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Social behaviour in pre-school children: a child-centred follow-up study
Maša Vidmar & Maja Zupančič
Full text (pdf) | Views: 19 | Written in Slovene. | Published: August 13, 2006
Abstract: The contribution presents a study with 3-year-olds and examines relative contribution of children's age of entry to pre-school (1 and 3 years), their personality type (resilient, average, willful) and maternal parenting style (optimal, less-than-optimal) to the development of individual differences in social behavior. Employing The Family Environment Questionnaire (Zupančič, Podlesek, & Kavčič, 2004), 2 internally replicable parenting styles were identified with maternal and paternal self-report data sets. The styles differed mainly by authoritative parenting and stimulation, and appeared structurally similar between the spouses. Parental agreement on individual style membership significantly exceeded chance levels, but was relatively low. Therefore further analyses considered maternal parenting style only. The mothers also filled in The Inventory of Child Individual Differences (Halverson et al., 2003) and the teachers (concurrently and one year later) filled in The Social Competence and Behavior Evaluation scales (LaFreniere et al., 2001). Child personality type membership was based on classifications derived in a previous study. Relatively, the personality type exerted the strongest and the most consistent effects on child social behavior in pre-school. Social functioning of the resilient and the willful children was somewhat more efficient in comparison to their counterparts with the average profile, even though the latter showed the most improvement in these domains between ages 3 and 4. With the willful children only, less-than-optimal parenting had an adverse effect on the development of externalizing behavior, while the development of social adjustment was negatively affected by the children's late entry to pre-school.
Keywords: pre-school children, social behaviour, personality types, parenting styles, age of entry into pre-school
