Your Parenting Mojo - Respectful, research-based parenting ideas to help kids thrive 045: How parenting affects child development
Aug 14, 2017
49:36
Isn’t it kind of a “well, duh?” that parenting affects child development? But do we know how? We know it’s not good to have really big fights in front of the kids, but do spousal quarrels screw them up too? Are there really links between a family’s emotional expressiveness and the child’s later academic performance? How does the marital relationship affect parenting, and how does parenting affect the marital relationship?
Today we talk with Dr. Laura Froyen, who has a Ph.D in Human Development and Family Studies and seems almost as obsessed with research on child development issues as I am. You can find much more about her work at www.laurafroyen.com.
References
Bascoe, S.M., Davies, P.T., Sturge-Apple, M.L., & Cummings, E.M. (2009). Children’s representations of family relationships, peer information processing, and school adjustment. Developmental Psychology 45(6), 1740-1751.
Belsky, J. (1984). The determinants of parenting: A process model. Child Development 55(1), 83-96.
Bretherton, I., & Munholland, K. A. (1999). Internal working models in attachment relationships: A construct revisited. In J. Cassidy & P. R. Shaver (Eds.), Handbook of attachment: Theory, research, and clinical applications (pp. 89-111). New York: Guilford Press.
Buehler, C., & Gerard, J.M. (2002). Marital conflict, ineffective parenting, and children’s and adolescents’ maladjustment. Journal of Marriage and Family 64(1), 78-92.
Davies, P.T., & Cummings, E.M. (1994). Marital conflict and child adjustment: An emotional security hypothesis. Psychological Bulletin 116(3), 387-411. Full article available at https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Edward_Cummings/publication/15390513_Marital_Conflict_and_Child_Adjustment_An_Emotional_Security_Hypothesis/links/0912f507fc3e02ce88000000.pdf
Davies, P.T., Winter, M.A., & Cicchetti, D. (2006). The implications of emotional security theory for understanding and treating childhood psychopathology. Developmental Psychopathology 18(3), 707-735.
Erel, O., & Burman, B. (1995). Interrelatedness of marital relations and parent-child relations: A meta-analytic review. Psychological Bulletin: 118(1), 108-132.
Froyen, L.C., Skibbe, L.E., Bowles, R.P., Blow, A.J., & Gerde, H.K. (2013). Marital satisfaction, family emotional expressiveness, home learning environments, and children’s emergent literacy. Journal of Marriage and Family 75, 42-55.
Gottman, J., & Gottman, J.S. (2008). And baby makes three: The six-step plan for preserving marital intimacy and rekindling romance after baby arrives. New York, NY: Harmony.
Grych, J.H., & Fincham, F.D. (1993). Children’s appraisals of marital conflict: Initial investigations of the cognitive-contextual framework. Child Development 64(1), 215-230.
Hindman, A.H., Miller, A.L., Froyen, L.C., & Skibbe, L.E. (2012). A portrait of family involvement during Head Start: Nature, extent, and predictors. Early Childhood Research Quarterly 27, 654-667.
Lapierre, S. (2008). Mothering in the context of domestic violence: The pervasiveness of a deficit model of mothering. Child & Family Social Work 13, 454-463.
Sturge-Apple, M.L., , Davies, P.T., & Cummings, E.M. (2006). Hostility and withdrawal in marital conflict: Effects on parental emotional unavailability and inconsistent discipline. Journal of Family Psychology 20(2), 227-238.
Tronick, E. (2009). Still face experiment. UMass Boston. Video available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=apzXGEbZht0
Vallotton, C. D., Harewood, T., Froyen, L., Brophy-Herb, H., & Ayoub, C. (2016). Child Behavior Problems: Mothers’ and Fathers’ Mental Health Matters Today and Tomorrow. Early Childhood Research Quarterly 37, 81-93. doi: 10.1016/j.ecresq.2016.02.006
Transcript Jen: [00:38] Hello and welcome to the your Parenting Mojo podcast. Our guest today is Laura Froyen, who received her Ph.D In Human Development and Family Studies with an emphasis in Couple and Family Therapy from Michigan State University, where her research focused on how marital and family relationships influence parenting and child development. She continued this research as an Assistant Professor of Human Development and Family Studies at the University of Madison, Wisconsin, and while she loved her work as a new professor, she found that she missed working directly with families which had been doing while she was working on her Ph.D. When she was pregnant with her second daughter, Laura had a life-changing car accident, which luckily both she and her daughter came out in one piece, but the experience caused her to reevaluate what she wanted to get out of life and she realized that she really missed working with families. She now offers parent coaching as well as parent support groups in classes. Laura’s academic work focused on the intersection of parenting practices and child development outcomes and she’s here to chat with us about that today. Welcome Laura. Dr. Froyen: [01:36] Hi Jen. Thanks so much for having me. Jen: [01:38] So it does seem somewhat logical to me that a family’s emotional expressiveness might have connections to a child’s emotional development, but I’m wondering if you can kind of walk us through what are some of the linkages here and how is that emotional development linked with later academic performance? Dr. Froyen: [01:55] Right, sure. So the family is seen as one of the primary ways that children learn about emotions and their expression and resultant behaviors. And as I’m sure you probably talked a lot about, modeling is considered one of the most powerful ways that children and humans in general learn, and emotions are no different. So when we talk about emotional expressiveness, we’re talking about the overall style of kind of the emotional state of the family and how they express emotion verbally and nonverbally and children are very much influenced by how their families are doing with the expressive expression of negative and positive emotions. So families can be high or low in both positive and negative expressiveness. So some families are high, some are low in both and some are high in one and high and the other families, but higher positive expressiveness tend to have children that display more prosocial behavior and families with higher negative expressiveness tend to have children that display more aggressive behavior. Dr. Froyen: [02:54] And the working theory on this is that family emotional context influences children’s self-regulation skills, likely through parenting. And then that self regulation in turn drives their actual behaviors. And self regulation is also a key skill when it comes to learning. And so if we think about some of the skills that children need to do well in school – being able to sit still and pay attention, being able to minimize distractions, raise their hand… Those types of skills are all self regulatory skills and um, those self regulatory skills give children greater access to learning so they make them better able to learn in those learning environments. Jen: [03:33] And so I’m just trying to think about what constitutes a very positive and a very negative environment. I assume a lot of yelling and screaming is very negative, but what is a very positive environment look like and what does a neutral kind of environment look like? Dr. Froyen: [03:49] Yeah. So we don’t talk a lot about necessarily neutrals. The research on many topics in child development are done at the extremes and so highly negative things like screaming and yelling and criticism. Criticism is an incredibly toxic thing in almost all family relationships; marriages, parent relationships. So things like belittling those things are very negative for families in general. But then the positive pieces of it is warmth, expressing love for one another, acts of love or demonstrative acts of love. So given how the sun or if you’re not necessarily affectionate, telling each other how you appreciate each other, those types of things. Jen: [04:35] Okay. And so when I was preparing for this episode, I was reading a lot about how conflict is not very good for children’s development, but I am trying to sort of get my arms around what kind of conflict is really bad conflict and I’m just thinking about, you know, my husband’s not listening to me again and I’m kind of irritated with him. Does that count as conflict or does it have to be like yelling and screaming? Dr. Froyen: [05:03] Oh gosh, I think that this is such an important question. I think that many parents have this idea that kids should never see them fighting. Right? And so what research actually shows us that this isn’t the case 100 percent of the time. So kids are incredibly tuned into the emotional environment of their homes, particularly their parents’ relationship because they derive a lot of security from that relationship. So kids have a lot invested in that relationship going well because that’s where they get their security and stability from. So even when parents attempt to hide their disagreements, kids almost always know that they’re happening. Jen: [05:39] I’m just thinking back to a memory from childhood, we used to have a long driveway at our house and my dad would reverse out of it every morning past the kitchen window and my mom would wave to him and I do remember on at least one occasion even though they would always hide conflicts from us, I have no memory of them of having a conflict ever in front of us or even within auditory range. I have memories of my mother drawing the blind in the kitchen window in the morning. Dr. Froyen: [06:11] Right? Non-verbal hostility! Jen: [06:11] Yes, it was there even though I didn’t hear it. Dr. Froyen: [06:15] What’s really interesting is that even verbal infants display behavioral changes when there is tension between parents after a conflict, what kind of changes, like more subdued affect or they might cry more depending on that child’s coping strategy. So there’s a whole set of… You of course are familiar with attachment theory and I’m guessing a lot of your listeners are, um, but there’s a whole kind of sister theory called emotional security theory that really views the couple relationship as a kind of a separate attachment figure. If we’re talking about it… And this is just kind of coming up now, but emotional security theory is really helpful in thinking about why kids intervene in parents conflicts and so attachment theory is based on…the way we measure it is by observing behaviors, right? So we measure a child’s law like security of attachment by putting them in a stressful situation and watching what they do and there are similar behaviors that children engage in. Their parents are arguing or disagreeing that signal kind of their feelings of security around that couple relationship. So kids who are feeling less secure or are kind of nervous when fighting starts to happen, we’ll do things like problem solved, the conflict for the parents or create a big distraction to distract the parents from the conflict. And so we see some of those behaviors in infants and they get more sophisticated as kids get older. Jen: [07:48] And how severe does that conflict have to be before children start doing that kind of thing? Like is my irritation enough or… Dr. Froyen: [07:56] Yeah. So it totally depends on the tactics that you’re using rather than the disagreement itself. So in the literature when they talk a lot about negative conflict tactics like belittling and criticism and yelling and then positive conflict tactics like problem solving, validating, showing empathy, those types of things. And so if you’re able to manage your irritation with your partner, I actually have an example. Jen: [08:22] Oh please. I have some too, but… Dr. Froyen: [08:26] So recently my husband stopped at the grocery store on the way home from work and, but he forgot an ingredient that I really needed for a recipe for a thing that was happening the next day and there was no replacement. That was nothing I could substitute. Right. And so when he got home and he didn’t have it, I was justifiably frustrated even though this is a common mistake that everybody makes us sometimes. But I was frustrated and in that moment I expressed the frustration to him and he was able to validate my feelings while offering to run back to the store after the kids were in bed. So he offered a solution, and in that moment I was able to take a deep breath and you know, validate that yes, we’ve all forgotten things. I’m and thank him for going to get it and then I was able to let it go. Dr. Froyen: [09:09] I’m not always able to let it go and if I know going in that I’m not going to be able to let it go. I will say let’s talk about it later and then we’ll talk about it later because I know that at that point in time my conflict tactics might not be quite so positive, but if I know I’m going to be able to handle it well, I absolutely want to offer that as a learning opportunity for my kids so that they can see, see me expressing my feelings and having those feelings be validated by my partner. I think that that’s really important. And then see us work together to come up with solutions and then to see me being gracious and forgiving. I think that those are all wonderful opportunities to model for kids. Jen: [09:49] It sounds lovely. Dr. Froyen: [09:50] It can’t go that way every time. Right? Yeah, and so I mean I think that if you can be present enough to know when it’s not going to go well, making an effort to say, you know, I think we need to talk about this later. You know, let’s schedule a date to talk about it. That’s a great way to model to your kids as well. Being able to regulate yourself, not have to engage in the conflict in the moment and take time to cool off. Jen: [10:19] Yeah, I was just thinking about an example and I wasn’t planning on sharing this but it just popped into my mind that my husband and I had a conflict. This was a few months ago now about…it was so stupid. It was about a package that he needed to mail to somebody and I was trying to make life easier for him by researching what are the flat rate shipping options and was asking him questions about it and he was not answering them in the way that I needed and I just found it so irritating and then he got irritated at me for asking questions that he thought were irrelevant. And once you get into that cycle, how do you get out of it again? That’s the part I struggle with. Dr. Froyen: [10:58] Yes. So this is where mindfulness practices is super helpful. Yeah. Because a regular mindfulness practice is proven to change the structure of your brain and to get into these, like they call them neuronal groups, right? So we have these groups, these patterns that we have kind of worn in our brain where we start responding in very stereotypical ways, ways that are just very much guided by how we...
Belsky, J. (1984). The determinants of parenting: A process model. Child Development 55(1), 83-96.
Bretherton, I., & Munholland, K. A. (1999). Internal working models in attachment relationships: A construct revisited. In J. Cassidy & P. R. Shaver (Eds.), Handbook of attachment: Theory, research, and clinical applications (pp. 89-111). New York: Guilford Press.
Buehler, C., & Gerard, J.M. (2002). Marital conflict, ineffective parenting, and children’s and adolescents’ maladjustment. Journal of Marriage and Family 64(1), 78-92.
Davies, P.T., & Cummings, E.M. (1994). Marital conflict and child adjustment: An emotional security hypothesis. Psychological Bulletin 116(3), 387-411. Full article available at https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Edward_Cummings/publication/15390513_Marital_Conflict_and_Child_Adjustment_An_Emotional_Security_Hypothesis/links/0912f507fc3e02ce88000000.pdf
Davies, P.T., Winter, M.A., & Cicchetti, D. (2006). The implications of emotional security theory for understanding and treating childhood psychopathology. Developmental Psychopathology 18(3), 707-735.
Erel, O., & Burman, B. (1995). Interrelatedness of marital relations and parent-child relations: A meta-analytic review. Psychological Bulletin: 118(1), 108-132.
Froyen, L.C., Skibbe, L.E., Bowles, R.P., Blow, A.J., & Gerde, H.K. (2013). Marital satisfaction, family emotional expressiveness, home learning environments, and children’s emergent literacy. Journal of Marriage and Family 75, 42-55.
Gottman, J., & Gottman, J.S. (2008). And baby makes three: The six-step plan for preserving marital intimacy and rekindling romance after baby arrives. New York, NY: Harmony.
Grych, J.H., & Fincham, F.D. (1993). Children’s appraisals of marital conflict: Initial investigations of the cognitive-contextual framework. Child Development 64(1), 215-230.
Hindman, A.H., Miller, A.L., Froyen, L.C., & Skibbe, L.E. (2012). A portrait of family involvement during Head Start: Nature, extent, and predictors. Early Childhood Research Quarterly 27, 654-667.
Lapierre, S. (2008). Mothering in the context of domestic violence: The pervasiveness of a deficit model of mothering. Child & Family Social Work 13, 454-463.
Sturge-Apple, M.L., , Davies, P.T., & Cummings, E.M. (2006). Hostility and withdrawal in marital conflict: Effects on parental emotional unavailability and inconsistent discipline. Journal of Family Psychology 20(2), 227-238.
Tronick, E. (2009). Still face experiment. UMass Boston. Video available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=apzXGEbZht0
Vallotton, C. D., Harewood, T., Froyen, L., Brophy-Herb, H., & Ayoub, C. (2016). Child Behavior Problems: Mothers’ and Fathers’ Mental Health Matters Today and Tomorrow. Early Childhood Research Quarterly 37, 81-93. doi: 10.1016/j.ecresq.2016.02.006
Transcript Jen: [00:38] Hello and welcome to the your Parenting Mojo podcast. Our guest today is Laura Froyen, who received her Ph.D In Human Development and Family Studies with an emphasis in Couple and Family Therapy from Michigan State University, where her research focused on how marital and family relationships influence parenting and child development. She continued this research as an Assistant Professor of Human Development and Family Studies at the University of Madison, Wisconsin, and while she loved her work as a new professor, she found that she missed working directly with families which had been doing while she was working on her Ph.D. When she was pregnant with her second daughter, Laura had a life-changing car accident, which luckily both she and her daughter came out in one piece, but the experience caused her to reevaluate what she wanted to get out of life and she realized that she really missed working with families. She now offers parent coaching as well as parent support groups in classes. Laura’s academic work focused on the intersection of parenting practices and child development outcomes and she’s here to chat with us about that today. Welcome Laura. Dr. Froyen: [01:36] Hi Jen. Thanks so much for having me. Jen: [01:38] So it does seem somewhat logical to me that a family’s emotional expressiveness might have connections to a child’s emotional development, but I’m wondering if you can kind of walk us through what are some of the linkages here and how is that emotional development linked with later academic performance? Dr. Froyen: [01:55] Right, sure. So the family is seen as one of the primary ways that children learn about emotions and their expression and resultant behaviors. And as I’m sure you probably talked a lot about, modeling is considered one of the most powerful ways that children and humans in general learn, and emotions are no different. So when we talk about emotional expressiveness, we’re talking about the overall style of kind of the emotional state of the family and how they express emotion verbally and nonverbally and children are very much influenced by how their families are doing with the expressive expression of negative and positive emotions. So families can be high or low in both positive and negative expressiveness. So some families are high, some are low in both and some are high in one and high and the other families, but higher positive expressiveness tend to have children that display more prosocial behavior and families with higher negative expressiveness tend to have children that display more aggressive behavior. Dr. Froyen: [02:54] And the working theory on this is that family emotional context influences children’s self-regulation skills, likely through parenting. And then that self regulation in turn drives their actual behaviors. And self regulation is also a key skill when it comes to learning. And so if we think about some of the skills that children need to do well in school – being able to sit still and pay attention, being able to minimize distractions, raise their hand… Those types of skills are all self regulatory skills and um, those self regulatory skills give children greater access to learning so they make them better able to learn in those learning environments. Jen: [03:33] And so I’m just trying to think about what constitutes a very positive and a very negative environment. I assume a lot of yelling and screaming is very negative, but what is a very positive environment look like and what does a neutral kind of environment look like? Dr. Froyen: [03:49] Yeah. So we don’t talk a lot about necessarily neutrals. The research on many topics in child development are done at the extremes and so highly negative things like screaming and yelling and criticism. Criticism is an incredibly toxic thing in almost all family relationships; marriages, parent relationships. So things like belittling those things are very negative for families in general. But then the positive pieces of it is warmth, expressing love for one another, acts of love or demonstrative acts of love. So given how the sun or if you’re not necessarily affectionate, telling each other how you appreciate each other, those types of things. Jen: [04:35] Okay. And so when I was preparing for this episode, I was reading a lot about how conflict is not very good for children’s development, but I am trying to sort of get my arms around what kind of conflict is really bad conflict and I’m just thinking about, you know, my husband’s not listening to me again and I’m kind of irritated with him. Does that count as conflict or does it have to be like yelling and screaming? Dr. Froyen: [05:03] Oh gosh, I think that this is such an important question. I think that many parents have this idea that kids should never see them fighting. Right? And so what research actually shows us that this isn’t the case 100 percent of the time. So kids are incredibly tuned into the emotional environment of their homes, particularly their parents’ relationship because they derive a lot of security from that relationship. So kids have a lot invested in that relationship going well because that’s where they get their security and stability from. So even when parents attempt to hide their disagreements, kids almost always know that they’re happening. Jen: [05:39] I’m just thinking back to a memory from childhood, we used to have a long driveway at our house and my dad would reverse out of it every morning past the kitchen window and my mom would wave to him and I do remember on at least one occasion even though they would always hide conflicts from us, I have no memory of them of having a conflict ever in front of us or even within auditory range. I have memories of my mother drawing the blind in the kitchen window in the morning. Dr. Froyen: [06:11] Right? Non-verbal hostility! Jen: [06:11] Yes, it was there even though I didn’t hear it. Dr. Froyen: [06:15] What’s really interesting is that even verbal infants display behavioral changes when there is tension between parents after a conflict, what kind of changes, like more subdued affect or they might cry more depending on that child’s coping strategy. So there’s a whole set of… You of course are familiar with attachment theory and I’m guessing a lot of your listeners are, um, but there’s a whole kind of sister theory called emotional security theory that really views the couple relationship as a kind of a separate attachment figure. If we’re talking about it… And this is just kind of coming up now, but emotional security theory is really helpful in thinking about why kids intervene in parents conflicts and so attachment theory is based on…the way we measure it is by observing behaviors, right? So we measure a child’s law like security of attachment by putting them in a stressful situation and watching what they do and there are similar behaviors that children engage in. Their parents are arguing or disagreeing that signal kind of their feelings of security around that couple relationship. So kids who are feeling less secure or are kind of nervous when fighting starts to happen, we’ll do things like problem solved, the conflict for the parents or create a big distraction to distract the parents from the conflict. And so we see some of those behaviors in infants and they get more sophisticated as kids get older. Jen: [07:48] And how severe does that conflict have to be before children start doing that kind of thing? Like is my irritation enough or… Dr. Froyen: [07:56] Yeah. So it totally depends on the tactics that you’re using rather than the disagreement itself. So in the literature when they talk a lot about negative conflict tactics like belittling and criticism and yelling and then positive conflict tactics like problem solving, validating, showing empathy, those types of things. And so if you’re able to manage your irritation with your partner, I actually have an example. Jen: [08:22] Oh please. I have some too, but… Dr. Froyen: [08:26] So recently my husband stopped at the grocery store on the way home from work and, but he forgot an ingredient that I really needed for a recipe for a thing that was happening the next day and there was no replacement. That was nothing I could substitute. Right. And so when he got home and he didn’t have it, I was justifiably frustrated even though this is a common mistake that everybody makes us sometimes. But I was frustrated and in that moment I expressed the frustration to him and he was able to validate my feelings while offering to run back to the store after the kids were in bed. So he offered a solution, and in that moment I was able to take a deep breath and you know, validate that yes, we’ve all forgotten things. I’m and thank him for going to get it and then I was able to let it go. Dr. Froyen: [09:09] I’m not always able to let it go and if I know going in that I’m not going to be able to let it go. I will say let’s talk about it later and then we’ll talk about it later because I know that at that point in time my conflict tactics might not be quite so positive, but if I know I’m going to be able to handle it well, I absolutely want to offer that as a learning opportunity for my kids so that they can see, see me expressing my feelings and having those feelings be validated by my partner. I think that that’s really important. And then see us work together to come up with solutions and then to see me being gracious and forgiving. I think that those are all wonderful opportunities to model for kids. Jen: [09:49] It sounds lovely. Dr. Froyen: [09:50] It can’t go that way every time. Right? Yeah, and so I mean I think that if you can be present enough to know when it’s not going to go well, making an effort to say, you know, I think we need to talk about this later. You know, let’s schedule a date to talk about it. That’s a great way to model to your kids as well. Being able to regulate yourself, not have to engage in the conflict in the moment and take time to cool off. Jen: [10:19] Yeah, I was just thinking about an example and I wasn’t planning on sharing this but it just popped into my mind that my husband and I had a conflict. This was a few months ago now about…it was so stupid. It was about a package that he needed to mail to somebody and I was trying to make life easier for him by researching what are the flat rate shipping options and was asking him questions about it and he was not answering them in the way that I needed and I just found it so irritating and then he got irritated at me for asking questions that he thought were irrelevant. And once you get into that cycle, how do you get out of it again? That’s the part I struggle with. Dr. Froyen: [10:58] Yes. So this is where mindfulness practices is super helpful. Yeah. Because a regular mindfulness practice is proven to change the structure of your brain and to get into these, like they call them neuronal groups, right? So we have these groups, these patterns that we have kind of worn in our brain where we start responding in very stereotypical ways, ways that are just very much guided by how we...