Proximal family processes
precedes the child’s behaviour change. However, the authors recognise that it is still
likely that to some unidentified extent the parenting style may have been invoked by
the children at earlier stages of development, thus making causal estimation difficult.
Moreover, it is also possible that the parenting practice proxies for other features of
parent capability or cognition drive not just the level of the outcome at period 1 but
also the change over time. However, these results indicate that parenting practices are
strong indicators of children’s developmental outcomes.
Rubin et al. (2002) obtained similar results for maternal intrusiveness, which predicts
children’s subsequent internalising behavioural problems conditioning on earlier
levels of these problems. If mothers demonstrated relatively high frequencies of
intrusive control and/or derisive comments, then the association between their
toddlers’ inhibition and four year old social reticence was significant and positive;
whereas if mothers were neither intrusive nor derisive, then toddlers’ inhibition and 4-
year reticence were not significantly associated. Maternal intrusive behaviour is thus
posited as moderating the predictive association between toddler peer inhibition and
pre-schooler’s social reticence; toddler peer inhibition together with maternal
intrusiveness indicates risk, inhibition without intrusiveness does not.
In a study exploring mother-toddler conflict, Laible and Thompson (2002) found that
the most consistent predictors of socio-emotional and socio-moral competence in
infants at age three were the strategies employed by mothers during conflict and
maternal resolution of conflict at 30 months. High levels of maternal justification, i.e.
use of clarification, reasoning and requests for clarification (and low levels of
aggravation, i.e. use of threats, teasing, or simple insistence without clarification) and
maternal resolution in home conflicts at 30 months were related to higher levels of
emotional understanding at age 3. Similarly, high levels of maternal justification (and
low levels of aggravation) in lab conflicts were associated with high levels of
behavioural internalisation in resistance to temptation.
2.2.2 The effects of prior parental education on parenting style
Klebanov et al. (1994) found evidence of an association between mother’s education
and parenting style as assessed by the HOME scale. Of all the familial variables
studied (including family income, family size, teenage birth, female headship and
ethnicity), maternal education was most predictive of parenting style.
Recent evidence from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics - Child Development
Study (PSID-CDS) similarly report that mothers with less than a high school
education are less likely to show their child warmth than are parents with higher
levels of educational attainment. For example, 75% of mothers with less than a high
school education hug or show physical affection to their child at least once a day,
compared to 87% of mothers with a high school diploma, 91% of mothers with some
college and 94% of mothers with college degrees. Similarly, more college-educated
fathers (77%) report hugging their child daily than do fathers with less than a high
school education (68%) or fathers with a high school diploma (70%) (Trends, 2002).
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