Understanding Parent-Child Relationships and Child Socioemotional Adaptation from Preschool to Middle Childhood Using a Family Systems Perspective

Abstract

The dyadic parent-child perspective has long been the lens by which to understand the development of children's relationships to their parents and the development of socioemotional adaptation. In order to extend this understanding, the family system in which the child's relationships occur must be considered. In contrast to research that has traditionally favored dyadic perspectives, this thesis adopts a family systems approach and observes the functional quality of the family mealtime using the Family Mealtime Q-Sort (Kiser et al., 2010). In this thesis, the functional quality of the family system at mealtime is explored as a significant moderator and predictor in important parent-child relational representations and developmental adaptations, respectively. Participants included 71 children (M_age = 100.35 months, SD = 11.37, 38 girls) and their parents. The first study of this thesis uses a moderation approach to understand the effect of family functioning quality on the association between preschool attachment and middle childhood relational representations. In this study, the dyadic framework of preschool attachment is hypothesized to be influenced by the interconnected and ecological framework of the family system within which it is embedded and may provide a new understanding of the child's positive or negative relational representations of both the mother and father that might not otherwise be estimated from dyadic frameworks alone. Results from this study suggest negative representations of the mother are indeed influenced by the functional quality of the family system, especially for mother-child ambivalent and disorganized attachments. The second study of this thesis uses a hierarchical regression approach to understand the added predictive effects of family functioning quality and its dimensions on measures of concurrent middle childhood socioemotional adaptation. In this study, the gestalt of the family system is hypothesized to provide a new understanding in the prediction of socioemotional adaptation, over and above the dyadic framework of parent-child synchrony. Results from this study suggest that over and above dyadic synchrony, family systems marked by more meaningful conversations and better adjustment to disruptions are linked to less problematic behaviors, especially for conduct symptoms. Together, the findings from this thesis extend previous research on the influence of parent-child dyadic frameworks (e.g., Dagan et al., 2022; Moss et al. 1998) and support family-level measurement (Hayden et al., 1998). Avenues for future research that consider the sociocultural and historical context of family life are presented.