“Because I said so!”: Mothers’ conventional conflict justifications related to resolution and child behavior problems and temperamental reactivity

Abstract

A common strategy parents use to justify their point of view during parent–child conflict is conventional reasoning, which focuses on child obedience to authority. In this brief report, we examined mothers’ use of conventional justification during mother–child conflict discussions in relation to the resolution reached and children’s behavior problems and temperamental reactivity concurrently and longitudinally. Participants included 190 mothers and their 5- to 7-year-old children. Dyads engaged in a conflict discussion task in the laboratory, which was coded for mothers’ use of conventional justification and the type of resolution reached. Mothers reported on child behavior problems and temperamental reactivity then and 1 year later. Results showed mothers used more conventional reasoning during conflict discussions that resulted in a win/loss resolution compared to a compromise. Mothers’ conventional reasoning was concurrently associated with more child externalizing behaviors and temperamental reactivity at Year 1. Mothers’ conventional reasoning did not relate to changes in child behaviors over time. Findings are discussed in terms of mothers’ conceptions of parental authority and possible directions of effects.

Keywords

Conventional reasoning behavior problems mother–child interaction conflict middle childhood child temperament

Get full access to this article

View all access options for this article.

References

Achenbach

T. M.

(1991). Manual for the child behavior checklist/4-18 and profile. University of Vermont, Department of Psychiatry.

Blandon

A. Y.

Calkins

S. D.

Keane

S. P.

O’Brien

(2010). Contributions of child’s physiology and maternal behavior to children’s trajectories of temperamental reactivity. Developmental Psychology, 46(5), 1089–1102. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0020678

Boyer

B. P.

Scott

J. K.

Nelson

J. A.

(2016). Maternal conflict behavior profiles and child social skills. Social Development, 25(4), 759–776. https://doi.org/10.1111/sode.12169

Campbell

Gilmore

(2007). Intergenerational continuities and discontinuities in parenting styles. Australian Journal of Psychology, 59(3), 140–150. https://doi.org/10.1080/00049530701449471

Coplan

R. J.

Hastings

P. D.

Lagace-Seguin

D. G.

Moulton

C. E.

(2002). Authoritative and authoritarian mothers’ parenting goals, attributions, and emotions across different childrearing contexts. Parenting: Science & Practice, 2(1), 1–26. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15327922par0201_1

Davidson

Turiel

Black

(1983). The effect of stimulus familiarity on the use of criteria and justifications in children’s social reasoning. British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 1(1), 49–65. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.2044-835x.1983.tb00543.x

Dunn

Brown

(1994). Affect expression in the family, children’s understanding of emotions, and their interactions with others. Merrill-Palmer Quarterly, 40(1), 120–137. https://www.jstor.org/stable/23087911

Finley

G. E.

Mira

S. D.

Schwartz

S. J.

(2008). Perceived paternal and maternal involvement: Factor structures, mean differences, and parental roles. Fathering, 6(1), 62–82. https://doi.org/10.3149/fth.0601.62

Flouri

Midouhas

(2017). Environmental adversity and children’s early trajectories of problem behavior: The role of harsh parental discipline. Journal of Family Psychology, 31(2), 234–243. https://doi.org/10.1037/fam0000258

10.

García-Ruiz

Rodrigo

Hernández-Cabrera

Máiquez

Deković

(2013). Resolution of parent–child conflicts in the adolescence. European Journal of Psychology of Education, 28, 173–188. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10212-012-0108-7

11.

Garner

P. W.

(2012). Children’s emotional responsiveness and sociomoral understanding and associations with mothers’ and fathers’ socialization practices. Infant Mental Health Journal, 33(1), 95–106. https://doi.org/10.1002/imhj.20339

12.

Kerns

K. A.

(2008). Attachment in middle childhood. In Cassidy

Shaver

P. R.

(Eds.), Handbook of attachment: Theory, research, and clinical applications (2nd ed., pp. 366–382). Guilford Press.

13.

Laible

Thompson

(2002). Mother–child conflict in the toddler years: Lessons in emotion, morality, and relationships. Child Development, 73(4), 1187–1203. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8624.00466

14.

Luster

Rhoades

Haas

(1989). The relation between parental values and parenting behavior: A test of the Kohn hypothesis. Journal of Marriage and the Family, 51(1), 139–147. https://doi.org/10.2307/352375

15.

Maccoby

(1992). The role of parents in the socialization of children: An historical overview. Developmental Psychology, 28(6), 1006–1017. https://doi.org/10.1037/0012-1649.28.6.1006

16.

Nelson

J. A.

Boyer

B. P.

Sang

S. A.

Wilson

E. K.

(2014). Characteristics of mother–child conflict and child sex predicting resolution. Journal of Family Psychology, 28(2), 160–167. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0035990

17.

Nucci

Smetana

J. G.

(1996). Mothers’ concept of young children’s areas of personal freedom. Child Development, 67(4), 1870–1886. https://doi.org/10.2307/1131737

18.

Perlman

Siddiqui

Ram

Ross

H. S.

(2000). An analysis of sources of power in children’s conflict interactions. In Mills

R. S. L.

Duck

(Eds.), The Developmental psychology of personal relationships (pp. 155–174). John Wiley.

19.

Putnam

S. P.

Rothbart

M. K.

(2006). Development of short and very short forms of the children’s behavior questionnaire. Journal of Personality Assessment, 87(1), 102–112. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15327752jpa8701_09

20.

Robin

A. L.

Foster

S. L.

(1989). Negotiating parent–adolescent conflict: A behavioral family systems approach. Guilford Press. https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.26-6566

21.

Sim

T. N

Chin

J. E. H.

(2014). Do mothers’ and fathers’ authoritative and authoritarian parenting interact? An exploration on schooling aspects with a Singapore adolescent sample. Youth & Society, 46(2), 286–300. https://doi.org/10.1177/0044118x12441188

22.

Smetana

J. G.

(1989). Adolescents’ and parents’ reasoning about actual family conflict. Child Development, 60(5), 1052–1067. https://doi.org/10.2307/1130779

23.

Smetana

J. G.

(2013). Young children’s moral and social-conventional understanding. In Banaji

M. R.

Gelman

S. A.

(Eds.), Oxford series in social cognition and social neuroscience. Navigating the social world: What infants, children, and other species can teach us (pp. 352–355). Oxford University Press.

24.

Smetana

J. G.

Daddis

Chuang

S. S.

(2003). “Clean your room!” A longitudinal investigation of adolescent parent conflict and conflict resolution in middle-class African American families. Journal of Adolescent Research, 18(6), 631–650. https://doi.org/10.1177/0743558403254781

25.

Steinberg

Darling

N. E.

Fletcher

A. C.

(1995). Authoritative parenting and adolescent adjustment: An ecological journey. In Moen

Elder

G. H.

Luscher

(Eds.), Examining lives in context: Perspectives on the ecology of human development (pp. 423–466). American Psychological Association. https://doi.org/10.1037/10176-012

26.

Turiel

(1998). Moral development. In Damon

Eisenberg

(Eds.), Handbook of child psychology: Social, emotional, and personality development (pp. 863–932). Wiley.

27.

Vuchinich

(1999). Problem solving in families: Research and practice. Sage.

Supplementary Material

Please find the following supplemental material available below.

For Open Access articles published under a Creative Commons License, all supplemental material carries the same license as the article it is associated with.

For non-Open Access articles published, all supplemental material carries a non-exclusive license, and permission requests for re-use of supplemental material or any part of supplemental material shall be sent directly to the copyright owner as specified in the copyright notice associated with the article.

0.00 MB

0.08 MB