| Description |
The purpose of this exploratory pilot study was to examine the parent-child interactions that occur in single-parent families in which preschool children and mothers form the family constellation. Specifically, there was an attempt to examine negative and non-negative bids that boys and girls make to determine if their bids significantly differed from each other. Second, there was an attempt to examine mothers' responses to those bids to determine if their responses were influenced by the sex of the child making the bid. Videotapes of parent-child interaction in the home setting during the dinner hour were collected. Selection of six videotapes consisted of only children (3 boys, 3 girls) ages four to five and their divorced mothers. A coding system for rating child bid - mother response interactions on the tapes was developed. The first three hypotheses examined the kinds of bids boys and girls made. Although the data tended in the direction of these hypotheses, suggesting that boys make more bids overall and more negative bids toward their mothers than do girls, the differences were small. However, it was the fourth hypothesis, which postulated that mothers' negative responses to their sons' negative bids would exceed mothers' negative response to their daughters' negative bids that ferreted out an unexpected finding. The data were inconsistent with this hypothesis. Not only were mothers in the sample more negative to their daughters' negative bids, but they ignored their daughters' bids significantly more than their sons' binds. Bid-response patterns were different for sons compared with daughters. Mothers' interaction patterns with sons tended to encourage aggressive, assertive behavior. In contrast, |
