The study investigated the role of parental perceived control in child development. A discussion of the conceptual bases of two parental locus-of-control scales led to differential predictions as regards their relations with parent experiences during infancy and child problems and competencies at 4 and 9 years. The Parental Control of Child’s Behaviour scale was suggested to measure perceived control and to be related to infancy factors and child outcomes. The Parental Responsibility scale was tentatively seen as measuring a stereotypic view, and associations with infancy aspects and child outcomes were not predicted. In a normal longitudinal sample of 103 families, mothers’ and fathers’ control ratings were obtained at ages 33 months and 9 years. In contrast to parental responsibility ratings, parental control ratings were predicted by child difficultness and parental adaptation during infancy, and more perceived control was associated with fewer problems and more competence both longitudinally and concurrently. Both fathers’ and mothers’ perceived control was important. It was further concluded that the Parental Control scale could function as a psychometrically adequate measure of how parents perceive their actual control in the rearing situation.
Documentation has become an important issue for policy, practice and accountability in many national contexts. The documentation of children's activities is a requirement in the national syllabus for the Swedish preschool. However, the documentation of children is always a social construction that focuses on certain things and excludes (possible) others. Such constructions can be linked to broader discourses of the competent and self-governed child, and the tendency to label the child as autonomous and competent in policy documents. The purpose of this article is to explore how constructions of the competent and self-governed child are performed in documentation panels in Swedish preschools. The theoretical framework is taken from visual methodology combined with an analysis of intertextuality. Three images (pictures and written text) of the preschool are discerned: the child as a good pal; the child as an autonomous investigator; and the child as a public speaker. In all three images, the children are depicted as competent in different respects. The result is discussed by relating the findings to broader discourses emphasising the competent and self-governed child.
The study aimed at an understanding of child-teacher interactions in school preparatory classrooms. Relations between observed interactions and sex of the child, teachers' ratings of their perceived control, and of children's undercontrolled and overcontrolled problem behaviors, social competence and work efficiency were studied. Thirty-six teachers and 92 six-year-olds, 39 girls and 53 boys, from 19 classrooms were directly observed on 2-5 occasions during a total mean of 60 minutes per child. The results showed that interactions involving teacher support behaviors were the most common, but comparatively less well explained by the predictors. Associations were found between perceived control and two types of teacher command interactions. For teacher commands initiated by child externalizing behavior, the relation with perceived control was shown to hold for boys only. Male sex and rated undercontrolled problems were predictive of more interactions initiated with externalizing behaviors and also of more restrictive teacher responses following child positive behaviors. Overcontrolled children, who had teachers high in perceived control, were more often met with support behavior when they were off-task. It was concluded that teacher perceptions of control and of child behaviors as well as sex of the child contribute to ongoing processes in preschool classrooms and that the chosen methodology could be used to further the search for factors affecting interactions in preschool settings.
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