Tracing the Cascade of Children’s Insecurity in the Interparental Relationship: The Role of Stage‐Salient Tasks

This study examined whether children’s difficulties with stage‐salient tasks served as an explanatory mechanism in the pathway between their insecurity in the interparental relationship and their disruptive behavior problems. Using a multimethod, multi‐informant design, 201 two‐year‐old children and their mothers participated in 3 annual measurement occasions. Structural equation modeling analyses indicated that coder ratings of children’s insecure responses to interparental conflict from a maternal interview predicted observer ratings of their difficulties with stage‐salient tasks (i.e., emotion regulation, autonomy, resourceful problem solving) 1 year later after controlling for initial stage‐salient task performance. Stage‐salient task difficulties, in turn, predicted experimenter reports of children’s behavior problems 1 year later. Associations remained robust in the broader context of other pathways hypothesized in prevailing developmental cascade models.     

Children's patterns of preserving emotional security in the interparental subsystem

Guided by the emotional security hypothesis, this research identified (1) individual differences in children's strategies for preserving their emotional security in the interparental relationship, and (2) the psychosocial and family correlates of these individual differences. Study 1 assessed reactivity to parental conflict simulations among 56 school-age children, whereas Study 2 solicited child and mother reports of 170 young adolescents' reactions to actual marital conflict. Cluster analyses in both studies indicated that children fit three profiles: (1) secure children, who showed well-regulated concern and positive representations of interparental relationships; (2) insecure-preoccupied children, who evidenced heightened distress, involvement or avoidance, and negative representations of interparental relationships; and (3) insecure-dismissing children, who displayed overt signs of elevated distress, avoidance, and involvement and low levels of subjective distress, avoidance and intervention impulses, and negative internal representations. Results in both studies indicated that preoccupied and dismissing children experienced more interparental conflict than did secure children, and preoccupied children evidenced the highest levels of internalizing symptoms. Study 2 results indicated that dismissing children had the highest levels of externalizing symptoms and preoccupied and dismissing children reported more coping, family, and personality difficulties than did secure children.     

Impact of hostility and withdrawal in interparental conflict on parental emotional unavailability and children's adjustment difficulties

This multimethod, prospective study examined the nature of pathways between interparental hostility and withdrawal, parental emotional unavailability, and subsequent changes in children's internalizing and externalizing behaviors, and school adjustment difficulties over a 3-year period in a sample of 210 mothers, fathers, and 6-year-old children. The results of autoregressive structural equation models indicated that interparental withdrawal had a detrimental impact on all areas of children's adjustment, whereas interparental hostility had an indirect effect on subsequent changes in child adjustment. An intermediary role of parental emotional unavailability in links between interparental withdrawal and hostility and child outcomes was indicated, with specific, differential effects observed for fathers and mothers.     

Assessing children's emotional security in the interparental relationship: the Security in the Interparental Subsystem Scales

Guided by the emotional security hypothesis, this study reports on the development of a new self-report measure that assesses children's strategies for preserving emotional security in the context of interparental conflict. Participants were 924 sixth, seventh, and eighth graders and a subset of their mothers, fathers, and teachers. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses of the Security in the Interparental Subsystem (SIS) Scale supported a seven-factor solution, corresponding well to the three component processes (i.e., emotional reactivity, regulation of exposure to parent affect, and internal representations) outlined in the emotional security hypothesis. The SIS subscales demonstrated satisfactory internal consistency and test-retest reliability. Support for the validity of the SIS Scale is evidenced by its significant links with parent reports of children's overt reactivity to conflict, children's responses to interparental conflict simulations 6 months later, and children's psychological maladjustment and experiential histories with interparental conflict across multiple informants (i.e., child, mother, father, and teacher). Results are discussed in the context of developing recommendations for use of the SIS and advancing the emotional security hypothesis.     

Child emotional security and interparental conflict

Guided by the emotional security hypothesis developed by Davies & Cummings (1994), studies were conducted to test a conceptual refinement of children's adjustment to parental conflict in relation to hypotheses of other prominent theories. Study 1 examined whether the pattern of child responses to simulations of adult conflict tactics and topics was consistent with the emotional security hypothesis and social learning theory in a sample of 327 Welsh children. Supporting the emotional security hypothesis, child reports of fear, avoidance, and involvement were especially prominent responses to destructive conflict. Study 2 examined the relative roles of child emotional insecurity and social-cognitive appraisals in accounting for associations between parental conflict and child psychological symptoms in a sample of 285 Welsh children and parents. Findings indicated that child emotional insecurity was a robust intervening process in the prospective links between parental conflict and child maladjustment even when intervening processes proposed in the social-cognitive models were included in the analyses. Studies 3 and 4 explored pathways among parental conflict, child emotional insecurity, and psychological adjustment in the broader family context with a sample of 174 children and mothers. Supporting the emotional security hypothesis, Study 3 findings indicated that child insecurity continued to mediate the link between parental conflict and child maladjustment even after specifying the effects of other parenting processes. Parenting difficulties accompanying interparental conflict were related to child maladjustment through their association with insecure parent-child attachment. In support of the emotional security hypothesis, Study 4 findings indicated that family instability, parenting difficulties, and parent-child attachment insecurity potentiated mediational pathways among parental conflict, child insecurity, and maladjustment. Family cohesiveness, interparental satisfaction, and interparental expressiveness appeared to be protective factors in these mediational paths. No support was found for the social learning theory prediction that parent-child warmth would amplify associations between parental conflict and child disruptive behaviors.     

Interparental conflict and child adjustment: testing the mediational role of appraisals in the cognitive-contextual framework

Children's appraisals of interparental conflict consistently have been associated with adjustment problems, but the processes that give rise to this association are not well understood. This paper proposes that appraisals of threat and self-blame mediate the association between children's reports of interparental conflict and internalizing problems, and tests this mediational hypothesis in two samples of children, one drawn from the community (317 ten- to fourteen-year-olds) and the other from battered women's shelters (145 ten- to twelve-year-olds). Results indicate that perceived threat mediates the association between interparental conflict and internalizing problems for boys and girls in both samples, and self-blame mediates this association for boys in both samples and girls in the shelter sample. Perceived threat and self-blame do not mediate links with externalizing problems, and there is no evidence of a moderating effect of appraisals on the association between conflict and child adjustment. Implications for understanding the mechanism by which exposure to interparental conflict could lead to child maladjustment are discussed.     

A prospective investigation of appraisals as mediators of the link between interparental conflict and child adjustment

This longitudinal study tested the role of children's appraisals of threat and self-blame as mediators of the association between interparental conflict and child adjustment in a sample of 298 Welsh children ages 11 to 12 years. Exposure to higher levels of interparental conflict at Time 1 predicted greater perceived threat and self-blame at Time 2, after accounting for the effects of Time 1 adjustment and appraisals on later appraisals. Perceived threat in turn was associated with increased internalizing problems at Tune 2, and self-blame was associated with higher externalizing problems. The pattern of results was largely consistent for child and parent reports of conflict and for boys and girls, though some gender differences were found in associations between appraisals and adjustment.     

Children's school problems and family system processes

The literature concerning the relationship between children's school problems and family system processes is reviewed. While it is noted that there is no strong linkage between the empirical studies and case reports that have appeared to date, it is observed that the findings from these studies are showing some convergence. There is now reasonable evidence that some school problems may indeed be a consequence of family system processes. The fact of this possibility and the character of the relationship is brought to the attention of school counselors and school psychologists.     

Interparental conflict as a quadratic predictor of children’s reactivity to interparental conflict and school adjustment: Steeling effects or risk saturation?

This study examined interparental conflict as a curvilinear predictor of children's reactivity to interparental conflict and, in turn, their school problems across three annual measurements. Participants included 243 preschool children (M_age = 4.60 years; 56% girls) and their parents from racially (e.g., 48% Black; 16% Latinx) diverse backgrounds. Interparental conflict was a significant quadratic predictor of children's emotional reactivity (β = .23) and behavioral dysregulation (β = .27) to conflict over a 1-year period. The robust association between interparental conflict and behavioral dysregulation weakened at high levels of interparental conflict. In contrast, interparental conflict more strongly predicted children's emotional reactivity as conflict exposure increased. Children's emotional reactivity, in turn, predicted their greater school problems 1 year later (β = .25).     

Representation of self and socioemotional competence in kindergartners: differential and combined effects of attachment to mother and to father

In the present study, we examined the differential predictive power and the joint or compensatory effects of representations of child-mother and child-father attachment for children's representation of self and their socioemotional competence. The representations of attachment were assessed by an attachment story completion task, completed once for mother and once for father (in counterbalanced order). Eighty participants (40 boys and 40 girls), aged between 55 and 77 months (M = 5 years 3 months), took place in the study. The socioemotional competence (peer social competence, disruptive behavior, anxious/withdrawn behavior, and school adjustment) and behavioral manifestations of self-esteem were evaluated by the kindergarten teacher. The inner representation of self (positiveness of self, perceived competence, and social acceptance) was assessed in a subgroup of 50 children. Results showed that the relative predictive power of child-mother and child-father attachments differed according to the domain of child functioning that was assessed. More specifically, it was found that the child's positiveness of self was better predicted by the quality of the child-mother attachment representation than by the quality of the child-father attachment representation. In contrast, the child's anxious/withdrawn behavioral problems were better predicted by the quality of the child-father attachment representation than by the quality of the child-mother attachment representation. With regard to the joint effects of child-mother and child-father attachment, it was found that a secure attachment to one parent can compensate for or buffer against an insecure attachment to the other parent. However, the buffering effect was not complete.     

Preoccupied and Avoidant Coping during Middle Childhood

Prior research on attachment to caregivers during middle childhood has failed to include assessments of the divergent coping styles that insecure attachment can take. In this study, self-report scales were developed to assess children's preoccupied coping (strong need for mother during stress but inability to be soothed by her) and avoidant coping (denial of need for mother and avoidance of her during stress). The scales were administered to 229 boys and girls in the third through seventh grades (mean age 11.3 years) and were associated in theoretically meaningful ways with peers' reports of the children's adjustment at school. The advantage of including assessments of coping style in studies of attachment-adjustment relations in middle childhood is noted.     

The performance of young deaf children in spatial and temporal number tasks

Deaf children tend to fall behind in mathematics at school. This problem may be a direct result of particular experiences in the classroom; for example, deaf children may find it hard to follow teachers' presentations of basic, but nevertheless quite abstract, mathematical ideas. Another possibility is that the problem starts before school: They may either be worse than hearing children at early, nonlinguistic number representations, they may be behind in learning the culturally transmitted number string, or both. This may result in deaf children failing to develop informal problem-solving strategies, which prepare most children for the more formal learning of number and arithmetic that they will have to do at school. We compared 3- and 4-year-old deaf and hearing children's ability to remember and to reproduce the number of items in a set of objects. In one condition, we presented all the items together in a spatial array; in another, we presented them one at a time in a temporal sequence. Deaf children performed as well as the hearing children in the temporal tasks, but outperformed their hearing counterparts in the spatial task. These results suggest that preschool deaf children's number representation is at least as advanced as that of hearing children, and that they are actually better than hearing children at representing the number of objects in spatial arrays. We conclude that deaf children's difficulties with mathematical learning are not a consequence of a delay in number representation. We also conclude that deaf children should benefit from mathematical instruction that emphasizes spatial representation.     

Understanding Children's Comprehension of Visual Displays of Complex Information

Developing students' ability to interpret the vast amount of quantitative data they encounter on a daily basis has become a major task for today's educators. However, very little attention has been given to students' strategies of analyzing multivariate data. This study investigated how students interpret and analyze multivariate data organized in tables and the nature of external visual displays that they tend to create and use for this purpose. Ten middle school students were asked to think aloud while solving five problems demanding an analysis of data organized in tables. The students were then interviewed. Results indicated that (1) students based their conclusions on only part of the data; (2) students did not use either efficient or sufficient visual representations; (3) students did not apply mathematical operations efficiently; and (4) students referred to or built a context to the problem. The results of the current research may assist educators to design efficient curricula while being aware of and taking into account (1) students' difficulties in employing previously learned mathematical devices to analyze data, (2) students' skills in choosing appropriate and efficient visual representations to present and interpret the data, and (3) strategies employed by students in analyzing multivariate data.     

农村"留守子女"教育问题现状及原因探析

农村“留守子女”入学难、辍学率高、学习成绩不佳、心理健康异常、犯罪与越轨现象严重等问题是建设社会主义新农村的难点之一。家庭教育的缺失、学校教育的不到位、同辈群体和社会传媒的不良影响等是造成这一难点的重要原因。解决这一社会难题,需要政府、学校、家庭三方共同努力。     

Peer Victimization: Cause or Consequence of School Maladjustment?

Past research has shown that peer victimization and school maladjustment are related, but it is unclear whether victimization is a cause or consequence of such difficulties. This study examined whether ( a ) peer victimization is a precursor of school maladjustment, ( b ) the effects are limited to the period of victimization, and ( c ) stable peer victimization experiences compound adjustment difficulties. Toward this end, data were collected on 200 5- and 6-year-old children (105 males, 95 females) in the fall and spring of kindergarten. Findings supported the hypothesis that victimization is a precursor of children's loneliness and school avoidance. Whereas children's feelings of loneliness were more pronounced while victimization was occurring, delayed effects were found for school avoidance. Furthermore, the duration of children's victimization experiences was related to the magnitude of their school adjustment problems.     

Preschoolers' Attention to and Memory for Attachment-Relevant Information

This study examined the relation between attachment quality in infancy and attention and memory at 3¹/₂ years. Sixty-eight children participated in 2 attention tasks and 1 memory task. In the first attention task, children were shown several sets of drawings; each set depicted a different mother-child dyad engaged in positive, negative, and neutral interaction. Insecure/avoidant children looked away from the drawings; more than the other children. In the second attention task, children were shown different sets of drawings; each set depicted a mother-child dyad engaged in positive interaction and an adult dyad expressing neutral affect. Insecure/avoidant and insecure/ambivalent children looked away from the mother-child drawings more than the secure children; when children did look at a drawing, insecure children were less likely than secure children to look at the mother-childdrawing. in the memory task, children were read 6 stories in which a mother responds to her child's bid for help. In 2 stories the mother responds sensitively to her child, in 2 stories the mother rejects her child, and in 2 stories the mother provides an exaggerated response to her child. Secure children recalled the responsive stories better than insecure/avoidant children and the rejecting stories better than the insecure/ambivalent children. Findings are discussed in terms of the proposition from attachment theory that attachment experiences influence attention and memory process.     

Temperament and Interparental Conflict: The Role of Negative Emotionality in Predicting Child Behavioral Problems

This study examined temperamental irritability and fearful distress as moderators of the association between interparental conflict and child behavior problems in a disadvantaged sample of two hundred and one 2‐year‐old children and their mothers. Using a multimethod, prospective design, findings revealed that the relation between interparental conflict and changes in child behavior problems over a 1‐year period were moderated by temperamental irritability. Consistent with differential susceptibility theory, children high in irritable temperament not only exhibited poorer outcomes in contexts of high interparental conflict but also better adjustment in contexts of low levels of interparental conflict. Mediated moderation analyses revealed that fearful reactivity partly accounted for the greater susceptibility of irritable children, particularly in explaining why they fared better when interparental conflict was low.     

Parents' Reports on the Child Adaptive Behavior Inventory Predict 4-Year-Olds' Playground Behavior

Although prior research indicates that parental reports of their young children's early social adaptation outside the home do not reconcile well with observations of social behavior in context, some of this inconsistency may be attributable to the “problem-oriented” biases inherent in many commonly used parent rating scales. Might greater concordance between parental reports and observational measures of social adaptation be found if parents described their children's peer behavior on an instrument balancing questions about behavior problems with questions about social strengths and competencies? Fifty-one children, representing two full preschool cohorts, were assessed over four months of a regular preschool year by trained observers using a scan-sampling procedure. Every behavior observed (M = 355 per child) was categorized as either Prosocial, Negative, or Withdrawn, with two sublevels per category. Midway through the school year, mothers and fathers independently completed the most recent version of the Child Adaptive Behavior Inventory (CABI), an instrument which assesses both competencies (social and academic) and difficulties with adaptation. Multiple, domain-specific correlations were found tying both maternal and paternal ratings of children's adaptation to observed social behavior on the preschool playground, with mothers's ratings only slightly better predictors of playground behavior than fathers'. Agreement between parents on the various CABI subscales (Social Competence, Externalizing-Aggressive, Externalizing-Hyperactive, Internalizing-Socially Isolative, and Internalizing-Psychological symptoms) was also good, ranging from .33 to .83. These results indicate that parents may be better attuned to preschool social behavior than has previously been assumed. Further research with the CABI is needed to establish the instrument's utility in predicting longitudinally the sequelae of early social adaptation.     

Children's drawings provide a new perspective on teacher–child relationship quality and school adjustment

A growing literature points to the importance of children's relationships with their teachers as a factor influencing attitudinal, cognitive, and behavioral aspects of school adjustment. However, such data may be confounded when the same teacher rates school adjustment as well as relationship quality. The present study sought to address this problem by investigating direct (self-reported feelings about the teacher) and indirect (representations through drawings) procedures to assess children's perspectives on the relationship. Self-report questions were adapted from measures of school liking and maternal acceptance. Drawings applied Fury's system for describing relational negativity in child–family drawings. Results, based on a sample of 125 six-year-olds, showed significant associations between children's reports/drawings and teacher-rated relationship quality and school adjustment. Negativity in child–teacher drawings was a particularly salient correlate, suggesting that children's representations of relationships can provide a useful independent means of identifying relationship or adjustment difficulties at school.     

The prevalence of depressive symptoms in children with learning disabilities.

Learning difficulties have been considered to be a symptom of childhood depression by some authors, whereas others have examined depression as a cause of cognitive difficulties, including learning disabilities (LD). This study examined the prevalence of depressive symptoms in a sample of public school elementary children aged 8 through 11, 37 boys and 16 girls, identified as LD by state standards. Of the sample of 53 children, 35.85% scored in the depressed range on the Children's Depression Inventory. Comparison of the children's self-reports and parents' reports of depressive symptoms in their children was not significant. Implications of the results are discussed relative to the role of school personnel and the assessment process in recognizing depressive symptoms in students with LD.