Links between mothers’ coping styles, toddler reactivity, and sensitivity to toddler's negative emotions
Highlights
► Examined links between maternal coping, toddler reactivity, and sensitivity. ► Disengaged coping was positively associated with reported insensitivity. ► An interaction was found for engaged coping and reactivity on reported insensitivity. ► High engaged coping reduced negative effect of reactivity on observed sensitivity.
Section snippets
Maternal sensitivity to negative emotions and child outcomes
Maternal sensitivity refers to mothers’ timely and appropriate responses to their children's cues with respect to their developmental level and the demands of the situation (Ainsworth, Blehar, Waters, & Wall, 1978). Maternal sensitivity is important because it fosters children's adaptive social and emotional outcomes (Denham and Grout, 1993, Fabes et al., 2001). Specifically, sensitivity to children's negative emotions is associated with children's subsequent ability to be more sympathetic,
Links between maternal coping and responsiveness to children's negative emotions
Parenting is an inherently stressful process that occurs within an affective context (Dix, 1991). When toddlers behave in ways that are not congruent with mothers’ goals and expectations, negative emotions are likely to occur, and this can create stress for mothers. How mothers cope with this stress is important for the affective context in which the mother–toddler relationship develops and evidence that how mothers think and feel about emotions are an important predictor of their behavior (
The role of child temperament
Child reactivity has also been linked with sensitivity in early childhood. Reactivity is defined as a temperamental characteristic typically indicated by the frequency and intensity of vocal, facial, motor, and physiological indices of stress (Rothbart & Bates, 1998). Infants who display distress intensely or frequently may be more difficult to care for as evidenced by greater parenting stress (Belsky, 1984) and more negative parental emotions (Crockenberg and Leerkes, 2003, Dix, 1991) among
Participants
Eighty-nine primiparous mothers participated in a follow-up study from a larger longitudinal sample (N = 118) when children were 16 months old. At the follow-up, significantly more minorities dropped out of the study than European-Americans, χ2(1, N = 118) = 4.29, p < .05. In the final sample, maternal age ranged from 17 to 38 (M = 28.3) and the majority were European-American (81%) or African-American (15%). Ninety-seven percent of the mothers were married to, living with, or dating the child's father;
Preliminary analysis
Data was examined for missing values before analysis. Given that 4.78% of data were missing a single imputation was done using NORM software (Schafer, 1999). Maternal age, minority status (0 = European-American, 1 = Minority), education, income, and child gender were examined as potential covariates; none were significantly associated with any of the outcome variables and were not considered any further. Correlations and descriptive statistics for all predictor and outcome variables are in Table 2.
Hierarchical multiple regression models
Discussion
The goal of this study was to examine links between maternal coping and subsequent reported and observed sensitivity to toddler negative emotions. The results supported the hypotheses that maternal coping styles would be adaptive in relation to sensitivity to toddlers’ negative emotions and would buffer mothers from the negative effect of toddler temperamental reactivity on sensitivity. The nature of the effects, however, varied for engaged and disengaged coping styles as described below. In
Acknowledgements
This research was supported by R03 HD048691, a New Faculty Grant and Summer Excellence Award from UNCG, and funds from the HES Center for Research awarded to the second author. Special thanks to the participating families for their time.
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