Mother Emotion, Child Temperament, and Young Children's Helpless Responses to Failure

Smiley, Patricia A.; Tan, Sherylle J.; Goldstein, A; Sweda, Jennifer R.

doi:10.1111/sode.12153

Cited by 7 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 67 publications

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“…Longitudinal research during the past decade also demonstrated specificity in warmth processes. With young children, maternal warmth was associated with less child helplessness during a teaching task, but only when children scored high on sadness (Smiley, Tan, Goldstein, & Sweda, ). This finding suggested that mothers were showing warmth when their children demonstrated a need for support.…”

Section: Strengths In Familiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Family Processes and Children's and Adolescents' Well‐Being

Buehler

2020

J of Marriage and Family

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The primary purpose of this review was to examine theory and research published during the past decade that focused on family processes and children's and adolescents' well‐being. Scholarship focused on family processes and child and adolescent well‐being made significant and exciting advances during this decade based on several key advancements. In addition to a brief introduction and a conclusion, this decade in review is organized into four sections. In the first section, advances made in the literature because of increased attention to complexity and specificity are illustrated. The second section describes advances that were made because of increased attention to family processes in diverse families. Diversity in the samples of families studied, extensions in family process models, and the revisioning of grand theories using a diversity lens that were used to conceptualize family processes are detailed. In the third section, the importance of time in the study of family processes and child and adolescent well‐being is described. The emphasis on families' daily lives is noted. In addition, prospective considerations and studies of change over time are highlighted. Strengths in family functioning are detailed in the fourth section of this article: positivity, regulatory processes, and family organization. These three areas were selected to elaborate the idea that one of the major advancements in the family process literature during the past decade was an emphasis on family strengths. This review concludes with a commentary regarding how conceptual and methodological advancements during the past decade can guide future scholarship.

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Section: Strengths In Familiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Family Processes and Children's and Adolescents' Well‐Being

Buehler

2020

J of Marriage and Family

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“…We reasoned that a low number of strategies named during a solvable puzzle, following the experience of repeated failure to complete unsolvable puzzles, would capture diminished effort by children who respond to failure with maladaptive cognitions about the self and the task. A different version of this task, modified for younger children, has been used to generate similar indices of behavioral helplessness and shown to be unassociated with lower child cognitive competence or maternal education (i.e., factors contributing to puzzle-solving proficiency; Smiley, Buttitta, et al, 2016; Smiley, Tan, Goldstein, & Sweda, 2016). In our sample, puzzle strategy use decreased significantly from pre- to postchallenge, t (136) = 5.71, p < .001; 56% of the sample showed a decrease in strategy use by at least one strategy, and 23% of the sample showed a decrease in strategy use by at least two strategies.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Learning helplessness in the family: Maternal agency and the intergenerational transmission of depressive symptoms.

River¹,

Borelli²,

Vazquez³

et al. 2018

Journal of Family Psychology

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Children of mothers with elevated depressive symptoms may observe and learn a maladaptive cognitive style, including low perceptions of agency, that is, low perceived control over their emotions and circumstances. In turn, children may face increased cognitive vulnerability to depressive symptoms; however, this mediational model has yet to be tested. Using a longitudinal design and testing our hypotheses within a community sample, we investigated the mediating role of maternal agency in the associations between maternal depressive symptoms and child behavioral helplessness and depressive symptoms one and a half years later (M ϭ 18.58 months, SD ϭ 6.91 months). A diverse sample of school-age children (N ϭ 137, 57.4% female, M age ϭ 9.74 years, SD age ϭ 1.51 years) and their mothers (N ϭ 122) reported on their depressive symptoms at Time 1. A subsample of children and mothers returned to report on depressive symptoms at Time 2 (N ϭ 68 dyads; 49 with complete data prior to multiple imputation). Maternal agency was coded from narrative responses to the Parent Development Interview-Revised for Parents of School-aged Children (Slade et al., 2009), completed at Time 1. Child behavioral helplessness was indicated by low strategy use at the end of a challenging puzzle task at Time 2. Results revealed that lower maternal agency predicted higher child depressive symptoms at Time 2 and mediated the associations between higher maternal depressive symptoms at Time 1 and higher child behavioral helplessness and depressive symptoms at Time 2. Implications for clinical intervention and future investigations are discussed.

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“…School-aged children experience a variety of discrete emotions including excitement, shame, and embarrassment when encountering challenges (Heyman et al, 1992; Lewis et al, 2010; Smiley et al, 2016). Emotional responses like these can be measured via self-assessment, observation, or neurophysiological markers (Zeman et al, 2007) and can be more generally understood in terms of two dimensions: emotional arousal (i.e., the intensity of an emotion) and emotional valence (i.e., the pleasantness or unpleasantness of an emotion; Barrett & Russell, 1999).…”

Section: Mother–child Dyadic Responses To Challenging Situations In M...mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…A moderate amount of targeted parental control (e.g., giving instructions only when the child desires assistance) could be perceived by children as supportive “controlling guidance” that reflects a sensitive response to a child’s request for help (Chua et al, 2014). Indeed, responses like these could help children cope with helplessness and anxiety (Nanda et al, 2012; Smiley et al, 2016). However, limited work has been conducted on the relation between children’s perceptions of challenge and parents’ behavior; controlled laboratory paradigms are preferable in order to delineate factors that affect these responses.…”

Section: Mother–child Dyadic Responses To Challenging Situations In M...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Mother–child dyadic responses to children facing challenges: An examination across ethnicities.

Pham,

Chen,

Boparai

et al. 2024

Emotion

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The current study (a) examined ethnic differences in mothers' and children's responses to children's performance in a challenging task, (b) tested the associations among children's desire for assistance, maternal control, and children's emotional responses to the challenge, and (c) explored whether these associations held across three ethnicities-Asian Americans (AA), Latinx Americans (LA), and European Americans (EA). Results showed that children's emotional arousal significantly increased and emotional valence became significantly less positive over the course of children experiencing repeated challenges in front of their mothers. In terms of ethnic differences, LA mothers exhibited more control than EA mothers, but LA children responded less negatively to the challenging task than EA children. AA dyads did not significantly differ from LA or EA dyads on any maternal or child responses. However, regardless of ethnicity, stronger child desire for assistance was associated with greater maternal control and greater maternal control was associated with less emotional arousal and more positive child emotional valence. These findings suggest that, in a challenging context, maternal control is likely experienced by children as guidance that mitigates decreases in positive emotion. Our work has implications for interventions to encourage more emotionally responsive parental involvement with children in late childhood and early adolescence.

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Mother Emotion, Child Temperament, and Young Children's Helpless Responses to Failure

Cited by 7 publications

References 67 publications

Family Processes and Children's and Adolescents' Well‐Being

Family Processes and Children's and Adolescents' Well‐Being

Learning helplessness in the family: Maternal agency and the intergenerational transmission of depressive symptoms.

Mother–child dyadic responses to children facing challenges: An examination across ethnicities.

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