Age-Related Differences in Children’s and Mothers’ Strategies for Regulating Children’s Behavior
Open Access
- Author:
- Cardwell, Gabrielle
- Graduate Program:
- Psychology
- Degree:
- Master of Science
- Document Type:
- Master Thesis
- Date of Defense:
- March 22, 2021
- Committee Members:
- Pamela Marie Cole, Thesis Advisor/Co-Advisor
Ginger A Moore, Committee Member
Kristin Buss (She/Her), Program Head/Chair
Erika Sell Lunkenheimer, Committee Member - Keywords:
- Self-regulation
Child development
Parenting - Abstract:
- The leading developmental model posits that infants and toddlers primarily rely on their caregivers as an external source of regulation and, during the transition from toddlerhood to kindergarten, children begin to make use of their own internal cognitive resources to regulate behavior (Kopp, 1982). However, there are few existing studies testing this model directly. Our study aims to address two gaps in the literature: how children’s engagement of cognitive resources through strategy behaviors differs as a function of age during early childhood, and how parents continue to intervene to act as a source of external regulation during this period. We investigated age-related differences in children’s strategic behaviors and mothers’ interventions during a challenging waiting (delayed reward) task. We also examined whether differences in children’s effortful control, a dimension of temperament, explains any age-related differences observed. Moreover, we considered temporal features of children’s and mothers’ behaviors in terms of (a) their frequency, latency, and average duration, and (b) how those indices change as a function of increasing challenge of the task. The participants were 154 mothers and their children (77 boys, 77 girls) between the ages of 30 to 60 months (M = 45.15 months, SD = 8.23) who participated in a 9-minute task in which mothers told their children to wait to open a gift. In line with a leading developmental model (Kopp, 1982), results of multilevel models reveal maternal and child behavior differ as a function of child age and experimentally induced perturbations, but not as a function of children’s temperamental effortful control.