An examination of parents' expectations, attitudes, scaffolding behaviours, and children's developmental outcomes

The present study incorporated a multi-method approach in order to: (1) examine the relationship between parents' expectations about children's abilities and parents' child-rearing attitudes; (2) observe the various connections among parents' expectations for children's competencies, parents' child-rearing attitudes, and teaching behaviours exhibited in a free-play and a teaching task; and (3) explore whether parents' attitudes, expectations and teaching behaviours were related to children's outcome measures. Another goal of this investigation was to observe both the similarities and differences in mothers' and fathers' expectations, attitudes, and teaching behaviours. A total of 31 two-parent families were recruited. Sixteen couples with a child between the ages of 14- to 16-months (6 females; 10 males) and 15 couples with a 26- to 28-month-old (8 females; 7 males) agreed to participate in the study. All families were white and spoke English exclusively in the home. Families took part in two home visits. In the first visit, mothers and fathers were observed interacting separately with their children for two five-minute periods. First, parents were video-taped in a free-play session. Next, parents were video-taped in a teaching task in which they were asked to teach their child how to assemble a puzzle. Different puzzles were used with each parent. Thus, both parents were observed for a total of 10 minutes each. Order of parent, task, and puzzle was balanced across all families. In addition to the observation sessions, parents completed several questionnaires which were designed to measure expectations for children's abilities and their child-rearing attitudes. In the second home visit, children were assessed on the Bayley Scale of Infant Development. Mothers were also asked to complete a parent self-report for their children's language abilities. The video-taped parent-child observations were coded for a number of teaching behaviours and children's outcomes. Higher expectation scores among mothers were related to higher ratings of control but were not associated with any teaching behaviours or with children's outcomes. Fathers' expectations were unrelated to any of the dependent variables. Second, mothers who endorsed nurturant child-rearing attitudes were less critical and offered fewer suggestions to children. Mothers with more restrictive attitudes were rated as being less sensitive. No correlations were significant when examining the relationships between fathers' child-rearing attitudes and fathers' scaffolding behaviours. Moreover, parents' attitudes were not associated with any of the children's outcome measures. Third, intercorrelations of parents' scaffolding behaviours revealed several consistent patterns of interaction styles (i.e., effective teaching behaviours tended to be related and ineffective teaching strategies were correlated). Fourth, directive behaviours and parents' explanation statements seemed to be related to various outcomes for children (i.e., self-reliance, persistence). Last, MANOVAs revealed that mothers and fathers tended to be more similar than different when examining specific parenting behaviours. However, sometimes, factors such as task, sex of the child, and age of the child interacted with sex of the parent. The discussion offers explanations for the results as well as comments of the limitations of the study.