Children's Narrative Representations of Mothers: Their Development and Associations with Child and Mother Adaptation

We investigated associations between children's representations of mothers in their play narratives and measures of children's and mothers' socioemotional adaptation, and explored the development of these representations between the ages of 4 and 5 years. Fifty-one children were inter...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Child development 1997-02, Vol.68 (1), p.127-138
Main Authors: Oppenheim, David, Emde, Robert N., Warren, Susan
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Adaptation, Psychological
Adjustment
Adult
Affect
Affection
Age Differences
Attitude
Behavior problems
Biological and medical sciences
Child
Child Behavior Disorders - psychology
Child development
Child discipline
Child psychology
Child, Preschool
Children
Children & youth
Developmental psychology
Female
Fundamental and applied biological sciences. Psychology
Humans
Internal-External Control
Longitudinal Studies
MacArthur Story Stem Battery
Male
Mother-Child Relations
Mothers
Narration
Narratives
Parent Child Relationship
Parenting
Perception
Play and Playthings
Preschool Children
Psychology, Child
Psychology. Psychoanalysis. Psychiatry
Psychology. Psychophysiology
Relationship
Relationships and Interactions
Representation
Representational Modeling
School age children
Stress, Psychological - psychology
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Summary:We investigated associations between children's representations of mothers in their play narratives and measures of children's and mothers' socioemotional adaptation, and explored the development of these representations between the ages of 4 and 5 years. Fifty-one children were interviewed using the MacArthur Story-Stem Battery to obtain their narrative representations of mothers. Positive, Negative, and Disciplinary representation composites were generated. Children who had more Positive and Disciplinary representations and fewer Negative representations had fewer behavior problems and their mothers reported less psychological distress. In addition, 5-year-olds had more Positive and Disciplinary representations and fewer Negative representations than did 4-year-olds, and there was moderate stability in individual differences in children's representations of mothers across the 2 ages. The results add an important dimension to research on parent-child relationships-that of children's perspectives on these relationships.
ISSN:0009-3920
1467-8624
DOI:10.2307/1131930