Abstract
The scope of existing parenting research is largely confined to the effects of parenting style on children’s emotional and behavioural adjustment. While these remain prominent areas of study due to the concerns of both parents and researchers, the effects of parent behaviour on children’s social understanding and social attitudes can be often overlooked. Furthermore, the way parents’ general social attitudes guide their parenting philosophy has not been examined despite evidence of similarities between parent and child social attitudes. This thesis had three aims to address these gaps in the parenting literature. The first aim was to examine the association between social attitudes and preferred parenting style. The second aim was to examine the effects of parenting style and parental talk on children’s social development. The third aim was to examine the role of parental talk in the development of children’s social understanding in early childhood.
In Study 1, I examined the association between social attitudes and parenting philosophy of 434 childless New Zealand adults. They reported their Right-Wing Authoritarianism (RWA), Social Dominance Orientation (SDO) , and empathy through questionnaires. Through an adapted parenting scale, the participants were presented with hypothetical parenting scenarios where they reported how they would behave as parents. The three measures of social attitudes correlated with their parenting philosophy, such that authoritative parenting philosophy was associated with lower RWA and SDO scores and higher empathy scores, and authoritarian parenting philosophy was associated with higher RWA and SDO scores and lower empathy scores. These parenting philosophies were still correlated with RWA and SDO scores, after controlling for empathy scores.
In Study 2, I examined the relation between social attitudes and parenting style in 75 Malaysian parents, and the relation between social attitudes and social understanding of 80 Malaysian children (aged 6 to 12 years). Parents self-reported their parenting style, RWA, and SDO. Children self-reported their RWA and SDO, followed by emotion recognition tests and an English vocabulary test. Amongst parents, there were differences between ethnic groups. Only Malay authoritarian parenting style correlated with greater RWA and SDO scores, though this was not observed with the Chinese subsample. Malay parents had higher RWA scores compared to Chinese parents. Children’s English vocabulary positively correlated with emotion recognition skills and negatively correlated with RWA scores. Emotion recognition scores did not correlate with RWA scores, after controlling for English vocabulary.
In Study 3, I examined the effects of parent variables (parenting style, parental mental state (MS) talk, and parent social attitudes) on subsequent child social development in early childhood through a longitudinal study design. The 66 mother-child dyads (children aged between 19 months to 55 months at Time 1) attended three sessions at six-month intervals. Mothers self-reported their parenting style, RWA, SDO, and empathy scores, and they reported their child’s MS and non-MS vocabulary. Children completed a Theory of Mind (ToM) task and a Friend Choice task (measuring race bias and anti-fat bias). Mothers described pictures to their child while being video recorded, from which mothers’ MS talk was coded. Observed parenting style was scored from video recordings of the mother-child dyads completing cooperative tasks (etch-a-sketch and blocks tasks). There was some evidence showing that observed authoritative parenting behaviours correlated with subsequent MS talk. Evidence of the relation between mothers’ positive affect and subsequent child race bias was largely inconsistent across time points. There was no correlation between MS talk and subsequent child outcomes. However, there clear and consistent evidence that children’s race bias increased across time. Overall, the largely inconsistent results made it impossible to infer causal relations between parent and child variables.
To conclude, I explored the potential mechanisms behind the intergenerational transmission of social attitudes from a ToM perspective. This thesis includes some replication of past findings as well as novel explorations into the correlates of parenting style. Despite some failure to replicate past evidence, this thesis highlighted the nuanced nature of social development in early childhood.