Children who experience difficulties in their social relationships with their peers are at risk for later problems of social and emotional adjustment. However, little is known about the antecedents of these individual differences across children. The goal of this project is to explore the contributions of the family in the development of social competence with peers. Children and their families (both mother and fathers) have been followed yearly since kindergarten and will be evaluated again when they are in middle childhood (grades four through six), during the grant period. The project will evaluate several aspects of this issue, namely: (1) the impact of parent-child interaction on peer relationships, (2) the impact of the parent as advisor and (3) the role of the parent as a provider of opportunities for contact with other children. A multimethod, longitudinal approach is used involving self- report and observational measures in both naturalistic and laboratory contexts. In addition to focusing on emotional processes including children's emotional understanding and emotional regulation and cognitive determining parental management activities and children's social behavior will be examined. The project will permit us to identify (1) the changing role of the three parental influence sources across time, (2) the relative importance of these three sets of strategies as a function of children's social acceptance, and (3) the cross time relationships between changes in these strategies and changes in children's social behavior with their peers and suggest strategies for the modification of family patterns that would, in turn, lead to improvements in children's social competence.
| Isley, S L; O'Neil, R; Clatfelter, D et al. (1999) Parent and child expressed affect and children's social competence: modeling direct and indirect pathways. Dev Psychol 35:547-60 |
