Teaching or Learning from Baby: Inducing Explicit Parenting Goals Influences Caregiver Intrusiveness

• Author: King, Lucy S ; Hill, Kaylin E ; Rangel, Elizabeth ; Gotlib, Ian H ; Humphreys, Kathryn L
• Subjects: Adult ; Caregivers ; Caregiving ; Family Characteristics ; Female ; Goals ; Human ; Humans ; Individual Characteristics ; Infant ; Infant Behavior ; Infants ; Instruction ; Interaction ; Learning ; Male ; Mothers ; Parent Child Communication ; Parent Child Relations ; Parent Child Relationship ; Parent Role ; Parenting ; Parents - education
• Is Part Of: Developmental psychology, 2023-11, Vol.59 (11), p.1951-1961
• Description: Caregivers' goals influence their interactions with their children. In this preregistered study, we examined whether directing parents to "teach" their baby versus "learn" from their baby influenced the extent to which they engaged in intrusive (e.g., controlling, adult-centered rather than child-centered), sensitive, warm, or cognitively stimulating caregiving behaviors. Mothers and their 6-month-old infants (N = 66; 32 female infants) from the San Francisco Bay Area participated in a 10-min "free-play" interaction, coded in 2-min epochs for degree of parental intrusiveness. Prior to the final epoch, mothers were randomly assigned to receive instructions to focus on (a) "teaching" something to their infant or (b) "learning" something from their infant. A control group of mothers received no instructions. Analyses of within-person changes in intrusive behavior from before to after receiving these instructions indicated that mothers assigned to teach their infant increased in intrusiveness whereas mothers assigned to learn from their infant and mothers in the control group did not significantly change in intrusiveness. The study provides experimental evidence that caregivers' explicit goals to teach infants result, on average, in more controlling and adult-centered caregiving behavior.
  
• Publisher: United States: American Psychological Association
  
• Language: English
  
• Identifier: ISSN: 0012-1649
  EISSN: 1939-0599
  DOI: 10.1037/dev0001592
  PMID: 37616120
  
• Source: Education Resources Information Center (ERIC)
  MEDLINE