Mother responsiveness and instruction strategy : joined or separate pathways to child cooperation?

Investigated the natural home interactions of 24 volunteer and 20 clinic-referred mother-child dyads during a one-hour observation. Observers coded mother instructions strategy ("Do" or "Don't"), child compliance, child negativity, and mother responsiveness. These categories were compared through descriptive, correlational, and regression mediation analyses to assess the association between mother instruction strategy, mother responsiveness, and child compliance. As hypothesized, mother responsiveness accounted for most of the variance in child compliance and was mediated by mother's use of "Do" instructions. Results were discussed within a theoretical framework in which the mother responsiveness construct was expanded to include her instructional strategy.