment security, shared positive affect, and early conscience development.

The separate literatures on parental discipline, maternal discourse about emotion, and autobiographical memory support the idea that parent-child discourse in the context of a supportive relationship plays a role in a child's early conscience development, and this study was designed to examine this issue. Forty-two preschool children and their mothers took part in a 45-min structured laboratory session, and at their homes, mothers completed the Attachment Q-Set. As part of the laboratory session, each mother was asked to discuss with her child one incident that occurred within the last week in which her child behaved well and one in which her child misbehaved. These conversations were transcribed verbatim and coded for maternal references to feelings, rules, consequences of the child's actions, and moral evaluatives. Each child also took part in a behavioral measure of internalization and several compliance tasks, and mothers completed a maternal report of the child's early conscience development. Consistent with attachment theory, attachment security predicted maternal and child references to feelings and moral evaluatives. Attachment security, shared positive affect between the mother and child, and maternal references to feelings and moral evaluatives also predicted specific aspects of early conscience development.

"But We Are Still Mothers:" Gender and the Construction of Need in Post-Socialist Hungary

This paper examines the gender regime of the welfare state transition underway in contemporary Hungary. I analyze this welfare restructuring within three state terrains and trace shifts in regime policies, institutional practices, and client strategies from late state socialism to the present. I argue that these shifts denote fundamental alterations in the social conception of need and in the nature of claims to state assistance. In the last two decades of state socialism, the Hungarian welfare apparatus was organized around maternal guarantees that accorded women benefits based on their contributions as mothers. These social guarantees provided female clients with a sense of entitlement and practical resources for use in their domestic struggles. In post-socialist Hungary, this maternal discourse is being dislodged by a new language of welfare designed to target and treat poverty. As the welfare system is oriented toward poor relief, women's needs have been materialized and their maternal identities displaced by new class identities and stigmas. With these shifts, the practical and discursive space for women to maneuver has contracted—prompting female clients to resist and reassert their previous status as entitled mothers. The data presented in this paper are drawn from archival, interview, and ethnographic research conducted in Budapest, Hungary from October 1993 to April 1995.

Radical Listening

Using a discourse analysis framework, I assert that mothers are constrained by cultural messages about "good" and "bad" mothering to "story" their lives acceptably, not necessarily accurately. The paper examines the toll that this takes on mothersand their loved ones. I then present several therapeutic techniques to help mothers resist problematic elements of the maternal discourse within which their subjective experience of themselves as mothers has formed.

Instructional discourse strategies: differences between hearing and deaf mothers of deaf children

This study examines the language used by mothers when instructing their hearing and deaf preschool children. Mothers and children from three matched groups, hearing mother — hearing child, hearing mother - deaf child, and deaf mother - deaf child, were videotaped during a problem-solving task. Dependent measures were maternal discourse behaviours and child initiative. The hearing mothers in the mother - deaf child dyads were less likely than the deaf mothers to adapt their discourse strategies to accommodate their children's needs as visual processors of information, and their children showed less initiative in terms of linguistic and construction attempts than the other children. The findings of this study support Vygotsky's dialectical theory of cognitive development.

Instructional discourse strategies: differences between hearing and deaf mothers of deaf children

This study examines the language used by mothers when instructing their hearing and deaf preschool children. Mothers and children from three matched groups, hearing mother - hearing child, hearing mother - deaf child, and deaf mother - deaf child, were videotaped during a problem-solving task. Dependent measures were maternal discourse behaviours and child initiative. The hearing mothers in the mother - deaf child dyads were less likely than the deaf mothers to adapt their discourse strategies to accommodate their children's needs as visual processors of information, and their children showed less initiative in terms of linguistic and construction attempts than the other children. The findings of this study support Vygotsky's dialectical theory of cognitive development.

Nesting: Embedded Narrative as Maternal Discourse in Children's Novels

Nesting:Embedded Narrative as Maternal Discourse in Children's Novels Roberta Seelinger Trites (bio) Many North American and British children's novels written since the rise of modern feminism in the 1960s rely on embedded narrative structures wherein the plot of the nested tale parallels the plot of the framing tale.1 Gayle Greene comments on the prominence of embedded narratives as a mode of feminine discourse when she describes their recurrence within postmodern feminist writing. She notes that feminist critics and novelists alike have rejected the "linear sequence of traditional quests and Bildungsroman plots" in favor of more circular narratives; she cites Elizabeth Abel, Hélène Cixous, Julia Kristeva, and Patricia Tobin, among others, to demonstrate how this rejection of linear narrative form constitutes a rejection of patriarchal power structures (14-15).2 Thus, recent children's novels with embedded narrative structures can be seen as potentially critical of traditional patriarchal structures. Moreover, as is the case with many parallel embedded narratives written for adults, such texts written for children—-e.g., E. L. Konigsburg's From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler or Virginia Hamilton's Arilla Sun Down —tend to foreground the discourse of art and creativity because the story-within-a-story creates an atmosphere wherein the very nature of narrative becomes a fundamental issue. Embedded narratives therefore question narrative linearity by demonstrating that "life, as well as novels, is constructed through frames, and that it is finally impossible to know where one frame ends and another begins" (Waugh 29). This self-reflexivity about the arbitrary and constructed nature of narratives implicitly lends itself to a critique of the dominant traditions of fictional realism (Waugh 28-34, 78).3 Some recent children's novels with nested narrative structures exercise their critique of traditional realism by encoding the text with both a form and content that evokes maternity; for example, nested narratives that explore the relationships between mother- or grandmother- figures and their daughter- or granddaughter-figures, such as From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler (1967), Arilla Sun Down (1976), Patricia MacLachlan's Unclaimed Treasures (1984), and Pam Conrad's My Daniel (1989). In the course of investigating various aspects of metaphorical or actual mother daughter relationships, these books rely on themes of birth or maternity to enact what Nancy Chodorow calls the reproduction of mothering.4 All four of the girl protagonists in these novels are engaged in the process of learning to value maternal relationships. Part of what is unique in children's novels that use embedded narratives to communicate maternal discourse is the way such texts reproduce mothering not only thematically, by privileging maternal relationships and images, but also in the way that the texts reproduce mothering through narrative structure. In and of itself, the narrative structure of the embedded narrative evokes for the reader a textual representation of a mother's pregnant body. With its housing of one narrative body within another narrative, the structure implies feminine fertility, so nested narratives can themselves become a child-of-the-mother image; the subnarratives are the offspring ofthe narrative. The very structure of a nested narrative places a metaphorical value on birth. Moreover, rather than relying on the linear plot that is considered conventional for children's literature and that evokes the hierarchical logic Carol Gilligan associates with masculine decision-making, the maternal embedded narrative evokes the awareness of interpersonal connections that Gilligan associates with feminine decision-making.5 The story-within-the-story establishes a web-like structure from within which a story-teller communicates about the importance of community. The structural pattern of the nested narrative represents the interconnectedness of narratives, while the thematic content of the story emphasizes the interconnectedness of relationships, especially between mother and daughter figures. Nested narratives that follow this pattern reproduce mothering in that they articulate the maternal process as a creative, artistic process. When this articulation occurs, the text joins form and function to engender a valorization of the maternal body. This pattern may encourage child readers to question patriarchal traditions, including such social traditions as delegitimizing motherhood and such prescribed narrative traditions in children's literature as the...

Maternal discourse features used with language-normal preschoolers with facial deformities.

Discourse features of 10 mothers of language-normal preschool children with repaired cleft palates were examined. Mothers had been provided training in infant stimulation. Fifty-six percent of the communication initiations within the mother-child dyads were made by the mothers. That level of responsibility for continuity of communication resembles the percentage of discourse initiation reported for mothers of language-normal children without orofacial clefts. All categories of utterance types were used by the subjects; a predominance was found among attention-getters and indirect directives. Distribution of discourse features appears to differ from that reported for mothers of both language-normal and language-impaired children who do not have orofacial clefts.

Discourse and the acquisition of grammatical morphemes

Adult recasts of child utterances have been shown to be related in a general way to the child's acquisition of syntactic structures. The current study had two aims. The first aim was to determine which feature(s) of recasts (i.e. reformulation, expansion, topic continuation, or reply) was responsible for facilitating language acquisition by comparing them to other maternal discourse models that were systematically defined by these properties. The second aim was to investigate this relation more specifically by relating adult discourse models of specific grammatical morphemes to the child's acquisition of those same morphemes. Again, recasts were of particular interest. Twelve mother-child dyads were videorecorded during one hour of naturalistic interaction when the children were 1; 10 and 2; 4. Results indicated that maternal recasts of specific morphemes were related to the acquisition of those same grammatical morphemes during certain developmental periods, whereas other grammatical morphemes were facilitated by expansions and topic continuations. These results are discussed in terms of the processes responsible for these effects.

Maternal Discourse and the Romance of Self-Possession in Kate Chopin's the Awakening

Maternal Discourse and the Romance of Self-Possession in Kate Chopin's the Awakening

The Body Politics of Julia Kristeva

Julia Kristeva attempts to expose the limits of Lacan's theory of language by revealing the semiotic dimension of language that it excludes. She argues that the semiotic potential of language is subversive, and describes the semiotic as a poetic-maternal linguistic practice that disrupts the symbolic, understood as culturally intelligible rule-governed speech. In the course of arguing that the semiotic contests the universality of the Symbolic, Kristeva makes several theoretical moves which end up consolidating the power of the Symbolic and paternal authority generally. She defends a maternal instinct as a pre-discursive biological necessity, thereby naturalizing a specific cultural configuration of maternity. In her use of psychoanalytic theory, she ends up claiming the cultural unintelligibility of lesbianism. Her distinction between the semiotic and the Symbolic operates to foreclose a cultural investigation into the genesis of precisely those feminine principles for which she claims a pre-discursive, naturalistic ontology. Although she claims that the maternal aspects of language are repressed in Symbolic speech and provide a critical possibility of displacing the hegemony of the paternal/symbolic, her very descriptions of the maternal appear to accept rather than contest the inevitable hegemony of the Symbolic. In conclusion, this essay offers a genealogical critique of the maternal discourse in Kristeva and suggests that recourse to the maternal does not constitute a subversive strategy as Kristeva appears to assume.