Immediate and Longer-Term Effects of Modeling Desired Behavior and Collaborating when Toddlers are Noncompliant

Although Bandura’s social modeling theory has been widely validated, the effectiveness of parental modeling of appropriate behavior during child noncompliance has not been studied. This study therefore investigated the effectiveness of optimal-looking modeling (“deliberate”) and indifferent modeling (“indirect”) for getting toddlers to comply during an observed cleanup task and for changes in their effortful control and behavior problems during the next two to 16 months. It also investigated parent-child collaborating, a more interactive alternative, in which mothers handed toys to toddlers and encouraged them to put them away. Videoclips of 85 mothers and their toddlers (17 to 31 months old) during a cleanup task were used to code deliberate modeling, indirect modeling, and collaborating. Mothers also completed the Child Behavior Checklist and Rothbart’s measure of effort control. Collaborating and indirect modeling increased child compliance in the next 5 to 15 s in a lag-2 autoregressive (AR-2) multilevel analysis of the observational data. Whether used for noncompliance or to maintain cooperation, mother-child collaborating also predicted reductions in externalizing problems and increases in effortful control during the next 2 or 16 months, in contrast to deliberate or indirect modeling. The mutually interdependent relational nature of collaborating may account for its effectiveness with toddlers, consistent with positive parenting theories.