Psychology Impact Assignment

Chapter 5

The Emerging Self and Socialization in the Early Years

Angie is 4 years old; her sister, Mary, just had her second birthday. Their mother, Jennie, and father, Jim, have been somewhat nomadic over the last few years. It started when Jim decided not to re-enlist in the Army and to try for a good paying job in “sales.” He tried large appliance sales, swimming pool sales, lawn service sales, and a few others. Often, when he left a company it was not because he couldn’t hold the job but because he was bored, not making much money, and certain that he was leaving to chase a better opportunity, in a different industry and usually in a different location. Between jobs, his family is essentially homeless. Jennie works as a health care aid. She can usually find work wherever they land, and she faithfully follows Jim on his endless quest. They often stay with family or friends in between Jim’s jobs, but occasionally they live in their car.

Angie seems to adapt well to every change. She is quiet but attentive, and she rarely disobeys or is out of sorts. Little Mary is a different story. She was highly active and reactive as an infant, and her parents regard her now as “impossible,” always getting into things, running off, reacting with temper tantrums when she is prevented from having what she wants, and disregarding the admonitions of the stream of different adults who house the family. The parents manage the two sisters quite differently. They are usually gentle with Angie, showing some warmth and affection, but they tend to just let her play quietly. If she does something “wrong,” such as accidentally breaking a lamp, they react with irritation, but Angie is so cautious that such things rarely happen. The parents are occasionally amused by Mary’s boisterousness, but more often they respond negatively: yelling at her to eat or to stop crying, pulling her roughly away from what they consider dangerous, often expressing anger or disappointment. Their own lives are unpredictable and difficult, and they usually find Mary’s rambunctious impulsiveness a heavy burden.

You can probably see the potential for Angie and Mary to develop rather different ideas about themselves from their different experiences of parenting. Their shared experiences –such as repeated relocations, periods of privation, reactions from people who do (or do not) take them in—are also likely to affect their early self-views.

In this chapter, we will describe the earliest roots of self-development. The role of caregivers is of major significance, but the causal influences are multidimensional. As you can see with Angie and Mary, a child’s temperament impacts parents’ typical responses and management strategies. And these interactive processes unfold within and are influenced by the context of the family and the broader culture. Let’s begin our examination of self-development by considering the rather elusive notion of “self” itself.

The Self-System

“Mirror, mirror on the wall, who is the real me, after all?” Philosophers, poets, wicked stepmothers, and ordinary human beings have pondered versions of this question ever since the ancient Greeks advised, “Know thyself.” The search for self embodies within it many of the profound questions at the heart of the human condition: What is the nature of self-awareness? Are we the same or different across situations and over time? How do people come to understand and accept who they are? Modern cultures are not the first to express interest in these matters, but critics have raised concerns that the level of attention directed toward the self has increased in recent decades. Note the amount of press devoted to the ideas of self-concept, self-esteem, self-enhancement, and self-actualization, and you might agree that we have become downright self-centered!

Those of us in the helping professions are no exception to this trend. Even a cursory review of the professional literature in clinical and educational fields reveals an intense interest in topics related to the self. Therapeutic approaches that emphasize self-development are very common. Educational institutions struggle to incorporate self-development into their more traditional academic objectives. Popular magazines are saturated with advice about self-concept and self-esteem. All together, the pieces add up to a crazy quilt: part folklore, part research, part anecdote,

and part good intention. Our task in this chapter is to unscramble some of this information and present the self in its developmental context. Helpers need to understand the research findings in this critically important area lest they assume that all of our popular, contemporary notions about self-development are valid.

Traditional Conceptions of the Self-System

What constitutes a self? To address this question, theorists and researchers have had to account for the fact that selves are multifaceted and possess elements of both stability and change. If you have ever said that you are not the same person that you were some time ago, you can understand this point. Writers often use the term self-system to replace “self,” because the latter seems too unidimensional. The self-system includes such things as self-as-agent, self-recognition, self-concept, self-regulation, and self-esteem.

The notion of an independent entity called “self” is such a deeply embedded concept in Western psychology that we tend to take it for granted. It may be surprising to learn that in some cultural views of the psyche, mind and matter are seen as changing continually, and this impermanence is viewed as being influenced by surrounding conditions (Bodhi, 1999). In Buddhist psychology, this is the concept of “no self” (anatta). It does not imply that our conventional use of “self” is not helpful or that you and I are not real in some way. Rather, it emphasizes the transient nature of our phenomenological experience as human beings. The self is constantly being constructed in the moment-to-moment flow of experience. This insight is at the core of recent therapies that offer ways to alleviate the suffering that can come from our human tendency to protect and defend reified concepts about ourselves (Chadha, 2017; Olendzki, 2014). The view of “no-self” is quite different from that of classic Western psychology, which assumes a relatively permanent construct that can be studied over time.

We will begin our look at the nature of the self-system within Western psychology with a brief description of the classic work of James, Cooley, and Mead. William James (1890) made a distinction between the “I” and the “Me,” a distinction that still guides contemporary research about the self (Harter, 2013; Prebble, Addis, & Tippett, 2013). That part of the self called “I” refers to the I-self/self-as-subject, as the active agent, or as the knower. It is that part of the self that experiences a sense of subjective self-awareness. The part called “Me” is that part of the self that is the object of self or others’ observations, or in other words, the part that is known. One might think of the “Me” part of the self (Me-Self) as the Me-self/self-concept.

More recently, writers have developed alternative ways of categorizing the classic “I–Me” distinction. Among these are Lewis’s (1994) subjective and objective self-awareness, Case’s (1991) implicit and explicit self, Neisser’s (1993) ecological and remembered self, and Gallagher’s (2000) minimal and narrative self. All the newer contrasts share the original distinction between the self as knower and the self as known. Furthermore, there is consensus between classic and contemporary theorists that the “I” self emerges first.

The “I” is the side of the self that experiences continuity over time. Even though we all grow and change, we know we embody core elements of the same “self” throughout our lifetime. The “I” also recognizes the distinctiveness of the self as a person compared to other persons. You know where you end and the person sitting next to you begins. Finally, the “I” reflects agency; it is the part of the self that engages in self-directed activity, self-control, and contemplation of the “Me.” The “Me” includes all those attributes that are used to define the self and that make up the self-concept. In James’s typology, these are the “material self,” the “social self,” and the “spiritual self,” ranked in that order of importance from lowest to highest. The material self encompasses a person’s physical characteristics and material possessions. The social self includes her social standing, her reputation, and those personal characteristics that are recognized by other such as gregariousness or stubbornness. The spiritual self, viewed by James as the most precious, incorporates her qualities of character, beliefs, and personal values.

Self-esteem is distinct from self-concept but still part of the “Me.” Whereas self-concept is a person’s knowledge of her personal attributes, self-esteem is her evaluation of these attributes. In other words, she assigns a valence to her characteristics, judging them to be good, bad, or neutral. James believed that self-esteem is more than just the measure of accomplishments. Rather, he believed that it depends upon the number of successes we enjoy relative to our aspirations, or, in his terminology, pretensions. Pretensions are goals that we choose to meet for ourselves because of their personal importance. For example, if it is highly important to you to be popular and socially active, the lack of a date for an important New Year’s Eve party can be a real blow to your self-esteem. However, if you really care more about earning enough money to become rich at an early age, you might consider working overtime on New Year’s Eve to be highly congruent with your aspirations. Your dateless condition is less damaging to your self-esteem. Failures or even successes in areas that are relatively unimportant to us may be discounted and will have less effect on self-esteem.

James’s ideas about the structure of the self are usually part of contemporary theorizing (e.g., Verschoor & Hommel, 2017). Another early theorist whose ideas suffuse modern work is Charles Cooley (1902). He introduced a developmental perspective that describes how interactions with others help construct the self-system. Using his now-famous metaphor of the “looking-glass self,” Cooley described the process of self-development as one that originates from observing the reflected appraisals of others, primarily attachment figures. Cooley hypothesized that this process consists of three steps. As we interact with others, we first imagine how we must appear to the other person on a certain dimension, such as intelligence. Then, we interpret or imagine how that other person evaluates us on that certain dimension. Finally, we experience some emotional response to that perceived evaluation. The resulting interpretation and its affective valence are building blocks for constructing self-knowledge. Our self-representations are shaped and given affective valences by the significant people in our life.

Let’s consider a simplified example of a young child’s display of affection for a parent. Imagine that Angie or Mary approaches her father to give him a hug. The father, preoccupied with searching the web for new job opportunities, looks annoyed by the interruption. He gives her a quick hug and returns to his search. If this type of sequence is repeated on a regular basis across various situations, the child may come to develop a “self-idea” that she is bothersome and not important enough to interrupt her father. She may begin to construct a vague impression of herself as unappealing or possibly too emotionally expressive or dependent. Because the child perceives the emotion and interprets her father’s response as impatient and irritated, her view of the event includes a self-appraisal—presumably that she is irritating—that is incorporated into her self-system. With repeated experience, the youngster comes to regard herself in certain ways by looking at the mirror of her parent’s view of her, warped though that mirror might be. The emotional valence associated with this aspect of the child’s self-image can be unpleasant or uncomfortable. This self-representation may serve as a standard for her behavior in social interactions (e.g., in her willingness to express her need for attention and affection from others) and inform her sense of right and wrong.

Now imagine this same little girl in another family. She interrupts her father to give him a hug, and he beams, expressing evident satisfaction in his daughter’s affectionate nature. This child’s self-concept is likely to include a positively valenced sense of being emotionally expressive. The same child and the same behavior could lead to different social responses in different families, setting the child’s developing sense of self, relationships, and morality on a different pathway. Thus early attachment and parenting interactions of many sorts have been viewed as instrumental in the development of individual differences in self-concept (Sroufe, 2016).

Although the development of the self is obviously influenced by many factors and is extraordinarily complex, Cooley believed that it was largely the product of social influences. Recent researchers have investigated the possibility that the sequence Cooley proposed can also operate in reverse order, namely that a positive appraisal of oneself can generate positive interpretations of others’ appraisals.

George Herbert Mead (1934) expanded on Cooley’s work, enlarging the scope of social influence to include the role of language and society in shaping the self-system. He held that children adopt descriptive information about the self, based on what is emphasized in their cultural milieu. They also incorporate those standards, rules, and goals that their family and their culture have determined to be appropriate ways of behaving and thinking. The “ingredients” of people’s self-concepts across cultures can be rather different as a result. In a classic study, for example, Markus and Kitayama (1991) found that Japanese participants were more likely to describe themselves by emphasizing their affiliations, such as family membership, whereas Americans used self-descriptors that emphasized their individuality.

These classic formulations of the self as multidimensional, as influenced by the reflected appraisals of significant others and as shaped by the cultural milieu, provide a foundation for current Western thinking about the self-system. As you will find in this and subsequent chapters, conceptions of self and of morality overlap in these models. Damon and Hart (1992) noted:

Children cannot know themselves without some sense of the other. Nor can they forge their self-identities without an awareness of their own values. Moreover, at all developmental periods, social activities derive from—and in turn shape—judgments about the self, other, and morality. In these and many other ways, self-understanding, social interaction, and morality are intertwined in a developing psychological system that grows and changes throughout the life span. (p. 421)

Self-understanding is one of the key building blocks of personality, social, and moral development. How does this mysterious “self” begin? In the next section, we will review the earliest stages of developing self-awareness.

The Early Development of the Self-System

The Beginnings of the “I” and the “Me”

You learned in Chapter 3 that studying a young infant’s ability to think and to understand the world is very challenging. Learning about the infant’s developing self-system is equally challenging. A child cannot describe herself as “smart” or “funny” until several years after birth. Does this mean there is no sense of self until then? To find out, we have to look for nonverbal indicators of what an infant is experiencing. As you have seen, when behavior has to be interpreted, researchers can disagree about what those behaviors mean. But on the whole, developmental scientists tend to agree that the self-system gradually unfolds, beginning at birth and continuing throughout life. (Discussions of self-development are part of many of the later chapters in this text.) What are the competencies of the infant that make self-development possible? How do these competencies interact with the social relationships that ultimately give birth to the self?

Precursors of Self-Awareness in Infancy—the “Pre-Self” and the “I-Self”

The newborn’s capacities for rudimentary information processing and social bonding provide the building material out of which the self is born. For example, one early competency is the infant’s ability to imitate. As you saw in Chapter 3, babies can imitate the facial and hand gestures of adults within their first few months of life. When a baby imitates an adult who is clapping his hands, she is detecting, at least at a behavioral level, similarity between herself and the adult model. She probably does not yet have a sense of herself as separate from the other person, but noticing these parallels may help her start the process of building that sense.

There are many other experiences and abilities that should help with that process as well. For example, when the baby acts, she feels the bodily states that go with that action; when another person acts, she does not have the same experience. As Meltzoff (2007, p. 28) suggests, “these first-person experiences contribute to a detailed . . . map linking internal states and behavior,” and they support the process of separating the self from others.

As you saw in Chapter 4, sensitive caregivers respond to their infants’ signals. They establish predictable, reliable interactive routines as they meet their babies’ needs and help them to manage their emotions. The regularity and reliability of caregiver–infant interactions may help babies begin to extract notions of “self-invariance” and “other invariance,” which precede self-awareness.

Overall, in the first half year we might say that the infant comes to possess a pre-self, composed of early inklings that she has a body, that it is separate from others, and that her actions affect events. Gradually, over the second half year, the infant appears to gain more control over when and how she signals the caregiver to provide for her needs. Imagine the lesson learned by an infant who, when she coos and babbles, regularly attracts the smiles and responsive vocalizations of her caregivers. This baby’s world, in some small way, begins to come under her control. She might encode the message, “When I am upset or need attention, my parent responds and takes care of me.” Clearly, young infants do not represent these ideas linguistically, but rather encode these kinds of organized sequences as procedural models or patterns of the self-in-relationship. Affective responses, such as feelings of love and relief, also become associated with these sensorimotor patterns. The infant’s self-system is under construction.

By 8 to 12 months, several cognitive and social developments you have learned about in previous chapters indicate that the I-self is emerging. Babies engage in intentional, planned behavior. To obtain an out-of-reach toy, for example, a baby might first set aside a barrier, or she might vocalize to get a parent’s attention, then reach or point toward the toy. Intentional action is considered a hallmark of feelings of agency (e.g., Prinz, 2012; Verschoor & Hommel, 2017). Doing things on purpose, making choices and plans, requires an I-self.

At about the same time, babies show other signs of an increasing sense of self as separate from others. They begin to display separation anxiety, signaling the formation of an attachment to the primary caregiver. For example, they might show distress even at an impending separation from an attachment figure, perhaps by looking anxiously at the door when the babysitter arrives. Many babies cry and cling to a departing caregiver. These behaviors demonstrate the infant’s recognition that the caregiver is separate from herself.

As you learned in Chapter 4, attachment theorists like Bowlby assume that the attachment between infant and caregiver gives rise to a sense of security and optimism in an infant, what Erikson described as a burgeoning trust in others and an early sense of self-worth. From this perspective, when the 1-year-old begins to use the caregiver as a secure base from which to explore the environment, we are seeing the emergence of a kind of preliminary sense of self-worth. Once again, the infant’s self-development evolves from her experience in relationships.

We also saw in the last chapter that late in the first year, caregivers’ facial expressions influence infants’ reactions to situations. Suppose, for example, that Mom opens the door to a stranger. Imagine how differently her 1-year-old might react if she sees her mother smile happily versus if Mom looks frightened and wary. Such social referencing not only implies recognition of the separateness of the other person, but it also provides the baby with a context in which she is sorting out experiences of the self from experiences of the other and from the combined experiences of the “we” (Emde & Buchsbaum, 1990). Social referencing demonstrates how transactional the self-development process really is. The child uses the caregiver’s emotions to discern meaning in events and to regulate her own feelings in different situations.

Suppose now that the mother reliably responds to the approach of a stranger in one way: either with smiles or with wariness. When caregivers communicate consistent emotional signals about environmental events, infants are also likely to develop certain pervasive emotional dispositions. These emotional dispositions often are integral to a family’s or even a culture’s “value system,” and they can affect how infants learn to approach questions such as “Can I trust other people?” “Is it safe to take risks?” Furthermore, caregivers’ emotional signals may affect the process of emotion regulation and emotional self-knowledge well beyond infancy. For example, suppose a family tends to be unsympathetic to indications of incompetence in other people, often expressing anger or blame. When the child herself struggles with a task and fails to complete it despite her effort, she is likely to conclude that she should feel guilty or ashamed (Campos, Frankel, & Camras, 2004).

Early Socialization: Parenting and the Development of the Self-System

Theorists from Cooley (1902) to Bowlby (e.g., 1969/1982) and Erikson (1950/1963) have assumed that many parts of the self-system grow out of our social interactions. As we saw in the last chapter, the available data do suggest that our earliest relationships create a trajectory for the development of self-concept and self-esteem. For example, when babies are securely attached to their mothers, they tend to be appropriately independent as 4-year-olds and to be self-confident and socially skilled as 10-year-olds (e.g., Sroufe, Egeland, Carlson, & Collins, 2005; see Thompson, 2015, for a review).

To briefly review: We know that early caregiving quality can make an important contribution to the quality of babies’ attachments. Infants are likely to become securely attached to caregivers who respond promptly and consistently to crying; who react appropriately to babies’ facial expressions, eye contact, and other signals; who handle their infants sensitively, and who hold them often during the first year, providing the contact comfort that helps infants modulate their emotions. Such caregiving requires patience and a child-centered approach that can be difficult for any parent sometimes, but is especially challenging if the baby has a difficult temperament or other special needs or if the parent is stressed or depressed. But the effort and self-sacrifice required for parents to create a “good fit,” as Thomas and Chess (1977) described it, between their caregiving and a baby’s needs does appear to contribute to attachment quality and to the direction that self-knowledge and self-evaluation will take. This process continues after infancy, as the description of self-development in the last section indicates. In this section, we will take a close look at parent–child relationships in the toddler and preschool years. We will focus especially on the characteristics of parenting that may be most conducive to helping young children to develop positive self-esteem and adaptive self-regulatory mechanisms. One way to think about parents is to consider them as having a basic set of caregiving responsibilities or tasks, beyond meeting their children’s physical requirements for food, clothing, shelter, health care, and so on.

We just summarized the caregiving responsibilities parents have toward their infants, and these are captured by the first three parenting tasks listed in Table 5.2. You can see in the table that as the infant becomes a toddler, gaining cognitive, communicative, and motor skills, the list of parenting tasks expands. There are new challenges for parents who are trying to be sensitive and responsive and seeking to create a good fit between their care and the child’s needs. First, caregivers are faced with the need to grant more autonomy to the child. As toddlers become capable of doing more on their own, they are motivated to practice and expand their growing competencies. The strong dependency that characterizes young babies is gradually replaced by a capacity and need for independent action and mastery. Erikson theorized that toddlers’ emerging feelings of worth are benefited when they can use their growing skills to function at least somewhat autonomously, whether it is by feeding themselves or by buttoning their own buttons, or more subtly, by saying “NO!”—that is, refusing to do what someone else requires (see Table 1.2 in Chapter 1). Thus, although the earliest feelings of worth grow out of an infant’s trust in others to meet all her needs, those feelings of worth grow in the toddler years when the child begins to experience self-sufficiency, or autonomy, a sense that “I can do it myself.”

Second, also because the child’s behavioral and cognitive skills are growing, the caregiver must begin to socialize the child, that is, to prepare the child to be a competent member of society, from providing opportunities to interact with people beyond the family to imposing discipline. Discipline involves limiting some behaviors and demanding others, so that the child will be safe (“Don’t climb on the counter”) and so that she will behave in ways that are conventionally acceptable (“You must wear clothes”). Parents generally impose more discipline on the child as they perceive her to be more and more capable of self-control. When parents tell a child to do, or not to do, something, they are depending on the child’s ability to initiate or to stop her own actions. The only way to make a young infant do, or not do, something is to rely on physically moving or restraining the child. Parents do a lot of that with infants, but they rely more and more on controlling by request or command during early childhood, as the requisite abilities (such as representational and comprehension skills) develop.

Thus, caregiver–child relationships are reorganized in the post-infancy period, with the additions of children’s autonomy seeking, on one hand, and parents’ imposition of discipline, on the other hand. What are the important features of this more complex relationship between parent and child? What role does the parent–child relationship play in the child’s developing self-system? Let’s bgin by examining what research indicates are the most important dimensions or features of a parent’s behavior in this relationship.

The Dimensions of Parenting Style

Studies of parenting after infancy have a long history and have produced many complicated findings. Remarkably, researchers from very different theoretical traditions have repeatedly identified two major dimensions or aspects of parents’ behavior that seem to characterize the quality of parenting. These can be thought of as the primary contributors to what is called parenting style (for reviews see Baumrind, 1989, 1993; Bornstein, 2015; Maccoby & Martin, 1983; Pinquart, 2017).

The Warmth Dimension—Parental Responsiveness

In the post-infancy period, parents continue to create an emotional climate for their children. Contributing to a positive climate is the warmth dimension (parental responsiveness): listening to the child, being involved and interested in the child’s activities, accepting the child, making positive attributions toward the child, being “tuned in” and supportive (e.g., Baumrind, 1989; Bornstein, 2015). In essence, high levels of warmth with toddlers and older children are comparable to high levels of responsive, sensitive care with infants. But some of the child’s needs have changed. With toddlers, as we have seen, autonomy needs begin to be important, and responsive parents accept these needs, acquiescing when possible to their children’s reasonable demands for autonomy (Baumrind, 1993). So, when 25-month-old Amanda begins to insist that she can dress herself, her mother tries to accommodate her by setting aside extra time for the morning dressing ritual. She also ignores the inconvenience and the sometimes strange-looking results and gives Amanda positive messages about the process: “You’re getting to be such a big girl to put on your own clothes!” Her attitude is child centered, sidelining parental needs (for time, convenience, and coordinated outfits) when possible to meet Amanda’s developmental needs.

Some parents create a more negative emotional climate. Their behavior is often parent centered: They show little responsiveness to their children’s concerns and are unlikely to do things just to meet those concerns. They may even make hostile attributions when children’s needs are out of line with their own. When 20-month-old Jessie wants to feed herself her morning cereal, for example, at first her mother ignores her. When Jessie insists, her mother attends to her demands by making negative attributions, such as “You’ll just make a mess” and “Why do you always make things so hard in the morning?” When Jessie accidentally spills the milk, her mother responds in frustration, “I told you that you couldn’t do it yourself!”

We have seen that sensitive, responsive parental care in infancy promotes secure attachments. Likewise, parents’ warmth and responsiveness with their toddlers and preschoolers help maintain secure attachments and increase the likelihood that children will be cooperative when parents place demands on them (Thompson, 2016). In a series of classic studies, for example, toddlers’ compliance with their mothers’ requests was observed in toy cleanup tasks and in a situation where mothers designated some attractive toys as “off limits.” The most enthusiastically compliant toddlers were those who were securely attached to their mothers (according to a separate assessment), and whose mothers maintained a warm, positive emotional climate throughout the sessions (Kochanska, 1995; Kochanska, Aksan, & Koenig, 1995).

What happens when a parent of a securely attached infant becomes a less sensitive caregiver as the child moves into the toddler and preschool years? First, it is worth noting that this is most likely to happen when the parent faces an increase in negative life events (such as a job loss, separation from spouse, homelessness, violence in the home or neighborhood, and so on). Second, if a toddler begins with a secure attachment, she tends to weather insensitive parenting better than if she starts with an insecure attachment. However, even for children with a history of secure attachment, insensitive care in the toddler and preschool period seems especially problematic, as though “the continuing harmony of the parent-child relationship . . . constitute(s) a bridge between a secure attachment in infancy and the development of later personality and working models of relationships” (Thompson, 2016, p. 334).

The Control Dimension—Parental Demandingness

The second major dimension of parenting style is the control dimension (parentaldemandingness). If parental responsiveness means that parents sometimes acquiesce to their children’s demands, parental demandingness leads parents to impose discipline. Demanding parents exercise behavioral control. They communicate to their children expectations for appropriate behavior that are suitable to each child’s level of maturity (sometimes called maturity demands). Demanding parents impose clear and consistent standards and rules of behavior, and they enforce them. Interestingly, this dimension of parenting can be either child centered or parent centered. If the parent’s concern is the development of self-control necessary for children to feel secure, to behave in ways that gain social acceptance, and to become skillful at social give and take, then discipline has a child focus. If the parents’ concerns—for example, for quiet, or convenience, or orderliness, and so on—are primary, then discipline has a parent focus. Of course, parents’ disciplinary motives may sometimes combine both kinds of concerns, and the same parents may shift their focus depending on the given situation. For example, Hastings and Grusec (1998) found that parents expressed more parent-centered concerns (such as wanting to be in control) when disciplining their children in public, but parents expressed more child-centered concerns (such as teaching a child not to give up easily) in private interactions.

The control dimension refers to parents’ behavioral control, which is an important element of responsible parenting. This must be distinguished from psychological control, which refers to a kind of intrusiveness and interference on the part of parents (e.g., Barber, Stolz, & Olsen, 2005; Doan et al., 2017). The latter often involves criticizing and/or derogating the child. It is called psychological control because the parent seems to be trying to manipulate the child’s emotional experiences by promoting feelings of guilt or shame to pressure the child (e.g., “You ruined my day” or “You should be ashamed of yourself”), and/or by making love conditional on the child’s behavior (e.g., “I don’t like you right now,” or “I can’t stand the sight of you”). Psychological control has more to do with the emotional climate a parent creates (the warmth dimension) than it does with demandingness.

Four Parenting Styles

We can describe four basic parenting styles, or constellations of parenting characteristics, as shown in Table 5.3, by combining and crossing the positive and negative poles of parental responsiveness and demandingness (Maccoby & Martin, 1983). As you will see, these styles are often predictive of child characteristics (Baumrind, 1989, 1993; Pinquart, 2017).

The Authoritative Style

Parents with an authoritative style are both highly responsive and highly demanding. So, they create a positive emotional climate for their children, promoting autonomy and supporting assertiveness and individuality. At the same time these parents accept responsibility for socializing their children by expecting mature behavior and by setting and consistently enforcing clear standards. Other qualities also tend to be part of this constellation. These parents are often openly affectionate; they encourage two-way communication with their children (that is, they genuinely listen and pay attention as well as talking themselves). Their communications about expectations and standards are usually clear and come with explanations that go beyond “You do it because I said so” to statements that help children make sense of their parents’ demands. Thus, they are strong on behavioral control, but do not use psychological control.

The Authoritarian Style

Parents with an authoritarian style are low on responsiveness, but highly demanding. Thus, they do not create a positive emotional climate nor do they encourage children’s individualistic strivings or assertiveness, but they do tend to exercise considerable control, making maturity demands and requiring conformity to rules. A few other qualities tend to be characteristic of authoritarian parents. First, authoritarian parents usually communicate less effectively with their children than authoritative parents. Their communications are more one sided (“I say what will happen; you listen”). They express less affection. And their control tends to be more restrictive, meaning that they often restrict their children’s emotional expressiveness and other self-assertive behaviors. In other words, they are likely to exercise not just behavioral but also psychological control. They also are more likely to enforce control by using harsh techniques (see the section on parenting practices below) and are less likely to provide explanations that go beyond “Because I said so.”

The Permissive Style

Parents with a permissive style are moderately to highly responsive, but low on demandingness. Thus, they exercise less behavioral control of their children than other parents, making fewer maturity demands. They may be especially “laissez-faire” about restricting aggressive behavior. They are more nurturing and affectionate than authoritarian parents, but usually not as nurturing as authoritative parents.

The Neglecting–Uninvolved Style

Some parents are both low on responsiveness and low on demandingness, so that they actually invest little time or attention in a child and are largely parent centered in their concerns. Like permissive parents, those with a neglecting–uninvolved style seem to neglect their responsibility to socialize the child, but they also express less affection and are not likely to be responsive to their children’s needs, perhaps even expressing hostility or making negative attributions to their children. When they do impose limits on their children, they tend to use harsh techniques and little explanation.

Parenting Style and Child Outcomes

Through the long history of research on parenting, small but significant correlations have been found between parenting style, on one hand, and children’s typical behaviors, on the other. Briefly, authoritative parenting has been associated with many positive outcomes in young children: adaptability, competence and achievement, good social skills and peer acceptance, and low levels of antisocial or aggressive behavior. Of particular interest to us in this chapter, authoritative parenting seems to promote positive self-development, especially high self-esteem and the capacity for self-regulation.

The children of authoritarian parents are more likely to be irritable and conflicted, showing signs of both anxiety and anger. They are conforming (self-controlled) with authority figures, but are not likely to be socially skillful, and they are susceptible to being bullied and/or to becoming bullies (Ladd & Ladd, 1998; Pinquart, 2017). They tend to have low self-esteem, and although they exhibit self-control with authorities, they may lack self-regulation when they believe that authorities are not monitoring them (Bornstein, 2015).

Permissive parents are more likely to have children who exhibit uncontrolled, impulsive behavior and low levels of self-reliance. They are low on cognitive competence and social agency, and are likely to be aggressive, especially in family interactions. In some studies they have had high self-esteem, apparently when parents are very warm, but many studies suggest that warmth combined with demandingness is more certain to be associated with self-esteem (Maccoby & Martin, 1983).

Finally, the children of neglecting/uninvolved parents are likely to be impulsive, to show high levels of both externalizing problems (e.g., aggressiveness) and internalizing problems (e.g., depression), and to have low self-esteem.

Be cautious in interpreting these relationships between parenting style and child outcomes. The strength of the associations is modest, cueing us that many factors interact with parenting and modify its effects. Researchers have begun to identify a multiplicity of interacting factors, which we will discuss in a later section of this chapter (see Bornstein, 2015; Pinquart, 2017).

Parenting Practices: Methods of Control

Thus far, we have looked at parenting style—parents’ combined responsiveness and demandingness—as a source of children’s behavior and self-development. Another aspect of parenting concerns the methods of control parents choose. These are the strategies parents use to enforce their demands. Parents’ control methods mostly fall into three categories: power assertion, psychological control (which includes love withdrawal), and induction. Power assertion can involve corporal (physical) punishment or the threat of corporal punishment, ranging from spanking on the buttocks to harsh beating with objects. Or, it can involve withdrawal of privileges, from mild forms (such as time-out procedures with toddlers, see Box 5.1), to severe denial (e.g., withholding meals). Power assertion of both types is usually effective for the immediate control of behavior. Children often change their behavior while they feel

threatened. But there can be unwanted side effects. Harsh or severe power assertion has been linked to high levels of anger and anxiety in children, and children whose parents use harsh, punitive practices tend to be more aggressive than other children (Baumrind, 2001; Bornstein, 2015; Pinquart, 2017). New research on the effects of “milder” forms of corporal punishment (e.g., spanking) will be reviewed later in this chapter.

Box 5.1: Time-Out: Getting It Right

In many Dennis the Menace cartoons, Dennis sits in a pint-sized chair, hugging his teddy bear, facing into a corner, banished for some infraction. Dennis’s parents use time-out as a disciplinary procedure: During a short span of time, Dennis is required to discontinue his involvement in ongoing activities to quietly sit somewhere apart. The technique involves mild power assertion and is suitable for use with toddlers and preschoolers. There is no pain involved, but time-out gets the attention of young children. Requiring a child to sit in a corner is one approach, but you can choose any place that separates the child from the action, while keeping her in a safe place that is within easy reach of the caregiver. Do not choose a spot where the child might be overwhelmed by feelings of isolation. The purpose of time-out is to eliminate the rewards of misbehavior, not to frighten a child. Indeed, it will work even if the “place apart” is in the midst of things. For example, in one day care center, the time-out chair is in the middle of a busy classroom so that the child is safely in view of the teachers. For the children, just being confined to the chair, unable to participate in the ongoing activities of the class, is sufficiently aversive to be effective.

It seems simple, but it is actually somewhat complex, and parents often fail to fully understand what they need to do to make it work (Drayton et al., 2017). First, to minimize the child’s anxious arousal, stay calm. Remember that nearly all young children misbehave sometimes, and more exuberant children may do so more often. For example, many preschoolers occasionally engage in instrumental aggression, such as grabbing toys away from other children (Hay, 2017). You may be frustrated, but your child is usually just being a child. It should be clear that your negative assessment is restricted to the offending behavior; your affection for your child is intact.

To start, it helps to choose just two or three specific, target behaviors that need to be changed. For very young children, reserve time-out for behaviors that are important to control because of safety, such as climbing on the kitchen counter, or because they are antisocial and hurtful, such as hitting or biting. Explain to the child which behaviors will lead to time-out, why they are unacceptable, and what alternative behaviors would be acceptable. It works best if children know the rules in advance so that what will lead to time-out is clear. (Don’t forget to provide some positive attention for those more acceptable behaviors.) Don’t use time-out for behaviors that have not been previously identified as inappropriate, and when the time-out is over, follow up with a reminder of your reasons for restricting this behavior. As you will see in this chapter, mild power assertion combined with induction can be very effective. Although Dennis the Menace is allowed to have a teddy bear in time-out, it is more consistent to eliminate access to toys, television, and attention from others.

Don’t expect everything to go smoothly right from the start. At first a child may refuse to stay in time-out, or she may repeat the offending behavior just to test your resolve. If the child won’t stay in time-out, make it very brief—just a moment—and gently hold her the child won’t stay in time-out, make it very brief—just a moment—and gently hold her from behind to create the condition of no attention. Then quickly make eye contact and praise the child for staying in time-out, even though it was only for a moment. Stick it out—it will pay off. Time-out needs only to be long enough to get the point across. The younger the child, the less time is appropriate. One rule of thumb is 1 or 2 minutes for each year of age, so that the maximum time-out for a 2-year-old would be 4 minutes. Longer times are likely to become so aversive that they could defeat the purpose of simply getting the child’s attention and creating an opportunity for her to think over her behavior.

At the end of a time-out episode, assurances of your affection are appropriate. This also may be a good time to assist the child with emotion regulation, helping the child to identify her emotions and to consider ways of managing them.

Time-out, like most effective discipline, requires putting aside what you are doing to attend to the misbehavior when it happens. It can be inconvenient, but immediacy is important to help young children make the right connection between their behavior and its consequences. Similarly, consistency is essential. When a parent’s responses are unreliable, it is difficult for a child to learn what the rules are. Just how consistent can a parent be? There are going to be times when you simply cannot follow up on an act of misbehavior. But most times you can, if you make it a priority and if you are careful to use time-out for just a few important behaviors. Suppose, for example, that you are teaching your 4-year-old, Jenny, not to hit her baby brother. In the middle of your grocery shopping, sure enough, Jenny hauls off and whacks him. Immediately, tell Jenny what’s wrong with this picture: “Jenny, you know that hitting is not okay. It hurts and it makes people cry, and we don’t hit in our family, ever! You have to go to time-out for that.” Pick up the baby, take Jenny’s hand, leave the cart, and head for the car. In the car, put Jenny in the back seat and sit in the front with the baby. Say clearly, “You are in time-out,” and face forward for the designated time. At the end, explain the rule again, tell Jenny that time-out is over, and head back to the shopping cart. In other words, if at all possible, improvise. (No car? Stand silently on the sidewalk for the time-out period.) There are bound to be situations that make immediate and full follow-through impossible. You could have been in the middle of checking out your groceries, for example. But if your usual response is swift and sure, your efforts will pay off (see Drayton et al. , 2017; Hecker & Sori, 2016; and the Applications section for more detailed pointers on effective discipline and intervention for parents).

If a child is accustomed to power assertive control methods, what happens when the threat is removed (e.g., Mom or Dad is not present or unlikely to find out)? Does the child engage in self-regulation? In other words, will she regulate her own behavior because she is committed to an internalized set of standards? There are conflicting data on this issue. On the whole, power assertion does not seem to be particularly effective in promoting self-regulation. Interestingly, milder forms of power assertion are more effective than harsher forms, especially when they do not involve corporal punishment. But the picture is complex and cannot be fully understood without considering other factors, such as child temperament, culture, and overall parenting style. We will return to this issue later.

Psychological control, as you have seen, is a set of strategies that tend to go together, including inducing guilt or shame and withdrawing love. Love withdrawal might include a parent’s withdrawing attention or affection, expressing disappointment or disillusionment with a child, turning away from a child, cutting off verbal or emotional contact, or enforcing separations from the parent. Psychological control is rarely used alone by parents, but when it is used, it seems to generate high anxiety and is more effective in eliciting immediate compliance than any other method (Doan et al., 2017). As with power assertion, the compliance that psychological control generates is usually short term (Grusec, Danyliuk, Kil, & O’Neill, 2017).

Induction refers to parents’ use of explanation: giving reasons for rules (“If everybody touched the paintings they would soon be very dirty from fingerprints”) and appealing to children’s desires to be grown-up (“Big girls don’t take toys away from babies”). “Other-oriented” explanations seem to be especially powerful in promoting empathy (“When you hit people, it hurts them and makes them sad”). But explanations need to be appropriate to the situation. Suppose a parent is trying to explain to a preschooler why her teacher wants the children to raise their hands during group time. An “other oriented” explanation is not likely to work as well as pointing out how confusing things get when everyone talks at once (Grusec et al., 2017).

Using induction seems to be the most effective way to promote the internalization of rules. When a child has internalized a rule, she has made it a guiding principle for herself. She will usually then employ that rule to regulate her own behavior regardless of whether authorities are present and whether immediate consequences are likely. For example, Laible and Thompson (2002) observed mothers with their 30-month-olds in contexts where conflicts were likely to arise. These were a clean-up task and a “frustration task” where children had only a too-difficult puzzle to play with while their mothers were busy and while other more interesting toys were off limits. Mothers who used more inductive control strategies, like justification (“We can’t touch those toys because they might break”), and fewer punitive or aggravating control strategies, like threats, teasing, and harsh commands, had children who were more likely than other children to exercise self-control in a resistance-to-temptation task 6 months later.

Often, the same parents will use one practice on some occasions and another in other situations, and sometimes parents use multiple practices in the same disciplinary episode (Bornstein, 2015; Fung, Li, & Lam, 2017). Most parents tend to favor using one type of practice more than the others, and when they do, their primary practice is somewhat predictive of certain child outcomes. But, much as we found with rearing practices in infancy, such as breast versus bottle feeding, particular practices may be less important than the overall quality of the parent–child relationship. For toddlers and older children, the meaning that the child attributes to parents’ practices is likely to be important and appears to be tied to the emotional climate established by parenting style. In particular, when parents are warm and responsive, their children are more likely to comply with parental demands (Grusec et al., 2017).

Parenting style, then, affects how effective a parenting practice will be with a child. As it happens, certain practices tend to be combined with certain parenting styles. Authoritative parents, for example, are often characterized by extensive use of induction, regardless of what other practices they might sometimes use. The children of authoritative parents are likely to show higher levels of competence, self-esteem, and self-regulation than children exposed to other parenting styles. But what might happen if parents who show most of the qualities of an authoritative style—especially high responsiveness and high demandingness—were to use primarily power assertion to enforce their demands? In the next section, we will consider how parenting style interacts with practice for different children and in different cultural contexts, focusing on how these factors interact in the early phases of self-development, during the toddler and early preschool years. We will revisit these issues in later chapters when we describe self-regulatory and moral development in older children and adolescents.

Moderators of Parenting and Parenting Effectiveness

Authoritative parents seem to get the best results from their children, but are their behaviors really having any influence? Both developmentalists (e.g., Scarr, 1993) and popular writers (e.g., Harris, 1998) have asked whether we are wrong to assume that correlations between parenting and child outcomes imply that parenting style and practice are actually causing children’s behavior. Several other possibilities exist. First, the shared biological inheritance of parents and children might account for both the parental and the child characteristics measured in these studies (Scarr, 1993, 1997). For example, the same genetic endowment that makes parents affectionate and responsive might produce children who are cooperative and good-natured. Second, children’s predispositions and temperaments may actually cause parents’ behaviors rather than vice versa. For example, perhaps children who are “naturally” mild-mannered and compliant, like Angie, usually elicit authoritative parenting, but active, impulsive, negative children, like Mary, usually elicit more authoritarian or neglectful parenting behaviors.

Overall, although some controversy persists on these issues, an accumulation of evidence supports a multidimensional approach to the question of direction of effects in children’s social

development (Bornstein, 2015). That means that multiple causes are interacting, mutually modifying one another. As in Bronfenbrenner’s bioecological model, proximal processes—reciprocal interactions between the child and the people and things that surround the child—as well as distal processes, such as genes and culture, are all playing a role (e.g., Bronfenbrenner & Morris, 2006). In this section, we will consider two important factors in the multidimensional mix: the child’s temperament and the broader cultural environment.

The Child’s Temperament, Parenting, and Child Outcomes

Recall that during a child’s infancy, both parents and infants contribute to the quality of the caregiving relationship. It is harder for mothers to be sensitive and responsive to a baby with a difficult temperament, for example. But when mothers are highly responsive during infancy, the

good fit they create between their caregiving and the baby’s needs supports the development of a secure attachment even for babies with difficult temperaments. When mothers are not able to create a good fit, the type of insecure attachment that emerges often seems to be at least partly influenced by the baby’s temperament (Vaughn & Bost, 2016).

With toddlers and preschoolers, temperament and other child characteristics continue to contribute to the quality of the parent–child relationship. Children’s typical behaviors can affect both parenting style and the particular disciplinary practices that parents are most likely to use.

In a classic paper, Bell and Chapman (1986) reviewed 14 studies that demonstrated the influence of children on parents. Many of these studies were at least partly experimental, with adults (usually parents) reacting to, or interacting with, children who were not their own, in situations created by the researchers. The studies examined adults’ responses to children’s dependence versus independence behaviors, their tendencies to be aggressive or to withdraw, and their responsiveness to adults (e.g., tendencies to smile, chat, imitate, and so on). For example, in one of these studies, Marcus (1975, 1976) showed parents videotapes of a child actor solving a puzzle. The child in the film behaved either dependently (e.g., seeking help, like, “Would this piece go better here or here?”) or independently. The adults’ reactions were more directive with the dependent than with the independent child. Stevens-Long (1973) examined parents’ reactions to unrelated children’s aggressive, uncooperative behavior or to anxious, withdrawn behavior. The adults were more likely to command or ignore the more aggressive children, but to verbally help or reward the more depressive children. A number of newer longitudinal studies have corroborated these early findings. For example, child characteristics at one age (e.g., children’s low levels of affectionate behavior) have been found to predict changes in parents’ behaviors over time (e.g., decreases in parental warmth; Waller et al., 2014). When Hallers-Haalboom and colleagues (2017) studied families with two children, they found mothers’ and fathers’ sensitivity was sometimes different with each child. When it was, the children’s specific characteristics seemed to be important, as we saw with Angie and Mary. Studies such as these paint a picture of a multilayered, complex interactive system between parent and child. The child’s characteristics are likely to affect the parent’s behavior, and the parent’s style and practices affect the child’s behavior. But other factors also modify parents’ and children’s effects on each other. The degree to which the child affects the parent’s practices and beliefs depends in part on the parent’s initial attitudes toward children and child rearing, as well as the parent’s emotional state and ability to manage stress (Bornstein, 2015). For example, parents who have child-centered rather than adult-centered concerns are able to be more supportive and responsive to their youngsters. Parents’ emotional states influence how child centered they are likely to be. Depressive mothers report fewer child-oriented positive emotions and concerns than mothers who are not depressed (Dix, Gershoff, Maunier, & Miller, 2004). Similarly, as we saw in the last chapter, parents’ own relationship histories and their working models of attachment are likely to influence how they respond to their children and how well they adapt to their children’s characteristics.

Children’s Differential Susceptibility to Parenting Strategies

One illustration of the interactive complexities we have been describing is that children show differential susceptibility to different rearing approaches, depending on their early temperament characteristics (e.g., Belsky & Pluess, 2013). As you saw in Chapter 4, difficult, negatively reactive infants are often more affected by both sensitive and insensitive parenting than infants with easy temperaments. We see similar interactive patterns as children get older. Let’s consider the tendency to display aggressive behavior. Children who have difficult temperaments are more likely than children with easy temperaments to show inappropriate levels of aggression with peers and/or adults (Streit, Carlo, Ispa, & Palermo, 2017). But how aggressive they become is more closely linked to parents’ disciplinary and interactive style than it is for children with easy temperaments. For youngsters with difficult temperaments, insensitive, negative parent behaviors (e.g., frowning, criticizing, yelling, being physically intrusive) appear to increase their proneness to aggression, whereas sensitive, positive discipline (e.g., being affectionate, praising, using distraction) decreases their proneness to aggression. For youngsters with easy temperaments, even those who seem prone to aggression, parenting differences do not have as much effect as they do for children with difficult temperaments. That is, aggressive tendencies are not moderated substantially by parenting practices (Slagt, Dubas, Deković, & van Aken, 2016).

The Cultural Context, Parenting, and Child Outcomes

Just as children’s characteristics can affect parenting and outcomes, cultural factors, such as the race, ethnicity, and socioeconomic status of the family, can moderate parenting practices and may even alter their effects. The preceding sections have made a strong case for the benefits of authoritative parenting, but most of the supportive research findings have come from U.S. majority samples. Does parenting differ in other parts of the world, or in other ethnic or SES groups, and are these styles effective for other populations? No doubt about it, culture affects parenting. At its core, culture dynamically shapes values, self-regulation, and behavior, and cultures could not continue to exist without some means of transmitting their values and worldviews to younger members. Through socialization, cultures transmit methods of coping with and adapting to specific challenges, a process that fosters resilience in children and youth (Garcia Coll, 1990).

Studying the effects of culture on parenting is a task that is nothing less than daunting. Remember that what we call “culture” is essentially embedded within the environment at every level of the ecological system, from the immediate family to the larger society and its institutions. It is sometimes difficult to avoid conflating culture with geography, SES, or race. Researchers often paint with a relatively broad brush in order to capture key qualities that make one culture different from another, but, in reality, there is wide individual variation within groups (Gibbons, 1998). For example, “Hispanic” or “Latino” culture, broadly construed, reflects Mexican, Puerto Rican, South American, Dominican, Spanish, and other group influences. “European American” culture includes British, Irish, Italian, German, French, Polish, and other influences. So it is important to remember that these labels are generalizations that attempt to capture common underlying dimensions. When you consider all the labels writers have used to distinguish cultures, such as individualistic-collectivist, developing-developed, East-West, rural-metropolitan, immigrant-acculturated, native–non-native, majority-minority, and so forth, you can see what they are up against.

Despite these difficulties, some underlying cultural structures and values that are particularly salient for parenting have been identified. These structures and values may help to explain observed differences in parenting practices, such as discipline, across cultures. Table 5.4 offers several examples of traditional cultural values, reviewed by Yasui and Dishion (2007), thought to influence parenting from five major ethnic groups in the United States. Definitions for less commonly used words (in italics) are provided as well.

For middle-class White Americans, an authoritative parenting style and the nondirective or inductive disciplinary practices that usually accompany that style—offering suggestions, making polite requests, distracting a child, giving explanations, and so on—are associated with beneficial outcomes for their children. In other cultural groups, parents who are warm and responsive are often more restrictive of their children’s behavior, more directive, and less likely to tolerate discussion about rules. They also are somewhat more likely to use harsher enforcement practices, such as high levels of power assertion and/or psychological control strategies. Generally, the combination of high warmth and harsher discipline is more common among African American, Asian American, and Hispanic American groups, possibly due to different parenting goals.

What impact does this combination have on children? Let’s address this question first by looking at the impact of corporal punishment, and then we will consider the effects of psychological control techniques. You should note that severe physical punishments (inflicting bodily injury by beating, kicking, punching, scalding, and so on) are consistently associated with problematic child outcomes, such as aggressive behavior, emotion dysregulation, attention problems, conduct disorders, and depression (Cicchetti & Toth, 2006) and are considered to be maltreatment regardless of culture. The use of more common forms of corporal punishment (e.g., hitting, spanking, and paddling) in schools and homes is more contentious. Corporal punishment has been defined as “the use of physical force with the intention of causing a child to experience pain, but not injury, for the purpose of correction or control of the child’s behavior” (Straus, 1994, p. 4). Despite the intent, a growing body of research indicates that there may be harm in these less extreme forms of punishment. In a large early study of mother–child pairs, Straus and his colleagues (1997) asked mothers how often they had spanked their child in the last week when the children were between ages 6 and 9. The researchers measured children’s antisocial behavior then and over the course of the next 2 years. More frequent spanking at the first assessment predicted increases in the children’s antisocial behavior over the next 2 years. This was true regardless of the family’s social class, ethnicity, the child’s gender, or maternal warmth.

As we have stated, however, some studies of power assertive discipline have shown culture-specific differences. In European-American samples, there is a linear relationship between amount and harshness of physical discipline and children’s aggressive behavior. The more severe the punishment, the more aggressive children are likely to be. For African American children, researchers have not always found the same relationship, or as strong a relationship, between corporal punishment and children’s aggression (e.g., Baumrind, 1993; Deater-Deckard, Dodge, Bates, & Pettit, 1996; Lansford, Deater-Deckard, Dodge, Bates, & Pettit, 2004). What might account for these differences among U.S. subgroups?

One possibility is that normativeness reduces negative impact. In other words, if children expect to be disciplined in a certain way, such as by spanking, because most parents in their community or ethnic group use this technique, then they may perceive spanking as normal, and possibly even as a manifestation of their parents’ concern for them. Gershoff and her colleagues (2010) found some evidence that children’s perception of the normativeness of punishment moderated outcomes in a sample of families from China, India, Italy, Kenya, the Philippines, and Thailand. Remember that a moderating influence would affect how strongly certain types of disciplinary techniques were associated with adverse outcomes. Normativeness diminished the deleterious outcomes of yelling and corporal punishment, but only by a bit. These particular forms of discipline were always related to greater levels of aggression in all cultural groups, despite this moderation. Alampay and colleagues (2017) reported similar multicultural results in another large, longitudinal study of parents and children from around the globe.

Another explanation may be that the long-term effects of punishment are moderated by the warmth, affection, and responsiveness of the parent who is doling out the discipline. Several large studies of American children support this idea (e.g., Aucoin, Frick, & Bodin, 2006; McLoyd & Smith, 2002). McLoyd and Smith looked at outcomes across a 6-year period in nearly 2,000 American children. Once again, for all children, African American, European American, and Hispanic, the amount of spanking in the home predicted the level of children’s externalizing behavior over time. But mothers’ emotional support of their children moderated this link in all three groups. Overall, the moderating effects of normativeness and parental warmth indicate that the meanings that children attribute to parents’ control strategies have some impact on how these strategies affect them.

You may be wondering what “spanking” means in some of these studies. Most often, data is collected on the frequency of spanking incidents, but not on how it’s done. In response to an argument by Baumrind (e.g., Baumrind, Larzalere, & Cowan, 2002) that “ordinary” spanking (done with an open hand less than once a week) would not be associated with problems related to more severe discipline (e.g., frequent spanking, spanking with objects), 585 families were followed over several years to explore the effects of different forms of spanking (Lansford, Wager, Bates, Pettit, & Dodge, 2012). Some support for Baumrind’s argument came from maternal self-reports indicating no differences in externalizing behavior between not-spanked and mildly (with a hand less than once per week) spanked children compared to the harshly spanked group. However, over 50% of mothers initially reporting mild spanking admitted using objects to spank later on. Findings indicated that mild spanking, compared to no-spanking, increased the probability that discipline would escalate into harsher forms in the following year by 50%. In other words, the majority of mothers who spanked continued to do so, and the majority of these mothers increased the harshness of their spanking over time.

A large nationally representative sample of over 11,000 children from White/Non-Hispanic (64%), Hispanic (19%), Black/Non-Hispanic (12%), and Asian (5%) families were studied at kindergarten and again at third grade (Gershoff, 2008; Gershoff, Lansford, Sexton, Davis-Kean, & Sameroff, 2012). Two independent sources of data were provided by parents and teachers, an improvement over studies that relied solely on parents as informants. Teachers reported on children’s externalizing behaviors (arguing, fighting, getting angry) and mothers responded to questions such as: “About how many times, if any, have you spanked your child over the past week?” Number of times was coded using a 0 (no spanking) or 1 (ever spanked) to 6 (five spanking incidents or more during the prior week). The research focused on spanking and excluded harsher disciplinary methods known to correlate with adverse outcomes. Overall, spanking was shown to be a popular method of discipline, with some differences in frequency of use among the various ethnic groups. After controlling for initial group differences in frequency, spanking was found to predict the same increases in children’s externalizing behaviors for White, Black, Hispanic, and Asian American groups. In findings similar to those in the previously described study (Lansford et al., 2012), these results demonstrated a downward spiral. More spanking strengthened a pattern of coercive interaction processes in the families (see Chapter 7 for information on coercive family processes).

Associations between corporal punishment and later mental disorders were reported in the largest representative study to date (Afifi, Mota, Dasiewicz, MacMillan, & Sareen, 2012). Close to 35,000 U.S. adult males and females from the National Epidemiologic Survey on Alcohol and Related Conditions were interviewed by trained investigators. For purposes of analysis, a distinction was made between maltreatment and “harsh physical punishment.” Maltreated individuals, defined as those who reported physical abuse (burning, injury), extreme neglect (going without clothes or food), sexual abuse, or witnessing violence, were excluded from this study. Harsh physical punishment, which was the variable of interest, was defined as either being pushed, shoved, slapped, or hit by a parent or someone living in the home at least once during childhood. Findings indicated that the incidence of a lifetime mental disorder (all mood disorders, all anxiety disorders, drug abuse or dependence disorders, and several personality disorders) was significantly associated with harsh physical punishment as defined above, even after controlling for initial level of family dysfunction and other demographic variables. Interestingly, the odds of harsh physical punishment increased as families’ income and educational levels increased. Although the size of the relationship was relatively modest, the implications are great when viewed from a public health perspective. The authors concluded that the rates of mental disorders could be reduced 2% to 7% by eliminating harsh physical punishment.

In sum, despite a few studies that report minimal effects of corporal punishment on children in some cultural groups, the overwhelming preponderance of findings supports the conclusion that this parental control strategy promotes increasing aggressiveness in children. Inflicting pain to gain children’s compliance with demands may work in the short run, but it has unwanted consequences. In the Applications section, you will learn more about spanking, its frequency in different cultural groups, and the most recent findings on its effects.

Now we will consider psychological control strategies: shaming, inducing guilt, and making affection conditional on behavior (love withdrawal). Here again, these approaches are more commonly used by some cultural groups than others. In middle-class, European American samples, they have some toxic consequences for children (e.g., high levels of anxiety, risk of depression, low self-esteem). Could the outcomes be different in cultures where these practices are normative and/or combined with parents’ high levels of overall warmth? The answer to this question appears to be “No.” For example, psychological control is more commonly used among East Asian parents (e.g., Chinese and Chinese Americans) than among European American parents. It seems likely, then, that psychological control is perceived as more normative by children from East Asian groups. Yet, Gershoff and her colleagues (2010), who included several East Asian countries in their study (see above), found that the use of shaming as a way of disciplining children (e.g., “You should be ashamed of yourself”) was linked to anxiety disorders regardless of culture. Comparisons of American and Chinese families have found the same negative outcomes for children (Doan et al., 2017; Pomerantz & Wang, 2009; Wang et al., 2007). In the study by Doan and colleagues, mothers and children from suburban communities in the United States and China were compared. The Chinese mothers reported more use of psychological control strategies than the U.S. mothers, as expected. But in both samples, the more psychological control mothers used, the greater was their children’s stress response (e.g., cortisol output) during a challenging task.

Conscience: The Beginnings of a Moral Self

You can see that research on parenting supports the many theories of self-development that emphasize the importance of social interactive experiences in the development of the self-system. Parenting style especially has been found to correlate with children’s self-esteem—how worthy and competent children feel—and it appears to be linked to self-confidence in social interaction. Children whose parents are child centered, responsive, and warm tend to show high levels of self-esteem, and they are likely to be skillful in social interaction, as evidenced by peer acceptance and teacher ratings of social competence. These findings suggest that Erikson (1950/1963) may have been on the right track when he argued that after initial feelings of worth are laid down in late infancy, these feelings will be reworked by the child as she develops. For example, as toddlers become more capable of self-sufficiency, they acquire needs, such as autonomy and control needs, that sensitive, responsive caregivers accommodate. If a toddler’s needs are met in a positive, affirming way, the child will go beyond having global feelings of worth and will acquire more differentiated feelings of competency.

Parenting appears to contribute to other aspects of the developing self-system as well. In particular, parenting style and practice are related to children’s self-regulation, including the child’s ability to guide her own behavior in socially approved ways when she is not being monitored by adults. As you have seen, parents’ use of induction promotes internalization, the process by which children adopt adults’ standards and rules as their own. Internalization, in turn, is associated with the development of conscience, feelings of discomfort or distress when the violation of a rule is contemplated or carried out. Internalization and conscience formation are both aspects of the broader topic of moral development and will be discussed again in later chapters as we look at the course of moral development in older children, adolescents, and adults.

At this point, let’s take a closer look at the complex connections among early parenting, child temperament, the beginnings of self-regulation, and the associated processes of internalization and conscience formation. We have already noted that children can begin to learn self-control when they can understand and remember adults’ behavioral commands—when statements such as “No cookies before dinner” have meaning for them—certainly during their second year. You have also learned that 2-year-olds begin to show signs of emotional distress if a standard is violated (Kim, Kochanska, Boldt, Nordling, & O’Bleness, 2014), and soon after, they can show strong reactions if they are tempted to break a prohibition (Emde & Buchsbaum, 1990). At the same time, toddlers begin to show prosocial behavior, such as offering comfort to others in distress (Thompson, 2014, 2015).

Two aspects of parenting seem to promote these processes. First, parents’ warmth and responsiveness facilitate compliance (self-control) and promote the development of concern for others (Kim & Kochanska, 2017). Sensitive, responsive parents seem to establish a cooperative, mutually responsive relationship with their toddlers—an ongoing secure attachment—and toddlers are usually eager to maintain such relationships (Aksan, Kochanska, & Ortman, 2006). Second, children’s anxiety or emotional arousal seems to play a role in their willingness to comply and in the internalization of standards (Kochanska et al., 2007). Hoffman (1983) proposed that a parent’s discipline causes a child to feel anxious arousal. The key is for the parent to use strategies that elicit only mild arousal, enough for the child to take notice, but not to make her especially fearful. This is called the minimum sufficiency principle. If arousal is minimally sufficient, the child is likely to pay attention, to try to understand, and to remember the parent’s “socialization message.” She may attribute her own compliance to her acceptance of a rule, which is a step toward internalization of the rule. But if the child experiences intense anxiety during a disciplinary episode, she may pay more attention to her feelings and fail to really process and understand the socialization message. For example, she might notice, and later remember, how scared she is of her parent’s loud and angry voice, and then attribute herher compliance to her fear rather than to the standard or rule that she could have pondered and learned. Hoffman’s ideas help explain why mild power assertion is more effective than harsh power assertion for long-term internalization of rules. Milder strategies may produce minimally sufficient arousal in a child. His views are also consistent with findings that induction is helpful for internalization. Children are more likely to remember and accept rules they can understand.

If anxious arousal is an important ingredient in how children respond to their parents’ discipline, individual differences among children in how easily their anxiety is aroused should also be important. In other words, temperament differences among toddlers should influence the early development of conscience. For fearful children, gentle discipline that deemphasizes power and emphasizes requests and reasoning should be sufficiently arousing to produce optimal effects. But what about children who are not easily aroused—who seem almost fearless? Do they need harsh discipline to be sufficiently aroused to pay attention? To find out, Kochanska (1995) studied 2-year-olds’ committed compliance, that is, their eager and enthusiastic willingness to go along with their mothers’ requests. Committed compliance in 2-year-olds is predictive of measures of internalization and conscience in the later preschool period (Kochanska, Aksan, & Koenig, 1995). Kochanska found that toddlers’ fearfulness is indeed an important ingredient in the effectiveness of mothers’ discipline. Highly fearful children, as expected, showed the most committed compliance if their mothers used gentle discipline. Harsh discipline was not as effective. However, neither gentle nor harsh discipline was particularly effective in promoting compliance for the most fearless toddlers. For them, only the security of their attachment to their mothers made a difference. Securely attached, fearless toddlers tended to show committed compliance, but insecurely attached, fearless toddlers were much less likely to do so. And, as expected, committed compliance at age 2 was predictive of moral development at 4 ½ years (Kochanska et al., 2007). We see again that children’s temperaments make them differentially susceptible to parenting behaviors, helping to explain why correlations between parenting behaviors and child outcomes tend to be moderate. Parenting clearly is important, but it works somewhat differently with different children.

To clarify Kochanska’s findings, imagine a 2-year-old, Joel, who tends to be more fearful than the other children in his play group. For example, he holds back and ducks his head when a supervising adult offers him a turn to ride the new “race car” at the neighborhood playground, even though many of the other children are clamoring for a turn. When Joel’s mother encourages him gently to participate in a cleanup session, explaining how much help it would be, he is quite cooperative. She tells an observer that she never “yells” at him because he gets so upset that it is counterproductive. José’s mother, on the other hand, says that her son seems unfazed by yelling or any kind of harsh control from her. José does not seem to be afraid of anything. He can’t wait for his turn to ride the new race car, and the fact that the supervising adult is a stranger is of no concern to him. Fortunately, José and his mother share a warm relationship, and José, too, cooperates enthusiastically when his mother asks him to help with the cleanup. Andrew, another toddler in the play group, seems a lot like José in his fearlessness. He is panting to ride the race car and to try all the toys on the playground, and he marches right up to the supervising adult, asking for help. But there seems to be very little warmth between him and his mother, and when she asks him to help out with cleanup, he ignores her. Even when she gives him a shove and speaks sharply to him, he only halfheartedly moves to pick up a toy and abandons the cleanup effort almost immediately. Unfortunately, Andrew may be on a trajectory toward increasing antisocial behavior problems and poor conscience development. Parents low on warmth who use harsh power assertion to control their fearless toddlers tend to see their children’s externalizing behaviors and callousness (lack of empathy, guilt, remorse) increase as their children get older (Kim et al., 2014; Waller & Hyde, 2017).

In sum, parenting helps shape the development of the self-system in early childhood. Which aspects of parenting will be influential depends in part on the particular child. For the development of self-regulation, the quality of attachment, grounded in warm, responsive caregiving, may be all-important for some children. For others, particular parenting practices (methods of control) also play an important role.

Applications

Because the stages of infancy and early childhood have long been viewed as important ones for later socioemotional development, theories of early attachment, self-development, and parenting provide a theoretical formulation that can help explain the effects of sensitive and insensitive parenting.

Building a Self Through the Attachment Relationship

In Crittendon’s (1994, 1997, 2016) view, attachment classifications are linked to operant conditioning processes. Securely attached infants and toddlers receive predictable, soothing care when their physiological needs, fear, aggression, excitement, or anxiety threaten to overwhelm their capacity for homeostatic regulation. These children learn that expressions of their positive, as well as their negative, feelings (anxiety, distress, and anger) are acceptable, because their caregiver tolerates these expressions, and accepts and helps them. In other words, they are positively reinforced for expressing both positive and negative feelings. Let’s consider an example that might apply to adult students. Imagine a time when you were close to despair because of all the work you had to do. You had a number of responsibilities to complete at your job, you had family

obligations to attend to, and your professors were being unreasonably demanding about their assignments! On top of everything, you felt tired and on the verge of getting your annual cold. Your level of crankiness increased significantly, suggesting that you were starting to lose some emotional control. Now imagine that some loving person in your life approached you, and instead of telling you to “grow up,” was able to see through the irritability to the anxieties underneath. This person offered to help shoulder some of your burdens. Emotionally you experienced what amounts to a sigh of relief. You were able to function much better with the support, and your sense of yourself as a valuable and loved person increased greatly. In this supportive context, you would probably even be receptive to constructive suggestions about how you might schedule your time to improve your situation.

Although this example is not a strict analogy to early experience, young children have special needs for caregiver support to help them regulate their emotions and internalize positively valenced self-understanding. Crittendon believes that secure reciprocity with a caregiver allows the child to be open to both cognitive and affective experiences, gradually building procedural models of the self as competent to communicate with the caretaker, able to manage affect with the caretaker’s reliable help, and able to accept and express both positive and negative parts of the self. Essentially, the positive message the secure child encodes is that she is a valuable and loved person even when she’s not being particularly grown up. These repeated dyadic patterns of attachment are encoded as procedural memories that serve as precursors to the mature self and to the self-in-relationship.

The Emotionally Constricted Self

In contrast, insecure-avoidant infants who learn over time that displays of distress elicit rejection, punishment, or withdrawal become conditioned to inhibition of affect. These infants are, in fact, punished for their emotional displays, so these children come to actively avoid or block out perceptions that arouse their feelings because of the aversive consequences. Crittendon and DiLalla (1988) have reported that even very young children who have been severely abused actively block out information about their own feelings and demonstrate false affect—that is, affect that is superficially positive and incongruent with true feelings. Consistent with the general assumption of attachment theory, this pattern of avoidance is adaptive for an early nonresponsive caregiving environment but may have significantly negative consequences for later functioning. A highly defended or “false self” (Kernberg, 1976; Miller, 1981; Winnicott, 1965) may result from the inhibition of affect because the child distorts or mistrusts the evidence of her feelings. This situation effectively reduces the information that the young child can access in constructing the self and in learning about the world. The message the child encodes is that feeling anger or distress is unacceptable and should be avoided because the expression of these feelings distances the caregiver, emotionally if not physically. The child views the self as able to communicate with caregivers only if her own emotional needs are kept in check. Positive aspects of the self may be expressed, but negative aspects, such as emotional neediness, need to be repressed.

Avoidant children who have learned that emotional expression can be dangerous take on the responsibility of their own emotion regulation without seeking caregiver help. They function defensively to keep the caregiver “close but not too close” (Crittendon, 1994, p. 95). To cope with this style of parenting, they learn a style of relating that involves repressing emotions that might anger or distance their more authoritarian caregivers. Negative affect (feelings of distress, sadness, anger) is not well integrated into the self-system, and a false self develops that is biased in favor of its “good” parts and against its more shameful ones. These avoidant or defended children may appear self-reliant to their parents, who may not be very responsive to their children’s feelings anyway. In extreme circumstances, these children may demonstrate what Bowlby called compulsive caregiving. This is the pattern of providing emotional or instrumental care for caregivers, creating an imbalance in family relationships called role confusion (Macfie, Brumariu, & Lyons-Ruth, 2015). A pattern of compulsive self-sufficiency represents an opposite yet equally unhealthy result. These children are at risk because they appear so self-possessed. A closer look reveals their self-evaluations to be based on others’ negative appraisals, including shaming for their expressions of dependency or needs for closeness. Parents of these children can be helped to develop the nurturant side of authoritative parenting by using some of the attachment-related approaches described in earlier chapters.

The Emotionally Volatile Self

Insecure-anxious infants learn that their displays of distress elicit unpredictable results, sometimes positive and sometimes negative. They experience an intermittent reinforcement schedule because inconsistent or neglectful parental responsivity deprives them of a reliable method of communicating with caregivers. They don’t know which bid for attention will pay off. Consequently, their emotional experience is complex, characterized by “anxiety of unresolvable arousal in which desire for the attachment figure, distress at her absence, and aggression toward her are all felt concurrently” (Crittendon, 1994, p. 93). Ultimately these children learn they can trust neither their affect nor their cognitions. However, they may learn that escalation of affect often works best in getting their caregivers’ attention. Highly coercive strategies (aggressiveness or tantrums) and very coy behaviors (disarming manipulation) may be developed to maintain proximity. The self incorporates messages that reflect its ineffectiveness in communicating its needs to caregivers. The child’s aggressive behavior threatens the caregiver (“You must listen to me!”), whereas her coy behavior disarms (“Please don’t get angry at me”). Parents of these children might describe them as “out of control.”

Not all noncompliant child behavior problems are due to early insecure attachments, however. Children may discover, as they become more independent and more verbal, that coercion works well in getting them what they want. Patterson and others (1982; Dishion & Snyder, 2016) who study the development of noncompliance in children maintain that an intermittent (or inconsistent) schedule of reinforcement sustains the coercive child’s behavior problems. A pattern of negative reinforcement, when the cessation of a stimulus increases the frequency of some behavioral response, follows the child’s display of intense negativity or misbehavior. For example, a parent might tell her 4-year-old to go upstairs because it is time to go to bed. The little boy, detesting this interruption of his play time, begins to whine. The parent repeats her command several more times only to be met by continued resistance. The parent’s patience begins to thin and she escalates into threats, which, according to Patterson’s research, are usually not carried out. Instead, the parent appeases the child out of guilt or exasperation. The parent gives up and the child’s noncompliance is reinforced. This pattern strengthens the child’s coercive interaction style, which, with time and repetition, can become the predominant mode of communication. Ironically, Patterson believes that coercive children do not really want parents to give in. Instead, they crave the predictability that derives from knowing what their limits are and the security of knowing that parents will enforce them. Coercive children, however, need help developing a communication style that expresses their needs more directly so that caregivers will understand and respond appropriately. If left unchecked, child noncompliance can be a significant risk factor for later maladaptive outcomes, such as peer rejection and aggression. In such situations, some parent training is generally a very good idea.

Why Train Parents?

Parent training ([PT]; Patterson, Chamberlain, & Reid, 1982), or parent management training ([PMT]; Brestan & Eyberg, 1998), has the distinction of being one of a relative handful of therapies deemed efficacious for children (Kazdin, 2003; Lee, Horvath, & Hunsley, 2013). Studies have shown that PT is effective in reducing noncompliance and promoting prosocial behavior, especially for children ages 4 through 8. Parent training can substantially strengthen the limit-setting side of authoritativeness, improve the quality of life in the home, and reduce stress for parents who must grapple with children’s noncompliance. Table 5.5 provides some examples of skills taught in parent training programs.

In some cases, an added parent management component can make a good therapeutic program even better. For example, in the case of treatments for attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), a multimodal treatment that included medication and behavioral (including parent management) treatment demonstrated an advantage over medication alone for children with comorbid conditions (anxiety or conduct problems), for children with more highly educated mothers, for members of minority groups, and for families who learned to improve their discipline techniques via this training (Pfiffner & Haack, 2014). The principles involved in parent management training have also been used effectively in classroom management.

Parent training is successful, no doubt, because it has a strong theoretical rationale. It draws on a set of well-established principles from operant conditioning and social learning theory that can be used in individual counseling, group counseling, psychoeducation, and consultation. Whereas the benefits of well-delivered programs can be great, they are most effective for families with young children. Given the developmental needs of older children and adolescents, training for their parents should take into consideration adolescents’ need for some measure of personal control and autonomy by incorporating skills in decision making and negotiation into the counseling.

Effective parent training programs incorporate a few essential elements (Dishion, Forgatch, Chamberlain, & Pelham, 2016; Kazdin, 1991; Moore & Patterson, 2003).

 These programs are directed toward parents or guardians; children are not directly involved in treatment. An exception to this is treatment with adolescents, which typically does require the adolescent’s participation.

 Parents are taught to observe and define their children’s noncompliance in behavioral terms. They are instructed to note their own part in interaction cycles that reward and sustain noncompliance. The most problematic behaviors and their prosocial opposites are identified.

 Basic principles of learning theory, such as reinforcement, shaping, mild punishment, generalization, and so on, are taught to parents, used to illustrate the nature of parent–child interactions, and applied in contingent ways to achieve the goals of treatment. These principles provide the basis for therapeutic change.

 Parents (with a professional’s help) put these ideas to the test at home. Target behaviors that parents wish to modify are identified; skills are practiced in sessions using role play, modeling, therapist feedback, and discussion. These techniques are then employed in the home, and the results of the new behavior management strategies are recorded, reviewed, and further developed during subsequent sessions.

Parent management approaches depend upon the careful application of behavioral principles. Therefore, the therapist who uses this modality needs to understand behavioral terms correctly, must be precise about selecting and defining target behaviors, and must be able to identify contingencies that increase or decrease behavior. One method involves asking parents to identify two to four of the child’s behaviors that are most problematic. This is often supplemented by the use of more formal observational assessment tools. Moore and Patterson (2003) report that a typical initial concern can be defined as “minding” versus “not minding.” Once the parents are helped to notice the context wherein the “not-minding” occurs, principles like positive reinforcement (using tangible objects or the very powerful attention of parents), mild punishments (like time-out or restriction of privileges), and shaping (rewarding closer and closer approximations of “minding” with social praise) can be incorporated into some contingency approximations of “minding” with social praise) can be incorporated into some contingency management system. Contingency management involves presenting and withdrawing reinforcers and punishments in a systematic and consistent way to effect behavioral change. The linchpin of these approaches is the mindful use of positive reinforcement, a particularly potent response from parents when it comes in the form of warm encouragement, acceptance, and attention. A correct understanding of concepts like negative reinforcement, which is central to understanding the coercion cycle (Patterson, 1982) and which is distinct from the concept of punishment, is particularly important as well. When parents use time-out correctly, for example, they are removing the situational rewards that support the child’s misbehavior. Daily documentation of progress can be a useful part of the program, helping parents become more consistent in their use of techniques. More information about coercive processes is presented in Chapter 7.

Over the years, many effective programs have built upon these basic principles. Some have been adapted for highly distressed families, such as those affected by addiction and abuse. Programs have also been successfully used and scaled up in community, residential, and foster care systems. Pioneering work done in the 1960s (Bijou & Baer, 1966; Hanf, 1968; Patterson, 2002; Wahler, Winkel, Peterson, & Morrison, 1965) has generated a range of behaviorally based family programs that have helped untold numbers of children and their families in accessible, culturally sensitive and cost-effective ways. (See Table 5.6 for a sample.)

Sometimes, stressed families, who possibly need parent training the most, are unlikely to access it. Many find it extremely difficult to commit to structured meetings or participation in other community-based supports. Limited finances and time, language barriers, and fear of criticism from social service providers can all reduce the chance of engagement. Creative ways to bridge the gap between parent need and resource access are necessary. One approach, the Family Check-Up ([FCU]; Dishion & Stormshak, 2007), has demonstrated that families who took part in this short-term intervention were more likely to avail themselves of other community services, such as the more in-depth parenting programs mentioned earlier. The FCU may be delivered in schools or other community settings, so it is relatively easy to access. First, FCU involves a 3-session phase comprising an interview, family assessment, and feedback meeting (hence, the “check-up”). It is notable that clinicians employ motivational interviewing techniques throughout (see Miller & Rollnick, 2002) to identify family strengths and challenges as a way of eliciting parent participation. For example, clinicians might explicitly point out to parents how certain positive behaviors they already demonstrate or family traditions they share do benefit their children. Next, parents and therapists work on areas that need improvement, which have been identified in the check-up assessment. These might include setting limits, increasing the frequency of positive comments to children, monitoring behavior, and defining effective discipline strategies or other areas of need. Just as your doctor doesn’t prescribe every possible medication to you after your check-up, so every family doesn't need to improve every possible parenting skill. Building on existing competencies, parents and therapists work together to define targets and identify community-based resources that are available to support them. Consequently, the FCU is personally tailored to each family’s needs; it is ecologically and culturally valid, strengths-based, and accessible.

Recently, new interventions that address the emotional regulation and attention of the parent have been explored as a means of promoting parenting quality. We know that the presence, warmth, and listening skills of the parent are particularly important influences on the health of their relationships with their children. Parents who are stressed, distracted, or emotionally unavailable, especially when this is a chronic pattern, tend to undermine the quality of relationships and foster children’s dysregulation. Recent work in mindful parenting interventions has shown promise in improving parenting quality because of the nature of the attention that is being cultivated. Mindfulness practice can have an impact on relationships because it supports loving attention and helps reduce parental stress. In improving parents’ own emotion regulation, all too common in normal and distressed parent–child relationships, child behaviors can improve (Bogels & Restifo, 2014). The use of mindfulness practice has increased in novel programs for parents during pregnancy, birthing, and parenting because it benefits both parent and child (Duncan & Bardake, 2010). We will have more to say about mindfulness in Chapter 14.

As Masten (2014) notes, the family is the context for child resilience, especially in the early years, acting as a protective factor against adversity through the transmission of beliefs and values, rules, routines, and other supports. Research supports that parenting quality moderates child outcomes. Therefore, parenting interventions such as the ones mentioned in this section can serve as potentially powerful influences on the course of later child development.

Noncompliance: Forewarned Is Forearmed

Higher rates of noncompliance appear to occur at certain times throughout the day (7:30 a.m., 11:30 a.m., 5:30 p.m., and 8:30 p.m.; Goodenough, 1931, as cited in Moore & Patterson, 2003). Consider this scene in the Arnold family. Mom, whose shift at work ends at 5:00 p.m., has just returned from the babysitter’s house with her 6-year-old twins. Both children are hungry and tired from a long day at school. Yvonne needs help with a homework project. Kenney has a Cub Scout meeting at 6:30 and needs to find some items for the pack’s activity. As their mother struggles to put together a meal, the children become more intense in their demands for her attention. Pretty soon, they are fighting with each other. She yells at them to stop, but this only makes matters worse. Yvonne ends up in tears and Kenney runs to his room. No one feels like eating dinner.

What About Spanking?

Current research is blurring what was once considered a bright line between corporal punishment and abuse, painting a picture of a slippery slope between mild corporal punishment and harsher forms of discipline (Gershoff, 2008). This may be the reality, unfortunately, because most of the corporal punishment meted out by adults is not done in a particularly calm, loving, or reflective way (Holden, Williamson, & Holland, 2014). As you have seen, the use and severity of corporal punishment tend to escalate over time, and most episodes of physical abuse occur in the context of child discipline (Durrant & Ensom, 2012).

So far, you have been reading about the importance of nurturing children to develop strong bonds of attachment and of socializing them in ways that imbue a sense of feeling valued and loved. It may be jarring to think about hitting children as helpful for these purposes. Despite this disconnect, if you also believe that most U.S. parents spank their children, you would not be mistaken. Corporal punishment enjoys wide support in the United States according to recent surveys. In large numbers, women (65%) and men (76%) agree that children sometimes need “a good, hard spanking” (Child Trends, 2015, p. 2). Other surveys show that corporal punishment is used by one third of U.S. parents to discipline infants as young as 10 months of age (Regalado, Sareen, Inkelas, Wissow, & Halfon, 2004) and approximately 65% to 70% of parents use it to discipline toddlers ages 1 to 3 (Maguire-Jack, Gromoske, & Berger, 2012). An analysis of responses to an online survey about spanking showed that over 70% disagreed with professional advice from the American Academy of Pediatrics (1998) that spanking should not be used under any circumstance.

Despite evidence to the contrary, many parents continue to believe spanking is an effective way to control children’s aggressive and noncompliant behavior, and methodological problems in many studies complicate matters by leading to varying interpretations of results. Given the concerns expressed by professional associations in the United States and internationally, finding consensus is important. As you recall, meta-analyses, or studies of studies, are helpful because they offer a firmer body of evidence from which to draw conclusions than single studies alone. To address the methodological shortcomings of previous meta-analyses, Gershoff and Grogan-Kaylor (2016) compared the effects of severe physical punishment/abuse (i.e., hitting with objects, etc.) with spanking (i.e., “hitting a child on the buttocks or extremities using an open hand,”p. 453) using 75 studies that met a high standard of quality. Less rigorous studies were eliminated, and 52% of the newly included studies had not been part of previous meta-analyses. Results indicated that spanking had deleterious effects on 13 domains and not a single beneficial effect on child well-being, even when considered separately from abuse (see Table 5.7). Spanking appears to have little influence on the goals that parents want most to achieve with discipline—the development of self-regulation and morality.

The growing consensus from research in this area has attracted a high level of international attention. In 1989, the United Nations recognized children’s right to protection from physical and psychological violence, including spanking, through the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (United Nations, 1989). Originally, only six countries out of the total 198 member countries (Somalia, Palestine, the United States, Taiwan, Western Sahara, and Vatican City, which has no child population) did not ratify this treaty. In 2015, five of the remaining countries ratified it, leaving the United States as the only country not to ratify the Convention on the Rights of the Child (treaties.un.org, accessed August 10, 2017). A large group of national organizations in Canada have joined together (Durrant, Ensom, & the Coalition on Physical Punishment of Children and Youth, 2004) to promote the message that physical punishment is ineffective and only serves to threaten children’s well-being.

You may be wondering why it is that researchers, professional groups like pediatricians, and international policy makers agree that spanking is not good for kids but many parents are very reluctant to give it up. A creative methodology was recently employed to investigate this question. Using a Time magazine article about the association between spanking and aggression (Park, 2010) as a springboard, researchers randomly sampled social media comments from a Yahoo! news site that reported on the article. Disagreement with the article’s conclusion was strong (71%). Use of corporal punishment was justified using personal (I was hit as a child, and I’m OK; I love my child so it’s not abuse.), child-focused (Children need discipline), family-focused (Parents need to be in charge), strategic (Spanking is the only thing that works), societal (Kids get away with too much these days), religious (It’s the parent’s duty not to spare the rod), and ideological (Other people shouldn’t tell parents what to do with their own children) reasons (Taylor, Al-Hiyari, Lee, Priebe, Guerrero, & Bales, 2016).

In the end, conclusive evidence demonstrates that corporal punishment does pose a public health problem of significant proportions, yet long-held assumptions are slow to shift. Research attempts to change people’s beliefs about the acceptability of corporal punishment have experimented with creative ways to use empirical knowledge in the service of altering preconceptions. For example, people were invited to read short summaries online describing corporal punishment effects while interacting with the text. For example, readers were asked to estimate the level of association between corporal punishment and various outcomes, like aggression or drug abuse. The program provided immediate online feedback about the correctness or incorrectness of their choices. This very brief exposure to empirical evidence about the effects of spanking was successful in changing attitudes toward the acceptability of corporal punishment for groups of parents and non-parents alike (Holden, Brown, Baldwin, & Caderao, 2014). Future research may help us harness this approach to aid in reducing the social acceptability of corporal punishment for parents and others.

Another significant approach most experts advise is parent education and the provision of alternative strategies for child discipline, but this cannot occur in a vacuum. Studies have long shown that conditions of economic and social stress in families burden caregivers and undermine the quality of their parenting (Conger & Elder, 1994). Combined efforts to support families economically and educationally may have the best chance of reducing caregiver stress and promoting more positive discipline practices. Also, efforts that educate with sensitivity to cultural context are necessary. The evidence suggests that “any efforts to reduce both spanking and externalizing behaviors would need to target Blacks, Whites, Hispanics and Asian Americans. While the approaches would likely vary by cultural group, the message would be the same—spanking children is not associated with better behavior over time” (Gershoff et al., 2012, p. 843).

The Flexible Work of Parenting

It would be incorrect to assume that the quality of the early attachment relationship will automatically be transformed into a complementary pattern of parent–child relationships in early childhood. That is, it is not necessarily the case that every securely attached baby becomes a securely attached preschooler, and so forth. But, as our discussion of parenting style in the toddler and preschool years illustrates, the elements of sensitive parenting that characterize the infancy period are not much different from those that are right for preschoolers. The specific parenting behaviors might change, but the underlying requirement to be psychologically available and sensitive to the child’s developmental needs and capabilities remains the same. For the most part, messages about the self-in-relationship that the child has internalized become the foundation for more mature interactions. Cicchetti and Toth (1994) believe that the negative adolescent and adult self-views that undergird many psychological disorders stem from insults to the self that were experienced during childhood. Consequently, clinicians need to apply primary prevention strategies to strengthen early parent–child relationships.

As children get older, they should be provided with experiences that allow for the growth of mastery, autonomy, and self-efficacy. Parent education and discussion groups can be helpful forums for parents in which to gain support for their strengths and to learn about the developmental needs of toddlers and preschoolers. Parents sometimes construe insensitive parenting to mean actions that are mean or rejecting. But intrusive interference, such as picking up the child to give her a hug when she is absorbed in an activity, or arbitrarily restricting a child’s mobility, may also be insensitive to the child’s needs if done repeatedly. Of particular relevance to self-concept development is educating parents about the implications of their language when conversing with their children. Insulting or insensitive remarks, particularly those intended to shame the child, should be avoided lest they become part of the young child’s self-concept.

The growth of a healthy self-system depends upon an environment that provides the child with love and limits appropriate to her developmental level. When the proximal environment is distorted, as is the environment of defended and coercive children, youngsters will make adaptations. However, their adaptations will come with a cost to the development of a child’s true self. Fostering the growth of the authentic self in infancy and early childhood sets the child on a developmental pathway that will support healthy functioning at every stage thereafter.

Summary

The Self-System

1. Some traditional theorists viewed the self-system as multidimensional. William James, for example, distinguished between the self-as-subject, as active agent or “I,” and the self-concept, the object of our own observations and evaluations, or the “Me.” The “I” is continuously experienced, is distinguished from others, and is an agent of action. The “Me” consists of personal attributes, the material (or physical), social, and spiritual characteristics of self. Self-esteem, the evaluation of one’s attributes, can be good, bad, or neutral. The valence assigned to one’s own attributes depends on the number of successes we enjoy relative to our aspirations.

2. James Cooley introduced a developmental perspective into theorizing about the self. Self-representations are constructed from our interactions with others, especially caregivers. We build a looking-glass self that reflects our view of how others see us.

3. George Herbert Mead added that language and society contribute to shaping the self-system. There are culturally determined differences in people’s preferred ways of viewing themselves. For example, Japanese emphasize affiliations in their self-descriptions, whereas Americans emphasize more individualistic qualities.

The Early Development of the Self-System

4. The pre-self that develops in infancy begins with early inklings of one’s body permanence and separateness from others that are derived from the regularity and reliability of infant–caregiver interactions. Procedural representations of interactions are established and may promote a budding sense of mastery by the second half of the first year, if babies’ behavior controls caregiving responses. A sense of self as self-in-relationship begins to emerge. Late in the first year, infants engage in intentional action, a sign of the I-self, a sense of agency. By the end of the first year, separation distress and social referencing signal the baby’s deepening understanding that the other is separate. Additional indicators include the baby’s tendency to explore more readily in the presence of a familiar caregiver. If the caregiver provides a secure base, the baby in a sense has the self-worth or confidence to explore. All of these indicators of a growing sense of the self as separate emerge from and depend on the baby’s relationship to others.

5.  Self-recognition is demonstrated as early as 15 months in the mirror recognition and “body-as-obstacle” tests. Passing these tests indicates that children are forming a self-concept, or a “Me.” After the second birthday, children begin to use self-descriptive words. Self-evaluation or self-esteem advances with self-recognition, with abused children showing signs of poorer self-esteem than non-maltreated children from the beginnings of mirror recognition. Gradually, more differentiated self-descriptions emerge, with preschoolers describing more concrete characteristics, such as “little,” and older children beginning to refer to more abstract, less obvious qualities, such as “funny.”

6.  Self-regulation involves both emotional and behavioral control. Emotional control begins in infancy, when caregiver–infant interactions give babies outside assistance with affective control. The caregiving relationship is the context in which the infant’s own capacity for emotion regulation develops.

7. emotion regulation develops.

8. Behavior regulation begins in the second year when toddlers achieve objective self-recognition. The simultaneous emergence of symbolic or representational thought and other cognitive skills allow the child to begin learning and storing rules or standards of conduct. By late in the second year, self-conscious emotions emerge, such as embarrassment or guilt, emotions that require awareness of self and of others’ judgments. Between 2 and 3, children show such emotions when they realize they have broken a rule or made a mistake. Once these capacities are in place, the child can begin to control her own behavior based on others’ expectations.

Early Socialization: Parenting and the Development of the Self-System

 As the infant becomes a toddler, her needs shift from total dependency to growing independence, and the parent–child relationship reorganizes such that sensitive, responsive caregiving begins to include efforts to socialize the child—to shape or control the child’s autonomous action, so that she remains safe and behaves in culturally appropriate ways.

 Two dimensions of parenting style, parents’ approach to caring for and disciplining their children, are important. First is warmth or parental responsiveness, which includes affection, acceptance, involvement and interest, and so on. Second is control or parental demandingness, the degree to which parents impose and enforce standards of behavior.

Four parenting styles can be described, crossing the positive and negative poles of the two dimensions. Authoritative parents are high on warmth and on demandingness. Authoritarian parents are low on warmth but high on demandingness. Permissive parents are high or moderate on warmth but low on demandingness, and neglecting or uninvolved parents are low on both dimensions. Authoritative parenting is associated with the most positive outcomes in child development, including adaptability, competence, good social relations, low levels of antisocial behavior, high self-esteem, and good self-regulation. The correlations between parenting styles and outcomes are significant but moderate, indicating that such outcomes are also influenced by other factors, not just parenting style.

 parenting style.

 Parents use a variety of methods of control. Power assertion, which involves either physical punishment or withdrawal of privileges, tends to be effective for immediate control of behavior, but may not have longer term benefits, and harsher forms can have some negative side effects, such as increased aggressiveness in children. Psychological control, which includes love withdrawal, generates high anxiety and elicits immediate compliance, but seems to have few effects on long-term self-regulation. Induction, providing explanations and emphasizing benefits to the child and to others, seems most effective for promoting internalization of rules and longer term self-regulation.

 Are parenting practices actually having an effect, or are there other reasons why parenting is correlated with child outcomes? For example, could it be that the correlation is the result of shared inheritance of traits between parents and children? Data support a multidimensional approach. Parenting, genetics, child temperament, and other factors all contribute to child outcomes.

 Parenting practices are partly the result of child characteristics, such as temperament traits. For example, adults are more directive with dependent children than with independent children. Also, the effectiveness of different parenting practices is partly a function of a child’s temperament. For example, toddler boys with difficult temperaments respond with high levels of aggressiveness when parents use physically intrusive control methods, whereas boys with easy temperaments do not.

 The broader cultural context seems to have an influence on parenting practices and may have an impact on their effectiveness. Some parenting practices may have different meaning, and therefore different outcomes, depending on ethnicity and culture. The traditional values of various cultures have shaped the ways they parent and discipline their children.

 children.

 Corporal punishment, which inflicts pain on children in order to control behavior, has been shown to predict increases in later externalizing behavior and mental disorders, even in its “milder” forms (i.e., spanking). This finding generally holds up across cultural groups. In some cultures harsh practices are normative, and parents may combine high levels of warmth with corporal punishment. Normativeness and parental warmth appear to moderate the link between corporal punishments and aggression, but not change the direction of effects.

 Psychological control practices seem to have the same negative effects across cultures (e.g., high levels of child anxiety) regardless of potential moderating factors, such as normativeness.

Conscience: The Beginnings of a Moral Self

17. Children’s internalization of rules and values is associated with conscience, feeling distress when one violates a rule. This is the beginning of moral development.

18. Children are more cooperative and compliant when they share a warm, responsive relationship with a parent. Their compliance can also be related to anxious arousal. Hoffman argued that mild arousal can help children pay attention to a rule, but doesn’t make them so anxious that they pay attention only to how afraid they are. This is consistent with the finding that mild power assertion practices are more likely than more severe power assertion practices to lead to children’s internalization of rules and their long-term compliance. Further, Hoffman’s ideas help explain why children who have fearful temperaments respond best to gentle discipline, but children who are fearless are unfazed by either gentle or harsh disciplinary practices. The most important determiner of compliance for fearless children is the warmth of their relationship to the parent.

Case Study

Terry and Bill, married for 5 years, are a Black couple who live in a small suburban community. Terry graduated from high school and worked as a receptionist before her marriage to Bill, a communications company manager. Because both of them believed that mothers should stay at home with young children, Terry quit her job when she had her first child, who is now an intense and active 4-year-old daughter named Dawn. Both parents were very attentive to their daughter and enjoyed caring for and playing with her when she was a baby. As Dawn got older, she became more active and assertive. When Dawn fussed, resisted, or showed frustration, Terry was patient and affectionate with her. She was able to coax Dawn out of her bad temper by making up little games that Dawn enjoyed. Both Terry and Bill liked Dawn’s spirited personality. Because her parents wanted her to have access to playmates, Dawn attended a church-related program for toddlers and preschoolers three mornings a week.

When Dawn was 3 years old, Terry gave birth to the couple’s second child, a son named Darren. Soon after the baby’s birth, the family learned that Darren had a congenital heart problem that would require ongoing medical treatment and a specific regimen of care at home. Darren was an irritable baby. He fussed for long periods and was very difficult for Terry to soothe. Because of Darren’s need for medical care and the limitations of Bill’s medical insurance, the couple soon found themselves in financial difficulty. Bill began to take on overtime work at the company to subsidize some of the bills and was away from the home several nights a week and part of each weekend.

Terry found the care of two demanding young children and the worries about money to be increasingly more stressful. She was always tired and seemed to have less patience with her family. Although she once had the leisure time to read to Dawn, to take her for walks, and to help her master tasks that proved frustrating, Terry now had to shift her attention to the care of her medically fragile infant. Because Dawn looked so grown-up compared to the vulnerable newborn, Terry began to perceive her daughter as able to do many things for herself. When Dawn demonstrated her neediness by clinging or whining, Terry became abrupt and demanded that Dawn stop. Many battles revolved around Terry’s new rule that Dawn have a nap or “quiet time” each afternoon so that mother and baby could get some rest.

One day, Dawn’s preschool teacher, Mrs. Adams, asked to speak with Terry. Mrs. Adams noted that Dawn’s behavior was becoming a problem in the morning preschool sessions. Dawn had begun throwing toys when she became upset and often refused to cooperate in group activities. Terry was greatly embarrassed to hear about her daughter’s misbehavior. Dawn was the only Black child in the small class, and her mother wondered if this was part of the problem. When Terry got home, she put her tearful, clinging daughter in her room for time-out for being bad at school. She loved Dawn, but she could not tolerate this kind of behavior, especially when Darren needed so much of her time. She began to wonder if she and Bill had spoiled their daughter. Terry feared that Dawn would have problems when it came time for her to enter kindergarten if they didn’t take a strong stand with her now.