2 Parental Styles of Interaction during Reminiscing and Play: Relations to Children's Attachment Open Access
Zaman, Widaad (2012)
Abstract
Parental Styles of Interaction during Reminiscing and Play:
Relations to Children's Attachment
By: Widaad Zaman
Sensitive parenting is key to the development of attachment in
infants and children. Yet, what sensitive parenting constitutes may
differ greatly between mothers and fathers, and attachment research
has failed to systematically take this into account, focusing
primarily instead on the antecedents of mother-child attachment,
and generalizing to the father-child bond. However, studies suggest
that mothers and fathers differ in their overall patterns of
conversations and play with young children (e.g., Leaper, Anderson
& Sanders, 1998), and these differences may result in
differential relations to children's attachment (e.g., Grossmann et
al., 2002). Yet, no study has directly compared maternal and
paternal reminiscing and play in relation to children's attachment.
Here, I examined how differences between maternal and paternal
might differentially relate to children's attachment. Parent-child
dyads from 47 families with a four-year old child reminisced about
a happy, sad, peer conflict, parental conflict, playground and
special outing experience of the child, and engaged in 10 minutes
of free play. Narratives were coded for cognitive elaboration and
joint engagement; play interactions were coded for parental
intersubjective and challenging play. Children completed the
MacArthur Story Stem Battery for attachment. Mothers were found to
be more elaborative and engaged with children than fathers,
regardless of the type of event being discussed. Mothers were also
more consistently elaborative and engaged with daughters than sons
across discussions about negative experiences. There were
surprisingly no differences between maternal and paternal quality
of play, and no relations between maternal reminiscing, play and
attachment. However, fathers' elaborative and engaged reminiscing
about happy and play experiences, and their intersubjective and
challenging play were related to sons' attachment security. Results
suggest that gender differences in parental interactions with
children may reflect and contribute to qualitatively different
representations of the mother and father as attachment figures.
A dissertation submitted to the
Faculty of the James T. Laney School of Graduate Studies of Emory
University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy
in Psychology
Department of Psychology
2012
Table of Contents
Abstract...4
Introduction: Parental Styles of Interaction during Reminiscing and
Play: Relations to Children's Attachment...5
Study 1: Gender Differences in Elaborative Parent-Child Emotion and
Play Narratives
Title Page...34
Abstract...35
Introduction...36
Method...45
Results...49
Discussion...54
References...62
Table 1: Coding for Cognitive Elaboration and Joint
Engagement...70
Table 2: Mean Words Used by Parents by Gender of
Child...71
Table 3: Means for Cognitive Elaboration and Joint
Engagement...72
Table 4: Correlations for Cognitive Elaboration...73
Table 5: Correlations for Joint Engagement...74
Appendix A...75
Study 2: Parent-Child Patterns of Reminiscing and Play: Relations to Children's Attachment
Title Page...78
Abstract...79
Introduction...80
Method...91
Results...99
Discussion...103
References...110
Table 1: Descriptions of the MSSB Story Stems...116
Table 2: Coding for Reminiscing Narratives...117
Table 3: Coding for Free Play Interactions...118
Table 4: Pearson's Correlations between Reminiscing, Play and
Attachment...119
Appendix A...120
Appendix B...121
Discussion...123
References...137
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