Personal Narrative Views of Mothers and Their Children: Setting Events for Mother-Child Interactions?

The personal narratives of mothers and children were examined for coherence and richness. Both were assessed for commonalities in narrative structure and possible links to mother’s responsiveness to child’s aversion behaviors. Narrative structure was empirically manipulated to assess changes on responsiveness and child negativity. A sample of thirty mother-child dyads were recruited for participation from normal populations and ten mother-dyads were recruited through the University of Tennessee Psychological Clinic. Measures include the Child Behavior Checklist 9CBCL; Achenback & Edelbrock, 1983), Personal Narrative (Castlebury & Wahler, 1997), and the Standardized Observation Codes-Revised (SOC-R, see Cerezo, 1988). Mother and child narratives were associated. The richer the mother’s narratives, the more coherent the child’s narratives were. The ability for a child to tell a coherent narrative buffered against adverse behavior problems. The result indicate that coherence does not fluctuate, but richness was able to be increased through clinic conversation sessions. Mother’s responsiveness increased as means of parent-training and thus child negativity decreased.