Child-mother relationships provide an important context for children to learn about their environment and about how to interact with peers and other adults. Thus, the study of child-parent relationships is a key to understanding all socialization processes of children. The basis for the formation and maintenance of child-mother relationships are everyday interactions. This program of research will explore the relation between those interactions and children's competence in other contexts such as preschool settings.
Research on these issues is scant, despite the fact that the preschool years are likely to be a time when child-mother relationships are consolidated, with implications for children's adaptation to social exchanges with others, and for children's socialization outcomes in general. Findings may have important implications for prevention and intervention issues in families from the populations studied.
This project has two objectives. The first is to investigate child-mother relationships processes in the domains of behavior and mental representation during early childhood (3.5 to 5 years of age). Further, we will study the relations between child-mother relationships and children's social competence (i.e., social exchanges with peers and other adults). To accomplish this, observations of maternal and child behavior at home and in playgrounds will be conducted. Narratives regarding child-mother relationships will also be obtained from mothers and children, as well as an assessment of mother-child joint interaction regarding attachment related issues. Finally, data on children's behavior during social interactions with peers and adults will be obtained from preschool teachers.
The second objective of the research is to investigate and compare the relationship processes mentioned above and their ability to predict social competence in samples of dyads from two different cultural contexts. Information will be collected from both U.S. and Colombian children. Although the tendency to form relationships with primary caregivers is characteristic of all humans, child-mother relationships are context sensitive. We will compare the data from both samples to determine common as well as sample specific patterns of association among the variables.
