Abstract
Background
Parenting strategies such as communicating clear expectations, providing calm directions, and teaching specific skills can strengthen young children’s social-emotional development. Parenting programs for children with disruptive behavior often emphasize gaining compliance via effective directives, and less on how to facilitate child skill acquisition or on effective parenting for differing situations and task demands.
Objective
We aimed to study how parenting strategies and associated child behavior vary by situational contexts. Specifically, we focused on the differential use of directives and guidance during different tasks.
Method
This observation study utilized a microsocial coding system, the Parent–Child Play Task Observation System (PCPTOS), to closely examine parent and child interactions in multiple analogue task situations. The study drew on pre-intervention data for 224 parent–child dyads who participated in a parenting-focused intervention trial for children ages 3–7 who presented elevated levels of disruptive behaviors.
Results
Interrater reliabilities were very good to excellent. Parents used directives more frequently during the clean-up task and guidance more frequently during the teaching task compared to the other tasks. Associations of parent use of directives and guidance with child behavior and affect differed by task. Observed parent directives were associated with child disruptive behavior during each task, whereas parent guidance was negatively associated with child disruptive behavior and positively associated with child positive affect during the teaching task.
Conclusions
Parenting strategies that are well matched to the situational context and proactively consider task demands are more likely to facilitate children’s social-emotional development.
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Funding
This research was supported by the National Institute of Mental Health under Award Number R01MH097699. The authors wish to thank the coding team, Cathy Milchak, Kristina Hulegaard, Katherine Bravo Aguayo, and Joey Blum for their excellent contributions.
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Rusby, J.C., Prinz, R.J., Metzler, C.W. et al. Attending to Task Demands: Systematic Observation of Parent Directives and Guidance in Varying Situational Contexts. Child Youth Care Forum 51, 421–437 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10566-021-09637-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10566-021-09637-x