ABSTRACT
This study examined the relationship of social-emotional adjustment of infants with regard to gender, age, temperament and maternal parenting behavior.
A total of 51 infants of one or two years of age and their mothers participated in the...
ABSTRACT
This study examined the relationship of social-emotional adjustment of infants with regard to gender, age, temperament and maternal parenting behavior.
A total of 51 infants of one or two years of age and their mothers participated in the study as subjects from three daycare centers in Seoul. The social-emotional adjustment of the infants was rated by the teachers and the observers. The teachers reported each infant's social-emotional behavior using the scale proposed in Na, Lee and Han(2006), which was a revised version of ITSEA (Holloway & Reichhart-Erickson, 1988). The interactions of an infant with other infants were observed by the observers during the free-play time and coded by the description of observation in Briggs-Gowan and Carter(1998). The mothers completed the questionnaires on the relationship between temperament and maternal parenting behavior based on the Temperament Scale (Choi, 1990) and the Parenting Behavior Scale(Park, 2002) of the infants. Descriptive statistics, t-tests and Pearson's correlation coefficient were used for the analysis of the collected data.
The results of this study are as followed.
First, the gender difference in social-emotional adjustment was significant in the study, showing that the girls better adjust than the boys. The teachers reported that the boys displayed more external problems in behaviors such as activities and peer aggressions than the girls. More negative behaviors from the boys were observed by the observers during the free-play time than from the girls .
Second, the age difference in social-emotional adjustment was also significant. The two-year-old infants displayed more inhibition/separation problems in internalizing behavior than the one-year-old infants. Furthermore, the one-year-old infants showed more individual activities, and two-year-old infants revealed more positive interactions. However, no age difference was observed with regard to negative behaviors in peers and the interactions with teachers.
Third, the temperament of infants such as adaptability, rhythmicity, intensity of reaction, and quality of mood was shown to be correlated with their social-emotional adjustment.
Fourth, the mothers' parenting behavior was correlated with the social-emotional adjustment of their infants in the teachers' reports. Overprotection-permission was negatively related to the social competence and rejection-nonintervention was positively associated with the externalizing factors.