The socialization of behavioral self-regulation:

Measuring parents' expectations of infants' emotional control

Caregivers’ rules and requests are part of a particular family context within which behavioral self-regulation develops. However, as Gralinkski and Kopp (1993) point out, although it is likely that caregivers’ developmental timetables for their own child (and children in general) are related to their rule systems, there is little empirical data to document the importance of parental developmental expectations with respect to the socialization processes involved in the development of behavioral self-regulation. The current study contributes to this understanding by creating a scale for measuring parental expectations of their infant’s ability to control emotional behavior. By relating parents’ expectations to interactions with their child, the present investigation also places these findings in context.

The Development of Early Affect Regulation (DEAR) Questionnaire asks parents to report the age at which they think their child should first be able to accomplish several behaviors to regulate emotion such as “calm himself/herself down without your help”, “let you know what he/she does not like in some way (without crying)”, or “wait to take turns without getting upset.” Distracter items assessing general developmental milestones were also included. Parents were asked to mark the age at which they expected their child to be able to perform the activity, ranging from birth to 24+ months. All parents completed the questionnaire while their child was 6 months old.

The current research literature was then used to assess the age range infants typically exhibit the ability, and items were scored to create a measurement of the magnitude of deviation of the parents’ expectations from the developmental norm. The overall scale score was the mean magnitude of deviation across items. Analyses assessing scale properties utilized mother-reported DEAR scores obtained from 132 mothers. Items assessing abilities that typically occur later than 24 months were dropped from the scale to prevent artificially forcing parental expectations below the norm. Two items were dropped due to low item-total correlations; all remaining items showed item-total correlations of .42 and greater, and revealed a Cronbach’s alpha coefficient of .84. The distribution of the DEAR score is skewed slightly to the left from a normal distribution (skewness = 0.60), with a mean of –4.44 (SD = 3.22).

Preliminary analyses using mother-reported DEAR scores at 6 months reveal an association with observations of mothers’ intrusiveness during free play with the child at 12 months (r = .22, p = .01). Specifically, mothers with expectations for their 6-month-old child’s behavioral self-regulation that are later than the norm were more intrusive and over-controlling in their interactions with their infant at 12-months. There were, however, no associations between concurrent measurements of mothers’ expectations and observations of mother-child interactions at 6 months of age. Further analyses will be conducted to assess the scale properties of father-reported DEAR and the associations between fathers’ scores and observations of father-child interactions in the same observational context conducted with mothers.