How to Support Toddlers’ Autonomy: Socialization Practices Reported by Parents

ABSTRACT

Autonomy-supportive parenting is found to foster children’s adjustment but relatively few studies have been conducted with toddlers. In the present exploratory study, parents (N = 182) reported what practices they use when asking their toddlers (M age = 26.9 months) to engage in important yet uninteresting activities. Parents rated twenty-six potentially autonomy-supportive practices, along with a well-known scale measuring the extent to which they have a positive attitude towards autonomy support. Research Findings: Using correlational and factorial analyses, eight practices were identified: various ways to communicate empathy, providing developmentally appropriate rationales, describing the problem in an informational and neutral way, and modeling the requested behavior. This subset of autonomy-supportive practices for toddlers was positively related with toddlers’ rule internalization, providing them with further validity. Practice or Policy: These preliminary findings may be useful in guiding future conceptual, empirical, and applied work on the support of toddlers’ autonomy and its assessment in an emotionally-charged and challenging context.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Typically, researchers take a loading of an absolute value of more than 0.3 to be important. However, that depends on sample size. According to Stevens (2002), for a sample size of 200, a loading of more than 0.364 can be considered significant. In order to be conservative, we thus chose a factor loading of 0.40.

2. The role of toddlers’ age and parents’ education as potential covariates was explored although they did not correlate significantly with toddlers’ internalization (r = .08, p = .29 and r = .04, p = .58, respectively). The pattern of results did not change, as partial correlations revealed a significant correlation between the parenting practices and toddlers’ rule internalization above and beyond parents’ level of education and toddlers’ age, r = .26, p = .001.