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From EurekAlert! - Breaking News:
Parents who use a particular conversational style with their children--drawing them out to elicit detailed memories about past shared events and to talk about emotions--contribute to the child's secure attachment, sense of self-worth, and eventual social competence, says a new University of Illinois study published in a September special edition of Attachment and Human Development.
"As soon as children start talking, parents develop conversational patterns with their kids, and different parents have very different patterns," said Kelly K. Bost, a U of I associate professor of human development.
In the study, Bost and her colleagues compared the conversational styles of 90 mothers and their three-year-old children with assessments the scientists had made in the home of the children's attachment security.
"In elaborative conversations, parents provide rich detail and lots of background information and try to get their child to provide new information from his memory as the conversation goes on," Bost said.
"These conversations are much easier and more evident in secure parent-child relationships in which parents are sensitive to their children's communication.
In a separate measure, Bost asked the mothers to participate in an adult attachment interview, which assessed the mothers' attachment experiences.
When mothers had secure relationships with their parents, they were more likely to respond sensitively to their own children, suggesting that these behaviors are intergenerational," she said.
"Adult attachment wasn't related to mothers' use of elaboration in conversation; instead, the mothers' own attachment security helped them to talk more openly about positive and negative emotions.
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Posted on October 9, 2006 03:36 AM
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