The Association of Promised Consequences With Child Compliance to Maternal Directives

Abstract

Noncompliance is a primary reason parents seek services for their young children. Research on socialization suggests that warning children about consequences is associated with greater compliance. In the current study, we test whether promised consequences (i.e., promises of parental responses to subsequent child behavior), compared with directives alone, were more strongly associated with compliance. We also tested whether some types of promised consequences were more strongly associated with compliance than others. Forty White mother–toddler (age 17–36 months) dyads were video recorded in a 30-min behavioral analogue situation. Interactions were coded using a derived coding scheme. Promised consequences were not found to be more strongly associated with compliance than were directives alone using sequential analyses; however, negative and immediate promised consequences were more strongly associated with compliance. Findings suggest that promising negative and immediate consequences for noncompliance may encourage compliance.

Notes

¹Detailed coding system available from author.

Note: Intraclass correlations (ICCs) for each specific behavior are included in Table 1; ICCs for the sequences of behaviors analyzed are included in the text.

²No demographic differences were found between the groups recruited by the two different newspaper ads. Children's Child Behavior Checklist scores on the Externalizing subscale were approximately normal across the sample. As such we analyzed all participants as part of the same sample regardless of recruitment method (the ad calling for toddlers who are difficult to manage or the ad calling for all toddlers).