Clarifying parent-child reciprocities during early childhood: the early childhood coercion model.
Consistent with existing theory, the quality of parent-child interactions during early childhood affects children's social relationships and behavioral adjustment during middle childhood and adolescence. Harsh parenting and a propensity toward emotional overarousal interact very early in life to affect risk for later conduct problems. Less empirical work has evaluated the emergence of early childhood coercive parent-child reciprocities. The proposed early childhood coercion model describes the processes by which coercive parent-child reciprocities emerge. Specifically, the interaction between parenting and infants' propensities toward reactivity influences the development of emotion regulation in children and disciplinary styles in parents. Highly reactive children are expected to experience more difficulty learning to regulate emotions and to evoke harsher parenting. Through a process of mutual reinforcement, harsh parenting, negative emotional reactivity, and poor emotion regulation become coercive parent-child reciprocities during early childhood. The emergence of coercive parent-child interactions further diminishes children's emotional regulatory capacities and affects the formation of peer relationships during kindergarten.
Scaramella
Laura V
LV
Department of Psychology, University of New Orleans, New Orleans, Louisiana 70148, USA. lscarame@uno.edu
Leve
Leslie D
LD
D000328:Adult; D002648:Child; D003068:Coercion; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007398:Interpersonal Relations; D008297:Male; D019964:Mood Disorders / Q000523:psychology; D009769:Object Attachment; D010287:Parent-Child Relations; D011582:Psychological Theory; D013694:Temperament