| Abstract: | The present study is framed within an ecological and sociocultural approach to interaction. It intends to answer three main questions: (a) Is there any influence of the content of the task on the interactions engaged in by parents and children? (b) Does any cross-situational consistency exist despite the contextual influences? (c) Can different activities be developed with the same task? With these questions in mind, we studied sixty-eight 22 month-old children interacting at home with their parents on three different tasks: constructing a figure, reading a picture book and playing with household objects. Our data confirm, first, the influence of the task itself: parents modify their behaviour adapting themselves to the demands of different tasks. Secondly, they confirm the existence of a certain cross-situational consistency among those tasks that share common characteristics. This consistency is probably related to the fact that parents transfer the same way of understanding interactions to the different situations in which they take place. This leads to different parent-child interaction styles. These styles reflect the parents' different sensitivity to children's actual and potential competence levels. It is argued that these differences are related to the way in which parents interpret the meaning of the task and the roles of those interacting. It is also postulated that the diversity in styles is related to the different “zone of proximal development perceived” in the children. |
