Interactions Between Children and Abusive Versus Control Parents

Abstract

Forty-five families (22 court-referred abusive families and 23 control families) participated in a laboratory play task as part of a larger study on family processes and child abuse (Reid, 1986). We led each family into a play room, asked the parents to play with the child for a 10-min period, and then asked them to have the child help clean up. We videotaped all sessions and coded the tapes using the Fagot Interactive Code, with the child's behavior categorized as passive, verbal communication, aversive, and narrative play. Although control children talked significantly more than abused children, botch abused and control children responded equally often to parent initiations of interaction. We grouped parent responses into positive and negative clusters. Abusive parents showed significantly less positive parenting than did control parents, and they responded significantly less to the child's initiations of interaction. We discuss the results in terms of lack of prosocial parenting skills of abusing parents.