Communication between parents and children in experimental situations

Abstract

The purpose of the present study was (1) to investigate the claim that both verbal and nonverbal communication styles are related to the social and educational background of the parents, (2) to shed light on the discrepant findings of sex differences in family interaction, (3) to examine parent-child communication in different contexts, and ( 4) to attempt to escribe interaction at different levels of analysis. Two experiments were carried out. The subjects in the first experiment were 40 Finnish first graders and their mothers or fathers. The subjects in the second experiment were 48 Finnish families with a four-year-old child. The families were divided into equal groups of lower and higher parental education. The first experiment was carried out in the laboratory and the second one in two stages: the first in a laboratory setting and the second in a laboratory setting or at home. The videotaped situations consisted of different cooperative tasks. The results showed that parental education is not of central importance in everyday communication. There were, however, differences between the two education groups in regard to parents' teaching styles and patterns of communication. The results of the first experiment showed that the parents with a higher education level explained the rules of the game in an exact fashion before playing. Moreover, the results .of the second experiment replicated this finding in that the parents with higher education levels used more mental operational demands in teaching their child than did parents with a lower education level. Many parents with a higher education level also treated their child as an active participant in a problem-solving task by trying to stimulate the child with questions and pieces of information to enable the child to arrive at solutions and to correct mistakes. Only a few minor differences were found in the communication between mothers and fathers as well as between girls and boys. Instead, the particular nature of the tasks and the phase of the task was found to be essential to the forms of interaction.