Inconsistency of mothers' feedback and toddlers' misbehavior and negative affect

Journal of Abnormal Child Psychology,  Dec, 1996  by Maureen M. Acker,  Susan G. O'Leary

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Among many goals of childrearing, socializing their children is one of the most challenging tasks parents face. This process is well underway by age 2, as parents strive to cultivate prosocial behaviors while discouraging or disciplining undesirable ones. Discipline encounters between parents and their toddler-aged children occur as frequently as once every 6 to 9 minutes (Minton, Kagan, & Levine, 1971; Power & Chapieski, 1986), and not surprisingly, child management issues are of primary concern to these parents (Mesibov, Schroeder, & Wesson, 1977). Many parents are successful in teaching their children to behave according to society's and the families' rules, however serious behavior problems can and do develop during the toddler years and presage the same or more serious problems in later childhood (e.g., Fagot, 1984; Olweus, 1979). Understanding what factors can cause normal toddlers to become noncompliant, aggressive, and defiant is important for the development of effective prevention and early intervention programs.

One likely determinant of children's misbehavior is how parents handle discipline encounters (e.g., Baumrind, 1967, 1971; McCord, McCord, & Howard, 1961; Patterson, 1982), but much of what we know about parental discipline is based on correlational research. Experimentally evaluating the effects of parenting strategies is particularly important since young children are known both to influence their mothers' parenting behavior (e.g., Anderson, Lytton, & Romney, 1986) and to be influenced by their mothers (e.g., Pfiffner & O'Leary, 1989). The current study was therefore experimental in design and was conducted with a group of normal toddlers who had not yet developed stable patterns of defying their parents' and society's rules for appropriate social conduct. We assumed that if particular discipline strategies were found to be detrimental for normal toddlers, then these discipline mistakes are likely to contribute to the development of clinically significant behavior problems, and clear guidance about not making such discipline mistakes should be included in prevention and early intervention programs.

Parental inconsistency is one discipline parameter that is frequently correlated with problematic long-term outcomes, most notably delinquency and aggression (e.g., Andry, 1960; Bandura & Walters, 1959; Burt, 1929; Glueck & Glueck, 1950; McCord et al., 1961; McCord, McCord, & Zola, 1959). Two types of inconsistency appear to be likely culprits. One type is a low probability of responding to children's misbehavior. For example, poor parental monitoring, and its consequent low probability of detecting and disciplining misbehavior, is significantly related to preadolescents' antisocial behavior (Patterson, Reid, & Dishion, 1992). Similarly, preschoolers whose parents are lax about enforcing rules are selfish, aggressive, and withdrawn (Baumrind, 1967, 1971; Baumrind & Black, 1967).

Another type of inconsistency that is probably detrimental for children is characterized by providing both positive and negative responses to misbehavior. Indeed, parents of preschool- and school-aged conduct-disordered children provide much richer schedules of positive or permissive responses to inappropriate child behaviors than do their nonclinic counterparts, and they follow child misbehavior with physical affection, verbal approval, or compliance with child demands as much as 55 to 72% of the time (Gardner, 1989; Patterson, 1976, 1982). In addition to these correlational findings, results of some experimental studies with elementary school-aged children underscore the likelihood that providing misbehaviors with a mix of positive and negative consequences produces untoward rates of misbehavior as well as emotional upset in the children (Acker & O'Leary, 1988; Sawin & Parke, 1979; Sherrill, O'Leary, Albertson, & Kendziora, 1991).

These adverse effects of low probability or mixed positive and negative discipline have not, however, been demonstrated experimentally in younger, toddler-aged children. We therefore manipulated the probability with which the most common discipline strategy, reprimanding, was implemented with toddlers. We also examined the impact of positive consequences for misbehavior. The misbehavior selected as the dependent variable was children's inappropriate demands for their mothers' attention; and because others have observed that children's whining and tantrums accompany inconsistency involving both positive and negative feedback, we included a measure of children's negative affect. To obtain adequate control of the mothers' behavior, we observed mother-toddler dyads in a laboratory setting while mothers were engaged in an "important" telephone call. This situation is identified by many mothers as one that virtually invites children to demand their mothers' attention and one that consequently requires mothers to provide corrective feedback.

We compared the effects of inconsistent discipline to those obtained with consistent, prudent (i.e., brief, immediate, firm) reprimands (100%R), a discipline strategy previously shown to result in low rates of toddlers' misbehavior (Pfiffner & O'Leary, 1989). We hypothesized that higher rates of child demands for attention would be observed when mothers reprimanded only 50% of children's demands (50%R) or when they reprimanded 50% of demands and attended positively to 50% of demands (50%R50%A). We also explored the possibility suggested by Gardner (1989) that negative feedback followed by positive feedback for the same misbehavior would be particularly problematic, perhaps because discipline that reliably signals an immediate reward loses its effectiveness. We tested this possibility by having some mothers provide mixed feedback to the same demand with negative feedback followed by positive attention (50%RA) and compared their children's rates of demands to those whose mothers provided mixed feedback to the same demand with positive feedback preceding reprimands (50%AR).