Determinants of Disciplinary Practices in Low-Income Black Mothers

Disciplinary attitudes and practices of low-income black mothers were examined. Mothers were interviewed about their parenting attitudes and control practices, and their responses were coded in terms of the degree to which they took a parent- versus a child-oriented approach to discipline. Mothers in the sample varied widely in their attitudes toward physical punishment, and mothers who used power-assertive techniques were as likely to take the child's perspective and give input into the socialization process as those who did not. Factors associated with maternal disciplinary styles included: maternal education, father absence, maternal age, and self-reported religious beliefs. Findings are discussed in terms of the variability in disciplinary practices in this population, as well as the factors contributing to these individual differences.     

The experience of story reading: deaf children and hearing mothers' interactions at story time

THE STUDY EXAMINED scaffolding interactions between deaf children and hearing mothers in which story reading was used as a tool to aid in the development of narrative comprehension and linguistic reasoning. The dyadic interactions were examined from the perspective of the theoretical works of Vygotsky (1934/1962, 1978, 1929/1981, 1960/1981). The sample group consisted of 7 dyads of hearing mothers and their deaf children ages 4.2 to 9.5 years. The mothers signed a story to their children. The dyadic interactions reflected the different levels of scaffolding and functioning within the zone of proximal development (Vygotsky, 1934/1962, 1978). The researchers found that story reading provides an excellent framework for both cognitive and emotional growth within the parent/child dyad. Mothers who engaged their children in mutual dialogue also used elaboration. This was reflected in their children's linguistic reasoning.     

Understanding Associations Between Low-Income Mothers' Participation in Education and Parenting

Maternal education is one of the strongest predictors of children's academic outcomes. One possible explanation for this is that more highly educated mothers more frequently engage in parenting practices that may promote children's later cognitive development; however, most of this evidence is correlational. This study uses Head Start Impact Study data (N = 1,953) to explore whether low-income mothers' participation in education affects their parenting practices and beliefs. Principal scores, which predict maternal educational participation based on covariates, were used for analysis. Principal score matching was used to identify mothers who we predicted participated in education because their children were randomly assigned to Head Start. We compared these mothers' outcomes to those of mothers we predicted would have participated in education if they were assigned to Head Start. For these mothers, participation in maternal education was associated with children watching fewer hours of TV, having more types of printed media at home, and more frequent participation in cultural activities, but it was not associated with a host of other parenting outcomes. Changing parenting is one potential pathway by which maternal educational participation may influence children's later academic outcomes.     

Maternal Reminiscing and Autobiographical Memory Features of Mother–Child Dyads in a Cross-Cultural Context

Maternal reminiscing styles and mother–child memory features were examined in a cross-cultural context. Fifty-five Chinese (Guangzhou, China) and 48 Australian (Melbourne, Australia) mother–child dyads (child age: 3–6 years) independently retrieved autobiographical memories and jointly discussed past events. Australian mothers used greater elaborative and supportive reminiscing and provided more specific memories than Chinese mothers. Australian children provided greater memory elaboration than Chinese children, but they did not differ in memory specificity. Maternal reminiscing styles and cultural group were independently predictive of child memory elaboration but not specificity. Nonetheless, moderation analyses showed that the two maternal reminiscing styles (elaborative and supportive) interacted to predict child memory specificity. These findings indicate the importance of culture and types of reminiscing on memory development.     

Parenting Style as a Context for Emotion Socialization

Research Findings: The purpose of this study was to examine parenting style in the domain of emotion socialization through studying the relationships among parenting styles, emotion-related parental practices, and parental goals of Hong Kong–Chinese mothers. Data were collected from 189 Hong Kong–Chinese mothers of 6- to 8-year-old children. Hong Kong–Chinese mothers reported that among authoritarian, authoritative, and permissive parenting styles, they adopted an authoritative style most often and an authoritarian style least often. They valued both relational and individualistic emotional competence of their children as parental goals but regarded the former as more important than the latter. Structural equation modeling results indicated that parental goals mediated the influences of parenting styles on parental practices. Authoritative mothers who held individualistic emotional competence goals adopted different parental practices (a coaching or an emotion-encouraging approach) from those who held relational emotional competence goals. When mothers adopted authoritarian parenting and endorsed relational emotional competence as a parental goal, they responded to children's expression of emotions in a dismissing way. Practice or Policy: Parenting styles play an overarching role in emotion socialization, influencing both parental practices and goals. The results imply that school personnel, counselors, or social workers should take into account parenting styles, parental goals, and cultural values of participants when they offer training programs to parents.     

Erratum to: Maternal parenting styles,homework help,and children’s literacy development in language minority and Finnish-speaking families

The aim of this study was to examine the role of mothers’ (language minority mothers, LM, n = 49, and Finnish-speaking mothers, MP, n = 368) parenting styles and maternal help with their children’s homework in the children’s (mean age 11.43 years) literacy skills at fourth grade in Finland. In addition, the moderating effect of a child’s gender on this relationship was investigated. The results showed that the LM mothers used psychological control more than MP mothers. Furthermore, the more LM mothers used warmth and psychological styles of parenting, the more they helped their daughters, not sons, with homework. MP mothers’ parenting styles did not relate to their children’s reading and spelling skills. LM maternal behavioral control parenting styles were positively related, and psychological control was negatively related to children’s reading skills through help with homework. Maternal help negatively related to children’s reading skills in both groups. This research provides also new information to teachers and educators who work in multicultural teams. Because our findings could be applied in the educational settings of multilingual students, they are likely to be of great interest to the visionary scientists, researchers, teachers, and trainees.

     

Dyadic activities and attention in the infant: A developmental study

Infants’ abilities to focus attention on objects are known to be related to mothers’ mobilizing behaviors. As delayed effects of maternal behaviors at 5 months may be observed in 8-month-olds, mothers may be considered as scaffolding their infant’s attention. However, all dyadic activities are probably not equally propitious to attention mobilizing. In a sample of 30 dyads, studied at 5 and 8 months of age, whole observations were split in four broad categories: care, dyadic play with objects, dyadic play without objects and infant alone. The duration of maternal mobilizing and infant attention focussing were studied within categories. Inter-dyads variability is high, while dyads are stable across ages. Even within the dyadic play with objects, mothers differ widely in the duration and way they mobilize attention. Five-month-olds still need their mother’s support, as they explore less when they are alone, while 8-month-olds are more autonomous. The impact and importance of the various types of dyadic activities on cognitive development are discussed.     

Low-income Latino mothers’ booksharing styles and children's emergent literacy development

Booksharing is often considered one of the most important activities parents can do to promote young children's early literacy skills. However, there is relatively little research on the style and nature of booksharing in Latino homes. This study examined the relation between maternal booksharing styles and low-income Latino children's subsequent language and literacy development. Eighty Latino Head Start four-year-old children and their mothers were audiotaped while they shared a wordless children's picture book together in their home. Six months later, children's emergent literacy ability was assessed. Results of a cluster analysis identified three types of maternal booksharing styles which had differential predictive power over children's literacy longitudinally. Results are discussed in terms of improving culturally appropriate research, practice and policy for early childhood and family literacy programming designed to meet the needs of young Latino children and their parents.     

The social ecology and early parenting of Caucasian adolescent mothers

Social characteristics, maternal behaviors, and the home environments of Caucasian adolescent and nonadolescent mothers were investigated in a sample of 50 primiparous low- and middle-class women and their 4-month-old infants. The mothers were interviewed about their child-care network and about stressful life events that may have occurred since the infant's birth. The HOME inventory was completed and videotapes of 2 hours of home observations were coded to assess maternal proximity, verbalizations, activity, and physical contact with the infant. Interview data indicated that adolescent mothers relied more frequently on other teenagers and other network members for help in child care than nonadolescent mothers. In addition, they also received more frequent support from their mothers and less frequent help from their partner's and partner's mother and siblings than nonadolescent mothers. During the home visit, they were less verbal with their infants and scored significantly lower on the Responsiveness and Maternal Involvement subscales as well as on the total HOME inventory; these results were replicated on subgroups matched for socioeconomic status, emphasizing the unique social context and parenting practices of teenage mothers.     

谈中国古代两大语体短篇小说的双向渗透

中国古代两大语体(文言和白话)短篇小说呈平行互补的双轨运转格局,二者之间的双向渗透主要表现为简明叙事与敷演叙事的对口交流、诗笔叙事与意象叙事的相互借鉴、雅语叙事与口语叙事的彼此参用等三个方面.这种双向渗透使得二者在取长补短中提高了各自的叙事功能.     

Culture and early social interactions. The example of mother-infant object play in African and native French Families

Data from cross-cultural studies on parental behaviour during early social interaction suggest that structural and universal features should be differentiated from culturally specific ones. No direct relations can be assumed to exist between specific forms of child rearing and development of skills in the child. However child rearing practices can have long term effects and affect social behaviours. As an illustration, we compare interactive styles of 40 French and African mothers living in Paris in an object play situation, with their 10 and 15 month-olds. French mothers’ interactions with their children are illustrative of tight connections between verbal and non-verbal behaviour. Action is the basis or anchor point for verbal exchange; and this repetition or verbal redundnacy yields discourse-on-actions which to a certain extent distances the action and allows for a generalization process to take place. In contrast, African mothers’ interactions with their infants present less verbal scaffolding of non-verbal behaviour. This type of interaction allows for a greater «disjunction» or separation of non-verbal and verbal communication. African cultures do not assign the spoken word with the educational function of structuring and planning activities. However, the models generated by the school system correspond to other types of obligations which are strongly affected by temporal perspectives.     

Proximate regulation by mothers: a demonstration of how differing styles affect young children's behavior

An earlier observational study of mothers and toddlers in the supermarket revealed differential success of 2 styles of maternal behavior. A proactive style of preempting opportunities for misbehavior, in contrast to a reactive style of responding only after misbehavior occurred, was correlated with a lower incidence of undesirable child acts. Here, the 2 styles were studied in the laboratory to explore their function further. In an analog of the supermarket situation, mothers behaved proactively and reactively in trials in which the task was to prevent their 2- or 3-year-old children from playing with desirable toys. Children responded to proactive behavior by engaging in acceptable behaviors longer and by violating fewer rules. The 2-year-old children were less able to comply with the rules. The data illustrate the role parents play in promoting and supporting the development of compliance and self-regulation in children.     

The ABC’s of Chinese: maternal mediation of Pinyin for Chinese children’s early literacy skills

In the present study, maternal Pinyin mediation and its relations with young Chinese children??s word reading and word writing development were explored. At time 1, 43 Mainland Chinese children and their mothers were videotaped on a task in which children were asked to write 12 words in Pinyin (a phonological coding system used in Mainland China as an aid to reading Chinese characters) with help from their mothers. The videotapes were later coded on a scale (adapted from Aram & Levin, 2001) of mothers?? writing facilitation techniques. Scores on this scale of maternal mediation of Pinyin uniquely explained children??s reading of Chinese words, but not writing of Chinese words, after statistically controlling for maternal education and age, and children??s non-verbal IQ, age, and phonological awareness. At time 2, 22 of the children from time 1 were further tested on Chinese word reading and word reading task 1?year later. After controlling for children??s age and non-verbal IQ, maternal Pinyin mediation uniquely explained 6% of the variance in children??s word writing and 7% of the variance in children??s word reading performance at time 2. Results underscore the potential importance of the maternal scaffolding role for reading acquisition both theoretically and practically in a domain not previously explored (i.e., use of a common coding system (Pinyin) for learning to read, rather than word reading itself).     

Distinct Influences of Mothers and Fathers on Kindergartners’ Numeracy Performance: The Role of Math Anxiety,Home Numeracy Practices,and Numeracy Expectations

The current study analyzed maternal and paternal differential influences on numeracy performance in kindergarten children. Participants were 180 Chilean children from backgrounds of low and high socioeconomic status (SES), their mothers, and their fathers. A path analysis was used to explore the influences of both maternal and paternal numeracy practices on children’s numeracy performance and the influences of maternal and paternal expectations and anxiety on those activities. Research Findings: Results showed that mothers and fathers who endorse higher numeracy expectations for their children and who report lower levels of math anxiety also report engaging more frequently in advanced numeracy practices with their children. Mothers’—but not fathers’—engagement in numeracy practices at home predicted children’s numeracy performance. Also, low-SES mothers engaged more frequently in numeracy practices with their children, and mothers in general engaged more often in numeracy activities with girls than with boys. Practice or Policy: These findings improve understanding of how maternal and paternal processes relate differently to numeracy performance in kindergarten children. Moreover, these results highlight the need to take into account parents’ numeracy attitudes and practices, as well as their SES, when designing interventions directed at increasing family support for math achievement.     

Mother–child joint writing in Chinese kindergarteners: metalinguistic awareness,maternal mediation and literacy acquisition

The present study examined the relations of Chinese word reading and writing to both maternal mediation of writing and a number of metalinguistic and cognitive skills in 63 Hong Kong Chinese kindergarteners. The whole process of maternal mediation of writing, in which mothers individually facilitated their children's writing of 12 two‐character words in their own ways, was videotaped. This study replicated and extended previous work on the cognitive strategies mothers use to help children in writing Chinese words. Mothers' typical mediation strategies were positively and significantly associated with both children's independent word reading and writing. In addition, maternal mediation of writing was uniquely associated with Chinese word reading, but not word writing, even with metalinguistic and cognitive skills, including phonological awareness, morphological awareness, orthographic processing and visual knowledge, statistically controlled. Findings underscore the importance of mothers' early scaffolding in facilitating children's literacy acquisition.     

The Relationship Between Maternal Beliefs and Behavior During Shared Reading

The goal of the present study was to increase understanding of the connection between maternal beliefs and behavior during shared reading and to examine the relation of these maternal beliefs to children's reading engagement. The study included survey and observational data from an ethnically diverse sample of 50 mothers and their 5- to 6-year-old children. As predicted, mothers who believed that shared reading should involve learning showed more learning-focused behaviors. Similarly, the belief that reading should be fun predicted more positive interactions. Some relationships between beliefs and behavior were moderated by gender. For girls, higher maternal expectations for children's future reading grades were associated with better scaffolding, but this pattern was not found for boys. There was a positive relationship between mothers' belief that reading should be fun and their sons' engagement. No gender differences were found in maternal expectations and beliefs or in observed maternal learning-focused behaviors or positive support. However, girls were observed to be significantly more engaged during the reading interaction. These results point to the connections between maternal beliefs and behaviors during shared reading, as well as the need to consider child gender in understanding these connections.     

Tracing unique trajectories of participation for a ‘girl with ADHD’: from ‘unwilling student’ to ‘agentive learner’

ABSTRACT

The overall aim of this study is to explore how individual children with long-term school difficulties follow unique ‘trajectories of participation’ in special educational needs settings, sometimes in unexpected ways, and how this contributes to alternative forms of identification and processes of learning. The data draws on long-term video-ethnographic work, tracing trajectories of participation during the course of a school year for an individual girl with an ADHD diagnosis who is a newcomer to a special support school in Sweden. We use a multi-layered theoretical and methodological framework to learning, identities and participation as situated practices to explore how the focal girl, through her everyday participation in classroom contexts structured to amplify the student’s capabilities, gradually moves from an ‘unwilling student’ to an ‘agentive learner’. Through a multimodal interactional analysis, we demonstrate how the focal girl’s actions and the teacher’s scaffolding responses are interactionally organised, and the emotional and relational dimensions in the creation of participation frameworks for learning. It is argued that the student’s agency and emerging emotional engagement in school-based learning are intimately linked to the pursuit of building long-term learning relationships based on mutual trust.     

An Examination of Parental Involvement Practices in Their Children’s Schooling by Zimbabwean Immigrant Mothers in Cincinnati,Ohio

This study examined parental involvement practices by Zimbabwean immigrant mothers in Cincinnati, Ohio. Research had shown the link between parental involvement and children’s academic success. We draw upon Epstein et al.’s (2002) parental involvement framework to examine how Zimbabwean immigrant mothers participate in their children’s schooling and the challenges they encounter when they try to be involved. Semistructured interviews, which were analyzed using thematic coding, were conducted with mothers whose children were enrolled in Grades K–12. Results indicate a high participation rate among Zimbabwean immigrant mothers in their children’s education. Participants shared their understanding of parental involvement in the United States after being involved in their children’s education. Our implications call for action by teachers, school administration, and educational stakeholders to develop a better understanding of immigrant children’s cultural backgrounds to help them succeed in the classroom.     

The Cultivation of Learning Dispositions among First-Generation Disadvantaged Students at a South African University

This article discusses the learning dispositions of first-generation disadvantaged students at a university in South Africa’s Western Cape Province. Based on qualitative data collected over a 2-year period, it focuses on findings from 7 purposively selected students at this university. Utilizing Bourdieu’s concept of habitus and Wacquant’s conceptual elaboration of this concept, the article explores the affective, cognitive, and conative (practices) dimensions of the students’ habitus as interrelated aspects crucial to understanding how they develop their dispositions to learn. The article illustrates how the students’ learning dispositions are produced through the active and strategic exercise of each of these 3 (affective, conative, and cognitive) interrelated embodied dimensions. I argue that understanding these embodied habitus generating practices are crucial for comprehending how they establish effective learning dispositions for successful educational engagement at their university. The significance of this article lies in offering a perspective of first-generation disadvantaged students’ learning dispositions in respect of establishing their educational engagement practices at the university.