Balancing a successful career with a family life can be challenging and impact on a person's satisfaction in their work and family roles, affecting not only the person but their partner and children as well. This study examined the influence of social support from family and work associates on the role satisfaction of female and male managers, and their children's adjustment. Participants were 96 male and 100 female managers and their families. The first aim of this study was to examine the relative importance of work and family support for satisfaction in the roles of paid worker, spouse and parent. Findings showed that social support had a domain-specific effect, with work support associated with job satisfaction, and family support associated with marital and parenting satisfaction. The second aim of the study was to evaluate gender differences in perceived social support, and the association of support with role satisfaction. Although there were considerable differences in the managers' work and family arrangements, female managers and male managers reported receiving similar levels of work and family support, and the strength of the relationship between social support and role satisfaction was similar for both genders. The final aim of the study was to examine the role of social support in the larger family system, as research has mainly focussed on the influence of social support on the support recipient. This study extended research on the relationship between social support and role satisfaction, by showing that family support was not only associated to managers' role satisfaction, but also to managers' interactions with their children, and their children's adjustment. Work support on the other hand, was related to job satisfaction, but not to parent-child interactions and child adjustment. The findings from this study could inform clinicians' treatment of families with children experiencing problems by addressing the relationship of family support with child adjustment. Findings could also inform governments' work and family agendas, which generally focus on providing assistance to employers with the development of workplace policies to improve work-family balance. Governments should also promote the role of family support, and provide information for families on how to arrange household and childcare tasks and provide support to each other to facilitate work-family balance. Furthermore, the current study showed that work support is positively related to employee's job satisfaction, which is important for employees as well as employers. Employers can promote supportive relationships among employees through establishing networking opportunities for their employees, such as breakfast meetings, workshops and seminars, and business planning days. This study showed that some people can have it all - a satisfying and successful career, a happy marriage, and fulfilling parenthood - and social support appears to play a significant role in achieving this.

Reviews summarizing hundreds of studies cite Parent Management Training (PMT) and Cognitive-Behaviour Therapy (CBT) as some of the most effective interventions for aggressive youth (e.g., Brestan and Eyberg, 1998). However, variability in outcomes persists, and we have yet to understand why certain interventions only produce behaviour change in some children. Using a clinical sample of 57 children (53 boys, 4 girls) and their mothers enrolled in a combined PMT/CBT program, the current study examined the relation between changes in real-time parent-child interactions, and children’s externalizing outcomes from pre- to post-treatment. Results showed that dyads who were regulated in their interactions over time reported greater reductions in externalizing symptoms from pre- to post-treatment compared to dysregulated dyads. Changes in mean levels of affective content (e.g., negativity) were not associated with aggressive outcomes. Findings suggest that dyadic regulation may be an important process associated with treatment success for aggressive youth.

Reviews summarizing hundreds of studies cite Parent Management Training (PMT) and Cognitive-Behaviour Therapy (CBT) as some of the most effective interventions for aggressive youth (e.g., Brestan and Eyberg, 1998). However, variability in outcomes persists, and we have yet to understand why certain interventions only produce behaviour change in some children. Using a clinical sample of 57 children (53 boys, 4 girls) and their mothers enrolled in a combined PMT/CBT program, the current study examined the relation between changes in real-time parent-child interactions, and children’s externalizing outcomes from pre- to post-treatment. Results showed that dyads who were regulated in their interactions over time reported greater reductions in externalizing symptoms from pre- to post-treatment compared to dysregulated dyads. Changes in mean levels of affective content (e.g., negativity) were not associated with aggressive outcomes. Findings suggest that dyadic regulation may be an important process associated with treatment success for aggressive youth.

Examining responses to violations of communication may provide insight into children’s communicative competencies not apparent during reciprocal interactions. In this study, the caregivers of 18-month-old typically developing children, 30-month-old children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), and 30-month-old children with Down syndrome followed our suggestion to playfully violate communication with their children in two contexts: requesting and social interacting. Caregivers of children with ASD made fewer bids and violations, which their children accepted less often than typically developing children; they also used instrumental behaviors more often when responding. Children with Down syndrome responded to their caregivers similarly to typically developing children, and used more high-level communicative behaviors in the requesting, versus social interacting, context. This study highlights the bidirectional nature of parent-child interactions, and suggests that violations of communication may serve as a “press” to elicit child behaviors not present during reciprocal communication.

Behavioral Parent Training (BPT) is an effective teaching package that is often used to teach new parenting skills. While BPT has been established as efficacious in teaching parenting skills, performance often returns to baseline levels. There may be myriad reasons for this; however, it is possible that competing contingencies in difficult behavioral interactions, and long histories of practices that solve behavioral issues in the short term, affect parents’ ability to implement what they were taught. This study sought to impact parental treatment integrity of a common set of parent training practices via an Acceptance and Commitment Training protocol. Parents were exposed to a behavioral parent training workshop targeting three parenting tools. Follow up measures were collected on implementation integrity and rate of parental coercive behaviors. Low levels of parenting skill implementation integrity were observed during baseline. Following the BPT training phase, implementation of parenting skills showed an increasing trend while parental coercives decreased in level. For the parent who met mastery criteria for all three tools, a follow up period, in which no feedback or training was implemented, and a decrease in level in parenting skill implementation integrity was observed. Following this, the parent participated in an Acceptance and Commitment Training (ACTr) workshop consisting of experiential exercises, metaphors, and homework assignments. After the ACTr workshop, implementation of parenting skills showed a continued increasing trend toward mastery, and frequency of negative parent-child interactions showed a further decreasing trend, as well for all parents.

The current study examined the role of self-reported and child-reported maternal lack of acceptance in increasing the likelihood of developing internalizing and externalizing symptoms among children with ADHD symptomatology. The effects of a social desirability bias on mother’s self-reports of rejection were controlled for. Mother-child agreement about parenting behaviors like warmth/affection, hostility/aggression and indifference/neglect was also investigated. In addition, variables with the potential to affect agreement (i.e., parents’ social desirability bias, child age, child sex) were examined. Participants included 120 boys and 90 girls, 6 to 11 years old (M = 8.25, SD = 1.18) with and without ADHD and their primary parent/guardian (N = 209). Parent and child participants completed self-report instruments separately. Results indicate that the relationship between mother-and-child-reported ADHD symptoms and internalizing symptoms is strongest when mothers exhibit low levels of rejection. Among the ADHD subsample, maternal lack of acceptance acts as a risk factor by strengthening the relationship between hyperactive/impulsive symptoms and externalizing symptoms. In addition, mothers and their children report significantly different levels of parenting behaviors. Child age and child sex were significant predictors of parent-child disagreement.

The association between television exposure and infants’ toy play was examined. Specifically, differences in the amount of program content and coviewing in the home were expected to predict different patterns of play when children were away from television. This thesis also sought to extend Pempek’s (2007) findings indicating that the more parents coviewed certain baby videos (i.e., Sesame Beginnings) in the home with their children, the more likely these parents actively engaged with their children in the laboratory. Consequently, the current thesis examined whether or not this active engagement resulted in something meaningful for children’s play behaviors. Parents of infants who were either 12- to 15- months or 18- to 21- months were given a TV viewing diary to record their children’s TV exposure at home over a two-week period. In addition, parent-infant dyads were randomly assigned to view either Baby Einstein or Sesame Beginnings videos in the home. A control group was not assigned to watch any videos. All dyads visited the laboratory after the exposure period for a videotaped 30-min free-time session (no TV). Each observation was coded for the amount of time children spent in play, mean play episode length, and total number of play episodes as well as the level of parent engagement. Results indicated that the amount of television exposure in the home did not influence infants’ toy play even when program content and coviewing were considered. Moreover, the increase in active parental engagement found in Pempek’s study did not result in an increase in children’s play behaviors. These results suggest that television does not have a distal influence on children’s play behaviors, regardless of content, coviewing, and level of parent engagement.

Thesis advisor: Eric Dearing / Research has shown that parents’ number talk predicts preschoolers’ concurrent and prospective math skills; yet, there is considerable heterogeneity in parents’ use of number talk (e.g., Ramani et al., 2015). Given this, researchers are developing resources and interventions designed to encourage family numeracy (e.g., Hanner et al., 2019). Interventions, however, are based on a limited understanding of how families engage in numeracy conversations, particularly when parents are working to teach their children. Developmental researchers tend to operationalize parent talk as discrete, decontextualized instances of environmental input. In contrast, scholars using Conversation Analysis (CA) argue that understanding interactional phenomenon requires attention to how it is collaboratively and incrementally constructed through turn-taking sequences and how it allows interlocutors to accomplish social actions across stretches of interaction (e.g., Schegloff, 2007). The current study used CA to examine parent-preschooler conversations about numeracy during a home-based math intervention for which parents and children cooked together. The 30 parents—primarily middle-class, college educated parents of color— and their 3- to 5-year-old children received a cookbook with domain-general learning tips and 15 recipes. Families in the treatment condition received additional numeracy tips, some specific to the recipes provided and some broadly applicable to any recipe. Families were asked to audio record themselves cooking twice a month for three months. Results indicated that exchanges in which numeracy pedagogy was irrelevant (i.e., low-relevance pedagogy) for completing the recipe were qualitatively different from exchanges in which numeracy pedagogy facilitated children’s participation in cooking tasks (i.e., high-relevance pedagogy). While low-relevance pedagogy engaged children in rehearsing their numeracy skills, high-relevance pedagogy invited children to use their numeracy knowledge to plan and implement recipe tasks. Counting occurred primarily within low-relevance pedagogy, meaning parents’ prompts to count were disconnected from cooking. The recipes, ingredients, and cooking tools families selected shaped the affordances for numeracy pedagogy. This dissertation has implications for improving early learning interventions. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2021. / Submitted to: Boston College. Lynch School of Education. / Discipline: Counseling, Developmental and Educational Psychology.

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