Children 's Motivation And Their Relationship With Mother' S Emotional Support And Cognitive Support

Mastery motivation is a core concept in the research of human development and it usually refers to an individual’s internal mental energy to understand and impactenvironmentand as well astointeraction with environment. It is also a kind of mental force to inspire individuals to focus on and persist in completing tasks which are with moderate challenging independently, and then master the skills or solve the problems. It turns out that mastery mbtivation contributes a lot to the children’s development of long-term cognition, social interaction and daily living skills.According to Vygotsky’s theory, in early childhood, the interaction between mother and child is an important factor of affecting children’s mastery motivation. Therefore, the present study carried out three track and observations on97pairs of mother-child dyads to encode the video of mother-child interaction to get the mother’s emotional, cognitive support and rejection data; using Dimensions of Mastery Motivation Questionnaire (DMQ) to collect2and3years old children’s mastery motivation data; using the Bayley scales of Infant Development to assess children’s Bayleycognition data. Using independent samples t-test, correlation analysis and regression analysis to analyze data. The results were as follows:1. Mastery motivation was significantly stable between2years old and3years old, and social motivation and expressive motivation of girls were higher than boys.2. There were significant gender differences in children of2years old in mastery motivation, in particular, girls’ Social-Persistence-Child is significantly higher than boys’, and there were no significant gender differences between other motivation dimensions.3. The maternal positive emotional support when children are at14months old had a positive prediction to mastery motivation when children are3years old; mother’s refusal to children of2years old had a positive prediction to Social-Persistence-Child.4. The maternal cognitive support when children are at14months had a negative prediction to mastery motivation of children of2years old.