The Impact of Family on a Child’s Social Competence

A model addressing family influences on the peer-related social competence of young children with mild developmental (cognitive) delays was developed and tested. Constructs representing child peer competence, types of parent action (arranging play for their child and socialization strategies varying in degree of control or power), parent attitudes (beliefs as to the degree their child’s peer interactions could be influenced by external actions), parent stress, social support, and child risk were examined. Path analytic techniques were used to evaluate the model. Results supported the importance of family influences on the peer-related social competence of young children with mild developmental delays. With the exception of parent attitude, all theoretical constructs were retained in the analysis and significant paths followed predicted relationships.

By the time young children with mild developmental (cognitive) delays reach preschool age, unusual difficulties in establishing relationships with peers and forming friendships are evident. These difficulties are apparent in various playgroup and community settings and affect virtually every aspect of children’s interactions with peers. In particular, in comparison to typically developing chronological age (CA) mates, children with mild delays experience difficulties initiating activities and entering peer groups; fail to sustain socially interactive play, frequently engaging in solitary forms of play; and exhibit inappropriate patterns of problem-solving during conflict episodes, revealing a confrontational and nonconciliatory orientation. As expected, these peer social competence difficulties are associated with lower levels of peer acceptance, restricted linkages between social partners in school and community settings, and limited reciprocal friendships. Of consequence, most of these patterns remain even after controlling for children’s developmental levels. This suggests that these difficulties correspond to characteristics related to children’s developmental status (i.e., the disability of mild cognitive delay) and not simply developmental level. The sources of these difficulties are certainly multidimensional.

Child-specific cognitive and language factors associated with children’s developmental delays that can substantially compromise peer social competence include those related to attention; information processing; expressive language; and working memory, especially in relation to scripts. In addition to these child-specific factors, recent research and conceptual models have pointed to the influence of family factors. In fact, researchers who primarily study typically developing children have identified a number of important family-peer linkages. Indirect linkages, particularly associations between parent–child and child–child interactions have been examined. Evidence suggests that parent– child interactions indexed by parental sensitivity and reciprocity, consistent affective patterns, moderate levels of control, and the use of discourse-based strategies of interaction and negotiation are positively associated with children’s peer-related social competence. Moreover, a number of socioemotional and social–cognitive processes have been identified that appear to mediate this association.

Parents, however, also influence their children’s competence with peers through more direct parent actions specific to the peer situation. In particular, when directly involved in providing instruction or advice in challenging situations, such as peer group entry, available evidence indicates that the quality of the socialization strategies carried out by mothers is associated with their children’s peer-related social competence, with more controlling high power types of strategies related to lower levels of peer competence. More high power socialization strategies are also endorsed by parents whose children exhibit behavior problems. To some extent, these parental patterns may represent a response to their child’s problematic social skills. Nevertheless, a continuing pattern of actively invoking high power socialization strategies by parents is likely to be counterproductive, further limiting their child’s developing competence with peers.

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In addition to variations in socialization strategies, parents also differ in terms of actively arranging play opportunities for their child. A more active arranging pattern is associated with larger peer-social networks and, at least for boys, higher levels of social competence as reflected by peer sociometric ratings. Direct parental action designed to promote children’s peer-related social competence requires a considerable investment of parental resources.

Finally, the inverse relationship between child risk and peer competence is consistent with childspecific social information -processing and language difficulties that underlie important features of children’s peer-related social competence. The absence of an association between child risk and parent stress, though not predicted, was nevertheless a weak hypothesis. Clearly, the availability of social support and related resources appears to be closely associated with parent stress for this group of children. Measurement concerns extend to many aspects of this study. The need for a more refined measure of parent attitude has already been noted. In addition, the degree to which parent actions, as assessed by parent report through structured interviews, corresponds with actual parent behavior is an issue that must be considered. In the domain of peer-related social development, parent knowledge has been shown to be related to relevant aspects of parent behavior, and parents’ discussions of what they would do with respect to advice to their child for the peer group entry social task are related to corresponding parent socialization strategies.

Nevertheless, the correspondence between the specific parent report measures in this study involving children with delays and actual parent behavior remains to be established. In fact, many of the constructs could benefit from more direct observational measures, particularly socialization strategies and child–peer competence. Observational measures distinguishing among various dimensions of parent–child interactions (e.g., scaffolding, responsivity, affective warmth) also may help elucidate possible family mediators of child– peer competence within a broader developmental framework. Moreover, given the dependence of this study on parental report for most of the constructs, common method variance may account for some of the associations that have been obtained. Future work emphasizing direct observational measures for key constructs would be able to address this issue. Finally, some gender differences are to be expected in the area of peer-related social development. However, as noted, we did not find gender differences for the construct scores. Nevertheless, trends toward gender differences were apparent for some of the correlations among the constructs, further suggesting the need for additional work in which a larger sample of girls could be obtained to allow possible differences to be detected. It is also important to emphasize that children with clinically significant behavior problems and mothers experiencing substantial stress were not included in this sample. Consequently, it is unclear whether this model is applicable to this group of children and families.

Also, as noted, our results are not related to the fact that we included children with relatively high cognitive levels in our sample. Taken together, there are a number of implications of this study relevant to the substantial peer-related social competence problems exhibited by young children with mild developmental delays discussed earlier. In particular, increased confidence should be placed in an intervention model derived conceptually and empirically from work on families of typically developing children and modified to account for the unique stressors facing families of children with disabilities. This implies not only the relevance of a developmental framework for children with delays, but, most importantly, the need for a comprehensive family and child approach to foster children’s peer-related social competence. Unquestionably, longitudinal and intervention studies will be needed to evaluate causal relations hypothesized to exist in this investigation, but the consistency and logical patterns of relationships obtained provide at least tentative support for developing interventions to promote peer-related social competence that consider family influences, including parent stress, social support, and specific forms of parent actions.