No abstract

Examined were the development and correlates of children's strategies for resisting maternal control. Subjects were 51 dyads consisting of depressed or nondepressed mothers and their young. Children were 1.5 to 3.5 years of age at first observation and 5 years old during the second. Data on parent and child behaviors were coded from 9 hours of videotapes of spontaneous interactions. Active and passive forms of noncompliance were distinguished; active noncompliance behaviors were also coded in terms of their quality as interpersonal influence strategies. Findings indicated that developmenta. changes in children's responses to control were consistent with a perspective on noncompliance that emphasizes children's growth as autonomous agents and developing social skills. Aversive strategies such as passive noncompliance and direct defiance decreased with age while relatively more sophisticated forms of resistance, simple refusal and negotiation, increased with age. Both compliance and quality of noncompliance were predictable over time.Children 5 years of age who used skillful forms of noncompliance tended to use skillful strategies when making requests. At both ages only unskillful forms of noncompliance were related to maternal perceptions of children's maladjustment. During toddlerhood only unskillful forms of noncompliance were associated with observed negative affect in the mother. Overall, boys used more defiance and refusals than girls. Girls were more compliant than boys in families with well mothers.

This study examined developmental changes in maternal control strategies and children's responses to maternal directives and associations between the interactive strategies of mothers and children. The subjects were 70 dyads consisting of depressed and nondepressed mothers and their 1 l h-to 3'/zyear-old children. Data on parent and child behaviors were coded from videotapes of spontaneous interactions in a naturalistic apartment setting. Developmental analyses of maternal control strategies indicated a shift from the physical to the verbal modalities with age. Maternal explanations, bargaining, and reprimands increased with age and distraction decreased with age. Developmental changes in children's responses to control were consistent with a social skill perspective on children's noncompliance. Passive noncompliance and direct defiance decreased with age, whereas negotiation, the relatively more sophisticated form of resistance, increased with age. Mothers' use of reasoning and suggestion were associated with the children's use of negotiation as a form of resistance, whereas relatively direct maternal strategies were associated with the children's defiant responses. Girls were more compliant than boys, but only in families with well, rather than depressed, mothers.An influential conception of children's functioning in parent-child interactions is immediate compliance or noncompliance to parental directives. "Young children comply with approximately 60% to 80% of the commands and requests of their parents (Forehand, 1977). Compliance has been used to index self-regulation (Vaughan, Kopp, & Krakow, 1984) and is associated with secure attachment (Stayton, Hogan, & Ainsworth, 1971) and successful adaptation to family stress (Hetherington, Cox, & Cox, 1982). Serious noncompliant behavior is the most frequent reason for psychiatric referral of young children (Bentovim, 1973;Forehand, 1977;Wolff, 1961).A limitation of compliance and noncompliance constructs is that they inherently reflect conceptualizations of the child as a passive recipient of parental influence. Despite increased emphasis on bidirectional influences, the principal focus of research has remained on parental strategies for controlling children's behavior and on children's susceptibility to parental influence. As descriptive categories, compliance and noncompliance offer little scope for describing how children actively function as agents of influence in their own right.

Traditional theories of how children acquire values or standards of behavior have emphasized the importance of specific parenting techniques or styles and have acknowledged the importance of a responsive parent-child relationship, but they have failed to differentiate among forms of responsiveness, have stressed internalization of values as the desired outcome, and have limited their scope to a small set of parenting strategies or methods. This paper outlines new directions for research. It acknowledges the central importance of parents and argues for research that (1) demonstrates that parental understanding of a particular child's characteristics and situation rather than use of specific strategies or styles is the mark of effective parenting; (2) traces the differential impact of varieties of parent responsiveness; (3) assesses the conditions surrounding the fact that parents have goals other than internalization when socializing their children, and evaluates the impact of that fact; and (4) considers a wider range of parenting strategies.

Patterns of attachment were examined in normal and depressed mothers. Mother's diagnosis (bipolar, major unipolar, or minor depression, or no psychiatric disorder), self-reported current mood states, and affective behavior in interaction with the child were considered. A modified version of Ainsworth and Wittig's Strange Situation was used to assess attachment. Insecure (A, C, and A/C patterns) attachments were more common among children of mothers with a major depression (bipolar or unipolar) than among children of mothers with minor depression or among children of normal mothers. Insecure attachment was more frequent in children of mothers with bipolar depression than in children of mothers with unipolar depression. A/C attachments were associated with histories of most severe depression in the mother. In families in which mothers were depressed, depression in the father did not increase the likelihood of anxious attachment between mother and child. However, if mothers with a major affective disorder were without a husband in the household, risk of an insecure mother-child attachment was significantly increased. The mothers' expressed emotions (positive vs. negative) in interaction with their children in situations other than the Strange Situation, and independent of diagnosis, predicted patterns of attachment: mothers of insecurely attached children expressed more negative and less positive emotion. Mothers' self-reports of moods on the days they were observed were unrelated to attachment. Results are discussed in terms of the transmission of social and emotional disorders in relation to mothers' affective functioning.