Parents’ Attributions for Negative and Positive Child Behavior in Relation to Parenting and Child Problems

Abstract

Previous research has stressed the importance of parents’ attributions and parenting for child problems. Based on social cognitive models, studies have focused on the interrelations among parents’ child-responsibility attributions for negative behavior, harsh parenting, and child problems. Little is known about the extent to which child-responsibility attributions for positive behavior and other types of parenting play a role in these models. The purpose of this study was to examine whether parents’ child-responsibility attributions for positive and negative child behaviors are related to child problems, and whether these relations are mediated by harsh, lax, and positive parenting. Mothers’ and fathers’ attributions and parenting were examined separately. A community sample of 148 couples and their 9- to 12-year-old child (50% boys) participated in the study. Mothers and children participated by completing questionnaires and a laboratory interaction task. Fathers participated by completing the same questionnaires as mothers. Harsh parenting was the only parenting variable that uniquely mediated the relations between more child-responsibility attributions for (a) negative child behaviors and child problems for both parents and (b) the inverse relation between attributions for positive child behaviors and child problems for fathers. Findings confirm the importance of harsh parenting and demonstrate the importance of parents’ attributions for positive child behaviors in relation to decreasing harsh parenting and child problems. Clinically, it may be useful not only to reduce child-responsibility attributions for negative behaviors but also to increase the extent to which parents give their child credit for positive behaviors.

Acknowledgment

We thank the families who participated in this research.

FUNDING

We thank the Social Sciences and Humanities Council of Canada for research funding.

Notes

¹ Fathers’ relationship to the child (1 = biological father, 2 = other) was not significantly associated with any of the study variables.

² As part of the larger study, each mother–father pair responded to eight negative scenarios and four positive scenarios. Half of these scenarios were completed in the questionnaire format just described, and the other half of the scenarios were completed as open-ended interviews. Only the questionnaire format responses were utilized in this study. Which scenarios were assigned to which format was counterbalanced across families, although mothers and fathers within a family received the same scenarios in the same format. In summary, each parent completed only four negative scenarios and two positive scenarios in the questionnaire format reported in this study.

³ Scenarios are available from the author on request.

⁴ Bivariate correlations indicate no significant associations between this variable and any study variables.

⁵ Missing values were not substituted in this section, and therefore degrees of freedom varied slightly for each analysis.

Additional information

Funding

We thank the Social Sciences and Humanities Council of Canada for research funding.