The Influence Of Caregiver’s Response On Children’s Support-giving Expectations

How caregivers respond to children’s need to promote young children’s development is an important theoretical and practical question.First,preschool teachers’ appropriate response to children’s needs is the foundation of high-quality teacher-child interaction.Second,responsive care is a fundamental principle of childcare services that are vigorously developing in China today.Third,the appropriate response of parents in the dilemma of work and parenting is the cornerstone of the healthy development of children.Obviously,appropriate response is the basic principle of interaction between caregivers and children.However,previous research on the relationships between caregiver response and early childhood development has mostly relied on measurement techniques,focusing on the role of the caregiver.Little is known about how children understand the caregiving relationship.Children internalize experiences into interpersonal schemas during interactions with caregivers.Children expect caregivers’ future behaviors based on these interpersonal schemas,which guide their performance in interactions.Children’s expectations about whether caregivers will provide support,that is,support-giving expectations,provide a window for exploring the impact of caregiver’s responses on children’s social development.Therefore,around the core question of "how does the caregiver’s response affect children’s support-giving expectations of whether the caregiver will provide support in the future",this study aimed to address the following three questions:(1)Can children make support-giving expectations based on caregiver’s response pattern with different nature?(2)How do children of different ages make support-giving expectations based on caregiver’s response?(3)Why children can make support-giving expectations based on caregiver’s response?Experiment 1 was designed to explore whether children can make support-giving expectations based on caregiver’s response pattern with different nature.Specifically,experiment 1 investigated the effects of caregivers’ deterministic and probabilistic response pattern on the support-giving expectations of children with different attachment styles through two experiments.In this experiment,5 to 6-year-old children were recruited as participants.The Attachment Story Completion Task was used to measure children’s attachment styles,and the Social Expectation Paradigm was used to test children’s support-giving expectations.This experiment found that regardless of whether caregiver’s response pattern was deterministic or probabilistic,high-frequency response increased children’s support-giving expectations,while low response decreased children’s expectations.Meanwhile,the support-giving expectations of secure children were significantly higher that the unsecure ones at base line.The above results suggested that 5-6-year-old children with no direct interaction experience about the caregiver tended to make support-giving expectations based on their own caring experience.After getting direct experiences,they would make expectations based on these direct experiences.Experiments 2 and 3 were designed to address the question of how children of different ages make support-giving expectations based on caregiver’s responses.Experiment 2 explored the developmental differences in the strategies used by 3 and 4-year-old children to make support-giving expectations based on caregiver’s response by manipulating the valence of the overall patterns of caregiver’s response.The results showed 4-year-old children used quantitative statistical strategies,and the 3-year-olds did not make a "good-bad" dichotomy judgement based on the valence of the caregiver’s response pattern.In view of the shortcomings of Experiment 2,Experiment 3 further explored how 3-and 4-year-olds make support-giving expectations based on caregiver responses from the perspective of expectation formation and expectation update.The results showed that,during the expectation formation phase,3-and4-year-olds’ anticipatory fixation about caregiver’s support both increased with the increasing of caregiver’s response trials,only 4-year-olds’ anticipatory fixation decreased with the increasing of non-response trials.During the expectation update phase,the anticipatory fixation of 3-and4-year-olds was both unaffected by caregiver’s responses.Experiment 2 and 3 showed that4-year-olds were able to make support-giving expectations according to a quantitative statistical strategy,while 3-year-olds tended to only monitor caregiver’s response event,forming positive support expectations.Meanwhile,once the initial support-giving expectations are formed,it is difficult to updated by subsequent inconsistent experiences for children of both ages.Experiment 4 and 5 were designed to answer the question of why children were able to make expectations based on caregiver’s responses.Experiment 4 explored the nature of initial experience and immediate response experience(whether the caregiver responded in the previous trial)on the expectation updating.The results showed that the nonresponse event decreased the number of children who expected the caregiver to provide support in the next trial marginally;and the updating of children’s support-giving expectation is not determined by the magnitude of the expectation error,but by the cumulative probability of caregiver responses.Experiment 5explored the role of expectation errors in the update of children’s support-giving expectations more directly.This experiment showed that FRN volatility increased when the expectation was wrong,but the wrong expectations did not lead to more changes in expectation choices.At the same time,the FRN amplitude was independent of the valence of the caregiver’s response.The Experiment 4 and 5 showed that,although children were able to assess whether the caregiver’s response was consistent with previous and whether their own expectations were correct,children’s support-giving expectations were influenced by caregiver’s previous cumulative response probability rather than caregiver’s immediate response.According to the above results,the following educational inspirations and suggestions are obtained.First,for children’s support-giving expectation,80% response has reached the appropriate threshold.Second,caregivers should understand children’s care experience,identify the adaptive significance of children’s interaction strategies,and support children to update their original support expectations by providing positive response experiences.Thirdly,in the sensitive period of care relationship,caregiver should response positively particularly to children to help them forming positive expectations,and be more patient and consistent to the children who have formed negative expectations.Fourth,caregiver’s appropriate "attentive response" and identification of children’s interaction strategies can be trained through virtual simulation technologies.