Mother-child reciprocity and the development of social competence in two-year-olds

The relations between mother-child reciprocity in free play interactions and young children's social competence in coping with their own and others' distress were examined in a sample of 47 low-income 24-month-olds. Measures of reciprocity included (1) time spent by the mother-child dyad in joint attention on objects, and (2) sequences of turn-taking behaviors of mother and child following maternal bids to initiate bouts of joint engagement. Measures of child social competence included (1) children's use of 4 behavioral strategies to regulate their negative emotions (assessed during a 6-minute delay of gratification episode), and (2) children's empathic responsiveness toward an experimenter feigning injury. Toddlers who participated in longer periods of joint attention with their mothers during free play were found to be more effective in regulating negative emotions. In hierarchical regressions, both child negative emotionality and child gender contributed to the explanations of self-regulatory strategy use by 24-month-olds. However, time spent in joint attention with one's mother added over and above both of these child factors. For empathic responsiveness, boys who engaged in more reciprocal bid sequences and fewer nonreciprocal bid sequences showed greater empathic responsiveness when witnessing another person's distress, than boys who experienced less reciprocity with their mothers. In contrast, girls who engaged in more nonreciprocal turn-taking with their mothers demonstrated greater empathic responsiveness to experimenter distress. These patterns of turn-taking explained variance in children's empathic responsiveness, over and above child negative emotionality for both boys and girls.