Social competence in middle childhood: Origins, pathways, and outcomes

Research into the factors that influence developmental and individual differences in children's social success have focused on two distinct developmental time periods: infancy or early childhood on one hand and adolescence on the other. Far less is known about the processes that contribute to social development in middle childhood. Based on the assumption that the family and peer systems are linked in multiple ways, the present objective was to investigate the associations between children's experience inside the family and their social adaptation outside the family. The first specific aim examined evidence for the idea that children's mental representations of key family relationships are linked to measures of observed family process and to measures of social competence in the classroom. In order to assess the internal "working models" that are thought to underlie children's mental representations, a new instrument, the Family Photo Narrative, was created. The second exploratory aim of the study proposed a conceptual model for examining how child and parent factors act independently and/or jointly to influence children's social and emotional adjustment.;For the first aim, data were collected from the children of 85 families (47 boys and 38 girls) during fourth grade and the following summer and included information on attachment status, mental representations, social competence and problematic classroom behaviors. For the second exploratory aim, 68 families, 43 with a first born son and 26 with a first born daughter had the complete data required for the analysis. In addition to the children's information described above, observational measures of parenting style collected when children were in kindergarten and fourth grade were also included.;A hierarchical multiple regression revealed that children's perceptions or mental representations of key attachment relationships as measured by the Family Photo Narrative predicted competence in peer relationships in middle childhood even when the effects of sex and quality of attachment were statistically controlled. The study then used Latent Variable Path Analysis with Partial Least Squares (LVPLS) to examine the direct and indirect relations among individual and family factors and children's social adaptation in the fourth grade. The results lend support to the hypothesis that children's mental representations of key relationships in their own families are an important linking mechanism among parenting style, the quality of the parent-child attachment relationship, and the quality of their relationships with peers in middle childhood. By age 10, the ways in which children make sense of experiences within their family environment contribute uniquely to variations in their social success in the fourth grade classroom. The new measure proposed in this study, the Family Photo Narrative, shows promise as an assessment measure to identify children at risk for peer difficulties.