Isn’t it kind of a “well, duh?” that parenting affects child development? But do we know how? We know it’s not good to have really big fights in front of the kids, but do spousal quarrels screw them up too? Are there really links between a family’s emotional expressiveness and the child’s later academic performance? How does the marital relationship affect parenting, and how does parenting affect the marital relationship?
Today we talk with Dr. Laura Froyen, who has a Ph.D in Human Development and Family Studies and seems almost as obsessed with research on child development issues as I am. You can find much more about her work at www.laurafroyen.com.
References
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Belsky, J. (1984). The determinants of parenting: A process model. Child Development 55(1), 83-96.
Bretherton, I., & Munholland, K. A. (1999). Internal working models in attachment relationships: A construct revisited. In J. Cassidy & P. R. Shaver (Eds.), Handbook of attachment: Theory, research, and clinical applications (pp. 89-111). New York: Guilford Press.
Buehler, C., & Gerard, J.M. (2002). Marital conflict, ineffective parenting, and children’s and adolescents’ maladjustment. Journal of Marriage and Family 64(1), 78-92.
Davies, P.T., & Cummings, E.M. (1994). Marital conflict and child adjustment: An emotional security hypothesis. Psychological Bulletin 116(3), 387-411. Full article available at https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Edward_Cummings/publication/15390513_Marital_Conflict_and_Child_Adjustment_An_Emotional_Security_Hypothesis/links/0912f507fc3e02ce88000000.pdf
Davies, P.T., Winter, M.A., & Cicchetti, D. (2006). The implications of emotional security theory for understanding and treating childhood psychopathology. Developmental Psychopathology 18(3), 707-735.
Erel, O., & Burman, B. (1995). Interrelatedness of marital relations and parent-child relations: A meta-analytic review. Psychological Bulletin: 118(1), 108-132.
Froyen, L.C., Skibbe, L.E., Bowles, R.P., Blow, A.J., & Gerde, H.K. (2013). Marital satisfaction, family emotional expressiveness, home learning environments, and children’s emergent literacy. Journal of Marriage and Family 75, 42-55.
Gottman, J., & Gottman, J.S. (2008). And baby makes three: The six-step plan for preserving marital intimacy and rekindling romance after baby arrives. New York, NY: Harmony.
Grych, J.H., & Fincham, F.D. (1993). Children’s appraisals of marital conflict: Initial investigations of the cognitive-contextual framework. Child Development 64(1), 215-230.
Hindman, A.H., Miller, A.L., Froyen, L.C., & Skibbe, L.E. (2012). A portrait of family involvement during Head Start: Nature, extent, and predictors. Early Childhood Research Quarterly 27, 654-667.
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Sturge-Apple, M.L., , Davies, P.T., & Cummings, E.M. (2006). Hostility and withdrawal in marital conflict: Effects on parental emotional unavailability and inconsistent discipline. Journal of Family Psychology 20(2), 227-238.
Tronick, E. (2009). Still face experiment. UMass Boston. Video available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=apzXGEbZht0
Vallotton, C. D., Harewood, T., Froyen, L., Brophy-Herb, H., & Ayoub, C. (2016). Child Behavior Problems: Mothers’ and Fathers’ Mental Health Matters Today and Tomorrow. Early Childhood Research Quarterly 37, 81-93. doi: 10.1016/j.ecresq.2016.02.006
Transcript
Jen: [00:38]
Hello and welcome to the your Parenting Mojo podcast. Our guest today is Laura Froyen, who received her Ph.D In Human Development and Family Studies with an emphasis in Couple and Family Therapy from Michigan State University, where her research focused on how marital and family relationships influence parenting and child development. She continued this research as an Assistant Professor of Human Development and Family Studies at the University of Madison, Wisconsin, and while she loved her work as a new professor, she found that she missed working directly with families which had been doing while she was working on her Ph.D. When she was pregnant with her second daughter, Laura had a life-changing car accident, which luckily both she and her daughter came out in one piece, but the experience caused her to reevaluate what she wanted to get out of life and she realized that she really missed working with families. She now offers parent coaching as well as parent support groups in classes. Laura’s academic work focused on the intersection of parenting practices and child development outcomes and she’s here to chat with us about that today. Welcome Laura.
Dr. Froyen: [01:36]
Hi Jen. Thanks so much for having me.
Jen: [01:38]
So it does seem somewhat logical to me that a family’s emotional expressiveness might have connections to a child’s emotional development, but I’m wondering if you can kind of walk us through what are some of the linkages here and how is that emotional development linked with later academic performance?
Dr. Froyen: [01:55]
Right, sure. So the family is seen as one of the primary ways that children learn about emotions and their expression and resultant behaviors. And as I’m sure you probably talked a lot about, modeling is considered one of the most powerful ways that children and humans in general learn, and emotions are no different. So when we talk about emotional expressiveness, we’re talking about the overall style of kind of the emotional state of the family and how they express emotion verbally and nonverbally and children are very much influenced by how their families are doing with the expressive expression of negative and positive emotions. So families can be high or low in both positive and negative expressiveness. So some families are high, some are low in both and some are high in one and high and the other families, but higher positive expressiveness tend to have children that display more prosocial behavior and families with higher negative expressiveness tend to have children that display more aggressive behavior.
Dr. Froyen: [02:54]
And the working theory on this is that family emotional context influences children’s self-regulation skills, likely through parenting. And then that self regulation in turn drives their actual behaviors. And self regulation is also a key skill when it comes to learning. And so if we think about some of the skills that children need to do well in school – being able to sit still and pay attention, being able to minimize distractions, raise their hand… Those types of skills are all self regulatory skills and um, those self regulatory skills give children greater access to learning so they make them better able to learn in those learning environments.
Jen: [03:33]
And so I’m just trying to think about what constitutes a very positive and a very negative environment. I assume a lot of yelling and screaming is very negative, but what is a very positive environment look like and what does a neutral kind of environment look like?
Dr. Froyen: [03:49]
Yeah. So we don’t talk a lot about necessarily neutrals. The research on many topics in child development are done at the extremes and so highly negative things like screaming and yelling and criticism. Criticism is an incredibly toxic thing in almost all family relationships; marriages, parent relationships. So things like belittling those things are very negative for families in general. But then the positive pieces of it is warmth,...
