Children's Narrative Representations of Mothers: Their Development and Associations with Child and Mother Adaptation

Abstract

We investigated associations between children's representations of mothers in their play narrative and measures of children's and mothers' socioemotional adaptation, and explored the development of these representations between the ages of 4 and 5 years. Fifty-one children were interviewed using the MacArthur Story-Stem Battery to obtain their narrative representations of mothers. Positive, Negative, and Disciplinary representation composites were generated. Children who had more Positive and Disciplinary representations and fewer Negative representations had fewer behavior problems and their mothers reported less psychological distress. In addition, 5-year-olds had more Positive and Disciplinary representations and fewer Negative representations than did 4-year-olds, and there was moderate stability in individual differences in children's representations of mothers across the 2 ages. The results add an important dimension to research on parent-child relationships--that of children's perspectives on these relationships.