Chapter 12

Why Parents Have a Favourite Child

• Always the one who has mastered the emotional display of rules

  • Viewed as more likeable and competent

  • They have social intelligence

• Always the child who has acquired social competence

6 Dimensions in Measuring Temperament

• Temperament = infant personality

  • Fearful distress -- In response to new situations

  • Irritable distress -- Frustration/anger when desires are frustrated

  • Positive affect -- Sociability

  • Activity level -- Amount of gross motor activity

  • Attention span

  • Rhythmicity -- Regularity of bodily functions

Development of Complex Emotions

• Self-conscious

  • Involves damage to our enhancement of our sense of self → embarrassment

• Self-evaluative

  • Involves both self-recognition + understanding of rules/standards for evaluating one’s behaviour → shame, guilt, and pride

Socialization of Emotions

• Regulate emotions to comply with a culture’s emotional display rules

  • Express happiness or gratitude when they receive a gift from Grandma

  • Suppress/mask any disappointment they may feel if gift is undesirable (By age 3 with limited ability)

• As early as 6 months old, infants turn their bodies away from unpleasant stimuli or by seeking objects

  • Boys find it harder than girls to regulate

  • Boys are more likely than girls to fuss and cry to elicit soothing

Influences on Temperament

• Heritability

  • Twin studies show moderate correlation

• Environmental

  • Shared environmental influences

    • Positive aspects of behaviours

• Nonshared environmental influences

  • Negative attributes

Stability of Temperament

• Several components of temperament are moderately stable

  • Activity level, irritability, sociability and fearfulness

• Behavioural inhibition

  • The tendency to withdraw from unfamiliar people or situations

  • Most- and least-inhibited children show most stability

    • Quality of caregiving – overprotective parents OR parents who are not accurate at appraising or are insensitive to their children’s feelings

    • Lower levels of positive emotionality affect stability of behavioural inhibition

Child Rearing and Temperament

Parents’ Well-Being and Personality Traits and Child Temperament

• ↓ maternal well-being due to their perceptions of their child as more active and less positive → ↑ behavioural control

  • Low maternal affection → Child’s low positivity

  • Maternal’s behavioural control → Child’s high negativity

• High maternal novelty-seeking + high child novelty-seeking → child attention problems in later childhood

Functions of Attachment

• Attachment is the deep confidence a baby has in the availability and responsiveness of the caregiver

• Serves three functions

  • Provides a sense of safety and security

  • Regulates emotions

  • Offers a secure base for infants to venture out and explore

The Caregiving Hypothesis

• Secure Attachment -- Sensitive caregiving

• Resistant Attachment -- Inconsistent caregiving

• Avoidant Attachment -- Impatient, rejecting, or overstimulating caregiving

• Disorganized Attachment -- Abusive Behaviours

Disorganized Attachment

Risk Factors for Intensive Caregiving

• Depression

• Emotionally insecure adults

• Unplanned pregnancies/unwanted infants

• Health, legal, or financial problems

• Unhappy marriages

Fathers as Caregivers

• Amount of time spent with infant

  • Happily married

  • Spouses encourage them to become involved

• Contribution to social and emotional development

  • Infants securely attached to both parents → ↓ anxiety & socially withdrawn, ↑ adjustments to challenges related to attending school

  • Infants securely attached to their fathers → ↑ emotional self-regulation & social competencies with peers, & ↓ problem behaviours & delinquency throughout childhood & adolescence

• Fathers serve as a buffer against the potentially harmful effects of an insecure mother-child attachment relationship

Caregiving, Temperament, and Attachments

• Quality of caregiving predicts the type of attachment -- Ainsworth’s caregiving hypothesis

  • Secure vs. insecure

• Infant temperament predicts the type of insecurity infants display if their attachment is insecure with their caregiver

  • Thomas & Chess’s goodness-of-fit model

Attachment and Later Development

• Secure attachment → ↑favourable developmental outcomes

  • Better problem solvers @ 2 months old

  • More creative and complex symbolic play

  • More positive and fewer negative emotions

  • More attractive to toddlers as playmates

• Disorganized/disoriented attachment → Risk of becoming hostile & aggressive

Insecure Attachment and Later Development

• Less enthused about mastering challenges

• Less prepared to deal constructively with the social & academic stresses in their college transition

• Display poor peer relations, have fewer close friendships, display deviant behaviours