Early Development and Parenting, Vol. 2 (3), 157-167 (1993) ~~ .- ~ ~ . ~ ~ _ _ _ _ .-- - ~- - . _.

Mother-Child Disputes as Arenas for Fostering Negotiation Skills

Rosemary Leonard Faculty of Humanities and Social Science, University of Western Sydnty, Nepean, PO Box 10, Kingswood, NSW

Valsiner‘s concepts of the zone of free movement (ZFM) and the zone of promoted actions (ZPA) were applied to mother-child disputes to study how mothers discharge their role as experts in negotiation. Twenty mothers of 3-5-year-olds each reported 20 disputes, 10 in which the mother was making a request and 10 in which she was refusing her child’s request. The disputes were analysed sequentially using four models, preservation, copycat, rewardlpunishment, and provision of a rationale. The results showed that perseveration and copycat models were more likely to apply when there was negative affect. Mother’s m-requests fitted the rewardlpunishment model whereas mother’s refusals better fitted the provision of a rationale model. Information from follow-up interviews supported the notion that requests and refusals are being socialized differently. The results imply that, whereas children’s requests and refusals are within the ZFM, only their requests are within the ZPA.

I Key words: Negotiation, value transmission, socialization, conflict.

The interdependence of the developing child and the organization of his or her environment have been described by Winegar et al . (1989). Carers purposefully organize environments to achieve those goals they see as important and, as they develop, children start to reorganize their environ- ments. The goals chosen by carers will reflect both their personal choices and their interpretation of cultural expectations (Goodnow, 1990). Not all carers will be equally involved in organizing the child’s environment. The most important carers are the ’experts’, where an expert is defined as one who not only has skills and knowledge but also is placed in a relationship for which the goal is the promotion of the development of understanding in a novice. For many young children, the main, though probably not the only, expert-novice relationship is with the mother.

Valsiner (1984) has used three zones to describe the child-situation interdependence. The zone of

free movement contains all the actions that a child is permitted to perform in a particular situation including those the child has not performed. The zone of proximal development (Vygotsky, 1978) is the zone within which children can perform tasks with help from an expert that they would not be able to perform by themselves. The zone of promoted actions consists of those actions which the carer is consciously fostering in the child.

The application of this framework to mother-child disputes places the mothers, as experts, in the position of providing a social environment for the child’s developing skill in negotiation. Their children influence the reorganization of that environment depending on how they manage their negotiations. For example, a mother can organize one aspect of the environment by choosing to ask small favours of her child. She will also decide on the limits of acceptable responses. She may set a wide ZFM in which all responses except extreme rudeness are

1057-3593/93/030157-11$10.50 0 1993 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd

Received 10 June 1992 Accepted 11 December 1992

158 R . Leonard

acceptable or a narrow ZFM in which she expects compliance. Within the wide ZFM the child’s habitual choice may be to use reasoning which may end in the reorganization of disputes as debates (Eisenberg and Garvey, 1981). The habitual choice of confrontational responses may reorganize disputes as conflicts (Patterson, 1980). A range of other sorts of reorganizations are possible. However, when the mother sets a narrow ZFM, compliance or conflict are the only choices open to the child.

The framework allows for mothers to have personal goals which may lead to idiosyncratic organization of the negotiating environment. However, the existence of cultural expectations leads to the possibility that a number of principles will be widely adhered to. Some possible principles can be inferred from previous research.

Refusals appear to be a part of the ZFM set up by most mothers. Early work on children’s refusals used a clinical approach which centred only on the issue of obtaining the child’s compliance (Wenar, 1982), which implied that all refusals are outside the mother‘s ZFM. However, Kuczynski (1984) demonstrated that the notion of compliance was inadequate to explain mother-child disputes. Often mothers did not force compliance but accepted a wide array of possible dispute outcomes, for example the strategies of defiance, passive non- compliance, simple refusal, bargaining and excuses described by Kuczynski and Kochanska (1990). Further, there is evidence that mothers are aware of their role as socializers of their children’s negotiations, and that they allow their children to be active participants in disputes (Kuczynski et al . , 1987).

Requests, but not refusals, appear to be part of the ZPA. The way mothers teach requesting to their children has been examined in the context of the child‘s developing pragmatic use of language (Becker, 1990). Becker (1990) in an extensive analysis of mother-child interactions found that the mothers influenced their children’s pragmatic development in requests through modelling, prompts, direct or indirect comments on children’s errors or omissions, reinforcement of appropriate behaviour, and statements about past or future pragmatic performances. In contrast, little emerged on the way in which mothers deal with children’s refusals, apart from some instructions not to argue or talk back. The present research asks how mothers discharge their role as experts. It approaches the question in two ways. One is by looking at mothers’ patterns of strategy use within disputes and their dependence on the children’s strategy choice.

The other is by asking mothers about the ways in which they socialize their children.

The patterns of strategy use were investigated using a method of sequential analysis. The way in which sequential analysis can obtain results that are not available from summary measures is illustrated by the work of Westerman (1990). Westerman found that mothers who were experiencing difficulties with their children‘s behaviour gave the same mean amount of guidance as those who were not. However, sequential analysis revealed that the mothers who were not experiencing difficulties increased their guidance when the child was having a problem and decreased their guidance when the child was going well. The interventions of mothers who were experiencing difficulties were not res- ponsive to the children’s needs.

In this research, the results of a sequential analysis of mother-pre-schooler disputes are presented. This form of sequential analysis examines pairs of responses. If, for example, the question of interest was mothers’ reactions to their children’s use of confrontation, the analysis would identdy all cases of the child‘s use of confrontation and of the following strategy used by the mother. Clearly there are a large number of possible pairs of strategies which would be difficult to interpret. A review of previous research into children’s socialization provided the basis for identlfying those types of two-statement sequences which would lead to a meaningful analysis. The four types of sequences which emerged have been labelled perseveration, copycat, reward and punishment, and provision of a rationale model.

The perseveration model examined the possibility that the mother’s use of a strategy was strongly contingent on her own previous strategy. For example, persisting with simple unadorned direct- ives would be typical of the nagging mother. The model was prompted by research which identifies undesirable behaviour from children as being associated with unresponsive strategies from the mother (e.g. Westerman, 1990, described above). If mothers’ most likely pattern is to persist with the one strategy, then they are not responding to their children appropriately and do little to foster negotiation. Strong support for the perseveration model would suggest that the conduct of disputes is not, in essence, an interactive process. The methodo- logical implication is that sequential analyses produce the same quality of information as summary measures.

In the copycat model, in contrast, the mother uses the same strategy as the one just used by her child.

Mother-Child Disputes ~-~ -

For example, mothers may respond to their children’s reasoning with their own reasoning, leading to the types of disputes identified by Eisenberg and Garvey (1981) in which children avoided compliance by engaging in a debate. The copycat model was also prompted by Patterson’s (1980) research describing the way mother and child react to each other’s provocative statements, leading to the escalation of the dispute. Strong support for the copycat model would imply that mothers are taking a fairly weak position for fostering negoti- ations. By mirroring the children’s strategies, mothers would be responding near the lower limits of the children’s ZPDs rather than extending their children beyond that independent level. Both the perseveration and copycat models suggest limited scope for mothers as the experts in negotiation. In the follow-up interviews, therefore, it was important to ask mothers about their knowledge of negotiation, such as the responses that might escalate, or ameliorate, the dispute.

For the rewardlpunishment model, the reward component examines the use of compromises as con- tingent strategies of the child. Correspondingly, the punitive component examines the use of confrontation as contingent on the strategy used by the child. For example, mothers may use compromises infre- quently when children ignore them but frequently when their children use reasons, thus rewarding their children for reasoning. The choice to use a rewardlpunishment model to examine mothers’ reactions to their children stems from the possibility that mothers’ responses are shaping their children’s negotiation strategies. The model prompts the question of the extent to which the mothers are consciously using the principles of behaviourism in their child rearing. The question, therefore, was addressed in interviews with the mothers by asking them about the ways that they train their children in negotiation.

The provision ofa rationale model examines the use of justifications which are reasons for a request or refusal which go beyond personal preferences (e.g. ’It’s too hot‘ is a justification but ’I don ’t like it’ is not). It simply states that a justification is given regardless of the other party’s strategy. This model stems from the parenting literature in which there is a strong emphasis on the desirable consequences of reasoning with children. Hoffman (1977), for example, found that other-oriented inductive reasoning was corre- lated with desirable social behaviour. Strong support for this model would suggest that mothers frequently model reasoning as a way of conducting disputes. However, like the perseveration model,

it suggests that mothers are not varying their strategies dependent on their children’s. Again, for further information, mothers were asked questions about the role of reasoning in the interviews.

These models are not mutually exclusive. It is possible that most disputes will fit each of the models to a certain extent. The questions of interest are whether mothers are likely to conduct disputes in ways that fit more closely to one model than to others, and whether there are differences between situations in which the dispute was initiated by the mother and those initiated by the child.

METHOD

Participants Information about the disputes was provided by 20 mothers, with each mother contributing 10 disputes initiated by herself and 10 initiated by her child. The children were 10 girls and 10 boys aged 3.1 to 5.1 with a mean age of 4.1. The mothers were all tertiary educated, anglo, and from middle-class areas. They therefore constituted a highly homogeneous sample. The choice to examine a relatively large number of disputes from each of a small but homogeneous set of mother-child dyads was made in order to collect a large data set in which individual differences were not salient so that patterns within disputes could emerge.

Procedure Mothers were trained to make the observations and record them in the booklets provided. Mothers were contacted regularly during the collection to help them with difficulties and remind them of their instructions. In addition, two experimental tasks were used as independent validity checks (reported in Leonard, 1991).

Coding The disputes were of two types, those initiated by

the mother (mother request sequences) and those initiated by the children (mother refusal sequences). While the first statement in the sequence usually took the form of a conventional request (or refusal), further statements in the sequence had a wider variety of forms (e.g. the example below shows the mother’s second request as ‘It’s too cold’, which provided supporting evidence for her initial request that her child stay inside). All the statements were coded into five strategies.

160 R. Leonard

Strategy 1, confrontation, covering force, threats, verbal abuse, and emotional protests Strategy 2, minimal effort, covering unem- broidered directives when a request is made, e.g. ‘Come inside‘ or ‘I want an apple’ and, for refusals, avoidance, or ‘No’ Strategy 3, own position. Each party states his or her own position with at least a little more than the minimum statement needed, e.g. ‘Please can I have an apple‘ (requests) or ’I‘m watching TV’ (refusals) Strategy 4, justifications. In these a person gives a reason for a request or refusal which is other than their own wants, e.g. ‘Put a jumper on because it‘s cold’ Strategy 5, compromise, covering statements which contain some consideration of the other party, e.g. diminishing a request in the face of a refusal, offering of help in response to ‘I can‘t ’

Reliability of Coding The interrater reliability, calculated on a random

sample of 0.1 of the data, using Cohen’s kappa (Liebetrau, 1983), was x = O M for request strategies 1-5 and x=O.81 for refusal strategies 1-5.

Method of analysis The sequences analysed were of two types: those that followed only the mother (e.g. first request to second request, second request to third request, etc.) and those that followed both parties (e.g. child’s first request to mother’s first refusal, child’s first refusal to mother’s second request, etc.).

For each two-statement sequence, a transitional probability (Bakeman and Gottman, 1986) was calculated. For example, a transitional probability measures the likelihood that a mother will use a confrontation, given that the child has just used a confrontation. The extent of the difference between the contingent frequency, as measured by the trans- itional probability, and the baseline frequency was measured by a Z score.

The two examples given below are used to illustrate the models explored in the sequential analysis. The first is an episode in which the child is making a request of the mother.

C’s 1st request: ‘Mummy, can I have Strat. 3

M’s 1st refusal: Mother ignores Strat. 2 C’s 2nd request: ‘I want some cake’ Strat. 2 M’s 2nd refusal: ’No, you won’t eat Strat. 4

some cake?’

your tea’

C’s 3rd request: ’I’ll just have a little Strat. 5

M’s 3rd refusal ’You can have some Strat. 5

C’s 4th request: ‘I want some now!’ Strat. 1 M’s 4th refusal: ’That’s enough, or Strat. 1

C’s 5th request: ’You’re a mean Strat. 1

bit‘

after tea’

you won’t get any‘

Mummy‘

The second example is of an episode in which the mother is requesting and the child is refusing.

M’s 1st request: ’I’d like you to stay

C’s 1st refusal: ‘I want to watch

M’s 2nd request: ’It’s too cold’ C’s 2nd refusal: ’But I’ll put warm

Strat. 3

Strat. 3

Strat. 4 Strat. 5

inside now’

Daddy’

clothes on’

Interviews With the Mothers The mothers were interviewed after they had completed their data collections. The six areas on which the interview focused were the ranking of request and refusal statements, the child’s tempera- ment, dealing with disagreements, the training of the child in requests and refusals, the role of reasoning, and the mother’s view of what constitute the major issues for child rearing.

Procedure for the Ranking of Requests and Refusal Statements

The procedure was a slight adaptation of a paired comparisons task developed for pre-school-aged children. Pilot work involved asking mothers to rank a pool of 16 statements, identdying those frequently used by their children. Testing on children showed that the largest set they could manage was four statements (six paired comparisons). Sets of four request statements and four refusal statements were identified as representing four of the five strategies and being understood and frequently used by children. The refusal statements were ’You do it!’ (confrontation), ’No’ (minimal effort), ’I’m tired’ (justification), ‘ I f you help me‘ (compromise). The request statements were ’You do it!’ (confrontation), ’Pick up the toys’ (minimal effort), ‘Pick up the toys ‘cause I‘m tired’ (justification), ‘Help me pick up the toys’ (compromise). In order to make comparisons with the study of children, the mothers’ task was limited to these two sets of four statements. They were presented on cards and the mothers ranked

Mother-Child Disputes 161

the statements in terms of how annoyed they would be if their children used them.

RESULTS

Mothers’ Reports of Disputes The data base consisted of the 396 disputes, which elicited 1464 request statements and 1255 refusal statements. The mean length of dispute episodes was 6.9 (2.9) statements. The disputes ended in a number of ways. In only 38% of cases did the mother end the dispute with blatant power assertion. In 36% of disputes she managed to convince her child to capitulate fairly happily and in 24% the children managed to convince their mothers to capitulate or compromise (3% were interrupted).

Overall, the results showed contrasts between strategy use in situations in which the mother was making a request and situations in which the mother was refusing her child’s request. The mothers used the reward and punishment model for requests, but for their refusals they were more likely to use justdications or compromises regardless of the child’s strategy. Confrontations and minimal effort strategies were the strategies most likely to fit the perseveration and copycat models.

Table 1 presents the distribution of strategies used by the mothers in their requests and refusals.

The distributions are markedly different. Mothers’ refusals are characterized by a high proportion of justifications (0.35), frequent use of compromises (0.27), but infrequent use of the other three strategies. In contrast, mothers‘ requests used compromise, minimal effort requests arid own position requests with similar frequencies. Just- ifications were slightly less common. For both requests and refusals, confrontations made up the smallest category, but still a sizeable number of the mothers’ statements were confrontational in nature.

Table 1. Distribution of strategies for mothers’ requests and refusals

Strategies Requests Refusals (N=634)

~

( N = 767) ~~~ ~

1 Confrontation 0.13 0.10 2 Minimal effort 0.25 0.19

4 Justification 0.17 0.13 5 Com~romise 0.21 0.27

3 Own position 0.24 0.10

A total of 100 transitional probabilities were calculated to explore all possible two-statement sequences. The results were interpreted in terms of the four models described previously: perseveration, copycat, rewardipunishment and provision of a rationale. There is some overlap between the models in that some of the transitional probabilities used in the copycat model were also used in the rewardl punishment and provision of rationale models. While these four models did not incorporate all the results, they do cover all the transitional probabilities that have Z scores greater than 2.

Perseveration Model This model considers the possibility that the best predictor of the mother’s strategy use is her own previous strategy. Figure 1A presents, for both request and refusals, the probabilities that mothers repeat each of the five strategies in consecutive responses. There was a high probability of per- severation within the confrontational strategy. This pattern was clear for mothers’ requests and refusals. It was most marked for refusals, for which there is a 0.45 probability that a confrontational request will be followed by another confrontational request. The probability of 0.45 was much greater than the baseline frequency of 0.10, and this large difference is reflected in a Z score greater than 4 (indicated by the letter c in Figure 1A).

Other strategies fitted the perseveration model to a lesser extent. Minimal effort strategies show a similar, but slightly weaker pattern than con- frontations. With mothers‘ refusals, the use of an own position statement increased the likelihood of another own position statement being used on one’s next turn ( Z > 2 ) . For justifications and compromises, the mothers’ request strategies were not dependent on their previous strategies.

Copycat Model In a copycat interaction, a mother’s strategy is best predicted by her child’s strategy. Figure 1B shows that this pattern occurred in confrontation for both mothers’ requests and refusals but was strongest for refusals. In the example above, the mother responds to the child’s confrontational request ’I want some now!’ with the confrontational refusal ’That’s enough, or you won’t get any‘. Copying also occurred within the minimal effort strategy for requests. If children used minimal effort refusals their mothers’ next request was likely to be a minimal one, a pattern which perhaps reflects a

162 R. Leonard

Requests Refusals C

1 2 3 4 5 1 2 3 4 5

Mothers’ Previous Strategies’

Requests Refusals b

1 2 3 4 5 1 2 3 4 5

Children’s Strategies

Figure 1. Preservation and copycat models. (a) Persevera- tion model: mother repeats her own strategy. (b) Copycat model: mother repeats child’s strategy. Transitional probabilities for pairs of statements, considered in terms of the extent to which they follow two models: preservation (the probability that a mother’s strategy is the same as her previous strategy) and copycat (the probability that the mother’s strategy is the same as her child’s strategy) models. *1 =confrontation, 2 =minimal effort, 3= own position, 4 =justification, 5 =compromise. **Level of Z scores: a = Z > 2; b= Z > 3; c=Z>4. The Z score indicates the extent to which the transitional probability departs from the baseline frequency for a particular strategy.

cycle of nagging mother and unresponsive child. A high degree of copying occurred for compromises but only in the mothers’ requests. Mothers appear to be very willing to compromise when their children’s refusals offer a compromise. They do not appear to be so responsive when they are refusing their children’s compromise requests.

Reward and Punishment Model The reward and punishment model examines the mothers’ use of compromises (rewards) and confrontations (punishments). Figure 2A shows that the mothers’ requests fit a neat stepwise pattern, rising from the left to the right so that a child using a confrontation is least likely to be rewarded with a compromise and a child using a compromise is most likely to be rewarded. Figure 2B shows a second stepwise pattern for mothers’ requests in the reverse direction. Mothers’ increased use of com- promise neatly mirrored their use of confrontation. An increasing likelihood of mothers using com- promise matched a decreasing likelihood of mothers using confrontation.

Interactions in which the mothers were refusing showed a different pattern. Mothers were likely to use compromises regardless of the strategy used by the child (no Z > 2, Figure 2A). For example, the mother responds to the child’s minimal effort request ‘I want some cake‘ with a justification ’You won’t eat your tea‘. Confrontation was rarely used except by mothers when the child used confrontation (Figure 2B). The strategies least likely to attract confrontation were own position statements, pos- sibly because these occurred at the beginnings of the disputes.

Provision of a Rationale Model This model examines the use of justifications (strategy 4). Mothers frequently used justifications in their refusals. Figure 3 shows that, in response to their children‘s confrontations, mothers’ justifica- tions are relatively less frequent (Z < - 3) but still not uncommon.

Justifications are much less common in mothers’ requests, except when the child uses an own position refusal (Z > 4). (In the coding example of a mother’s request, the child’s refusal ‘I want to watch Daddy’ was responded to with the justification ‘It’s too cold’.)

Information on mothers’ refusals, combined from Figures 2 and 3, shows that mothers’ refusals did not vary greatly with variations in the children’s requests.

Mother-Child Disputes 163 _. ~~ - . . ~ --

(a) Requests

b * * h

Refusals

1 2 3 4 5

Chi id fen’s

r ’ 0.4 1 Requests

I 1 2 3 4 5

strategies’

Refusals

C

1 2 3 4 5 1 2 3 4 5

Children’s Strategies

Figure 2. Reward and punishment models. (a) Reward model: mother’s use of compromise. (b) Punishment model: mother’s use of confrontation. Transitional probabilities for pairs of statements, considered in terms of the extent to which they follow two models: reward (the probability that a child’s strategy is responded to with a compromise strategy) and punish- ment (the probability that a child’s strategy is responded to with a confrontational strategy) models. *l=con- frontation, 2 = minimal effort, 3 = own position, 4 =

justification, 5 =compromise. **Level of Z scores: -a=Z<-2; b=Z>3; -b=Z<-3; c = Z > 4 . The Z score indicates the extent to which the transitional probability departs from the baseline frequency for a particular strategy.

Requests

0 5 1

Refusals a**

1 m

1 2 3 4 5 ) 1 2 3 4 5

Children’s Strategies *

Figure 3. Provision of a rationale model. Transitional probabilities for pairs of statements, considered in terms of the extent to which they follow the provision of a rationale model (the probability that a child’s strategy is responded to with a justification strategy). *1 =con- frontation, 2 = minimal effort, 3= own position, 4= justification, 5 = compromise. **Level of Z scores: a = Z > 2; - a = Z < -2; -b=Z< -3; c=Z>4. TheZscoreindicates the extent to which the transitional probability departs from the baseline frequency for a particular strategy.

Regardless of the child’s strategy, justifications and compromises were strongly favoured by mothers over the other three strategies. (In the coding example, the mother’s refusals are reasonable until the child confronts-‘I want some now!’, then the mother responds with confrontation, ’That’s enough, or you won’t get any at all’.)

Interviews With the Mothers Overall, the results of the interviews show that mothers rank request and refusal strategies in the same order from most annoying to least annoying confrontations, minimal effort statements, justifica- tions, compromises. The children have had ample opportunities for social interactions. The mothers have positive feelings towards their children and do not see them as particularly difficult or dis- obedient. They are aware of the role of their own negative strategies in escalating disputes and of positive strategies that would resolve them more easily. They have a clear idea of the way they teach their children to request in socially acceptable ways but are much less sure about teaching them to refuse. They have clear ideas about the importance of reasoning, and the parenting issue that was of

164 R. Leonard

0 0 1 2 3 4 5 1 2 3 4 5

Requests Strategies* Refusals

Figure 4. Mean annoyance rankings for request and refusal statements. *1 =confrontation, 2= minimal effort, 3= own position, 4= justification, 5 =compromise.

most concern was the conflict between the child's interests and those of others.

More detailed results for the questions about ranking strategies, dealing with disputes, teaching requests and refusals, using reasoning, and child- rearing issues are given below.

Ranking the Strategies Figure 4 shows the mean rankings for the four

statements. Mothers ranked the examples of request and

refusal strategies in the same way. In order of annoyance from most annoying to least annoying were confrontations, minimal effort strategies, justifications, and compromises. For situations in which the mothers are making requests, there is a clear match between the extent to which mothers say they find a strategy annoying and the likelihood that they will respond with confrontation (see punishment model, Figure 2B). In contrast, for situations in which mothers are refusing, there is no match between the mothers' ordering and their likelihood of using confrontation.

Dealing with Disputes The mothers were asked to suggest ways of

dealing with the disputes that were likely to lead to an easier resolution and ways which were likely to lead to an escalation of the dispute. All the mothers had at least one suggestion for ways of resolving the disputes more easily. Reasoning or compromises were mentioned by 12 mothers, dis- traction or separation of the child from either the issue or the mother was mentioned by seven mothers, bribery was referred to by four mothers,

and five mothers mentioned ways of talking to the child, e.g. using eye contact, quietly, firmly, as an individual. In terms of escalating the disputes, the mothers mentioned their own negative strategies, e.g. intransigence, the use of force, criticism, or anger (16 mothers). Four mothers did not mention a particular strategy.

Teaching Children to Request and Refuse in Acceptable Ways

The comparison throughout of requests and refusals is based on the possibility that children have differentiated experience with the two kinds of situation and the strategies they call for. It is accordingly of interest to see whether this is reflected in the mothers' reports. When the mothers were asked how to teach children to request in ways that did not annoy others, all could make at least two suggestions. The techniques suggested were prompts such as 'Say pZease' (15 mothers), with- holding their compliance until the child asks nicely (10 mothers), showing the child what to say (10 mothers), the mother being a good example herself (five mothers), empathy training, e.g. 'How would you feel?' (four mothers), commenting on other people's good examples (two mothers). Only one mother used punishment for 'sharp falk'.

When asked about the training of refusals, the mothers did not respond immediately. They asked for clarification and needed time to think even though they had already answered the question about training requests. Of the 20 mothers, four referred to expecting obedience, another five could not think of any suggestions, and four reprimanded rudeness but could not suggest ways to teach polite refusals. Only six mothers suggested techniques. These were demonstrating good ways of refusing, pointing out polite refusals from others, asking for a reason if none was given, and capitulating if the child gives a good reason.

The answers to the questions on training showed that all the mothers were clear about their approaches to training requests but they either had no approach to training refusals or had to think hard about what guidance they did give their children.

Use of Reasoning All the mothers considered reasoning to be an

important part of their interactions with their children. Some of the advantages mentioned were: to diffuse anger, to show the child 'ofher worlds', to prepare the child for unpleasant events, and that children respond better to requests if they know why. Some of the limitations of reasoning were that

Mother-Child Disputes . - .. ..

it does not work in the heat of the moment, that some children just enjoy the argument, and the need to keep explanations simple. Two mothers said they did not use reasons for numerous everyday events. Reasoning was considered to be particularly important in dangerous situations (13 mothers) or for the child’s prosocial development (eight mothers). While four mothers thought that their children had responded to reasons at approximately 18 months of age, all the mothers thought that reasons were effective with Cyear-olds. Ten mothers started using reasoning before they thought their children could understand it. The mothers’ com- ments suggested that reasoning was used as an accompaniment to other techniques such as distrac- tions so that children would get used to the idea that reasons are part of disputes.

Parenting lssues The final question asked mothers about child-

rearing practices which were issues for concern, either for their commission or omission. From the mothers’ responses to the previous questions, it is clear that they come to a dispute with an agenda that is broader than the immediate provocation. This question gave mothers the opportunity to raise any wider concerns that might influence their handling of disputes. The main dimension which arose on the issue of parenting was the child’s interests (11 mothers) versus those of others (eight mothers). The child’s self-esteem was an important issue for six mothers. These mothers stressed the importance of not putting the child down, of praising and being responsive. Also on the side of the child’s interests were the four mothers who wanted to give their children as much freedom as possible and the mother who mentioned both praise and freedom. On the side of the interests of others, two mothers stressed the importance of training children in their obligations to others, two emphasized the import- ance of strong parenting, and four mentioned both the child’s obligations and strong parenting.

Other issues raised by the mothers were the problems of pushy, over-ambitious parents (two mothers), smacking leading to aggression (two mothers), and the importance of consistency across parents and situations (three mothers).

DISCUSSION Overall, a picture emerged of requests and refusals being interrelated skills which are on different dev- elopmental paths because they are being socialized

by the mothers in different ways. The results supported the notion that refusals are a part of the ZFM but not the ZPA, while, in contrast, requests are part of the ZPA. The results of the sequential analyses showed contrasts between strategy use in situations in which the mother was making a re-request and situations in which the mother was refusing her child’s request. The mothers’ re-requests fitted the reward and punishment model. When the children refuse with a justification or, better still, a compromise, then the mothers are likely to respond with compromise and unlikely to respond confrontationally. In contrast, when children refuse in a confrontational manner, their mothers are very likely to be confrontational and unlikely to compromise. These results imply that mothers are, in fact, shaping their children’s refusals by the way in which they respond. The results for mothers’ refusals imply that children’s requests are not being shaped in the same way. Mothers frequently used justifications or com- promises for their refusals almost regardless of the child’s request strategy. While the frequent use of justifications and compromises in refusals does little to shape children’s requests, it does provide a model for polite refusing.

Differences between requests and refusals also occurred in the mothers’ comments about their train- ing. Consistent with the findings of Becker (1990), those differences support the notion that mothers put a great deal of effort into consciously training requests but that refusals are neglected. The results showed that most of the mothers’ refusals modelled justifications or compromises. However, only a few mothers were, on reflection, aware of their role in modelling polite refusals. None of the mothers appeared to be aware that their reactions to their children‘s refusals followed the reward and punish- ment model revealed by the sequential analyses.

The strateges for which the mothers’ interactions fitted the perseveration and copycat models were the confrontation and minimal effort strategies. Since these strategies were ranked as the two most annoying, there is a strong possibility that, once an annoying strategy is used, the mother and child become locked into a cycle of unpleasantness. In the case of minimal effort strategies, the cycle could take the form of the mother’s nagging being largely ignored by the child, leading to more nagging. In the case of confrontation, the mother may copy her child’s confrontation but then continue in a con- frontational mode. There appears to be a strong possibility of negative cycles of increasing con- frontation as described by Patterson (1980).

166 R . Leonard

Evidence of the mothers’ interest in negotiation comes from both the mothers’ interviews and the disputes in the home setting. The first piece of evidence is the disputes themselves. Some were quite long and, in a quarter of the cases, the mothers allowed themselves to be convinced by their children’s arguments. In the interviews, none of the mothers identified their children as having behaviour problems. It can be inferred, therefore, that despite the number of confrontational strategies, they find their children’s level of negotiation acceptable (i.e. within the ZFM). As pointed out by Kuczynski (1984), mothers do not expect immediate compliance and they are interested in negotiation.

Further evidence of mothers’ interest in negoti- ation came from their comments that reasoning and compromise tended to ameliorate disputes whereas force or intransigence tended to escalate them. All of the mothers stressed the importance of reasoning and, in fact, they did use a large number of justification strategies. However, the frequency of justifications for refusals was twice as high as that for their requests. Since there is no intrinsic reason why a refusal needs more justification than a request, the reason for the difference lies probably in the norms of politeness (Brown and Levinson, 1978).

Using Valsiner‘s approach for mother-child dis- putes promotes new questions about the mother’s role as the ‘expert’ in the social norms of interaction. She has the responsibility for transferring our society’s rules about good negotiation to her child. Hers is a ’middle management position’ between her child on the one hand and, on the other, the wider society in general and her immediate family in particular. Some evidence for the difficulty of this position comes from the mothers‘ responses to the question about child-rearing issues. All but one of the mothers identified a conflict between the children’s need to develop their autonomy and the needs of members of the wider society. Some mothers specifically mentioned problems with relatives or people without children who expected children to conform to restrictive rules such as ‘seen and not heard‘, ’speak only when spoken to‘ or ’no talking back’. The power of social norms to influence parents has been demonstrated by Goodnow (1984), who found that parents’ ideas about children’s rates of development do not vary markedly with their experience of parenting. Any variations from the norms of the mother’s culture are interpreted in terms of a problem with the child. Also, Patterson’s (1980) research showed that the responsibility for dealing with any conflict between

the child‘s interests and those of the wider society is wholly the mother’s and cannot be passed on to another person-even the father.

A question to consider takes the form: how does the potential conflict of interests affect the mothers’ negotiations? One possible area of conflict is between the mother’s interest in modelling reasoning and society’s requirement that she be able to control her child. In situations in which she is refusing there is no conflict. A mother can use as much reasoning as she likes while still maintaining control (i.e. not complying with the child’s request). In contrast, in situations in which the mother is requesting, modelling reasons will not necessarily extract compliance. The difference in the two situations is reflected in the result that more justifications were used in refusals than in requests. In requests, mothers used the more direct own position and minimal effort strategies.

Another potential area of conflict is between the teaching of politeness, to make children socially acceptable, and the teaching of assertiveness, to help children stand up for their rights. In this case there is no conflict for requests. Children can be taught to use appropriate politeness markers to assertively ask for their wishes and needs to be met. The problem arises for refusals. There is no really polite way to refuse an instruction from a person in authority. While the use of reasons can ameliorate a refusal, excessive use of justifications is not assertive (Lange and Jakubowski, 1976). Again the difference in the two situations is reflected in the results. Mothers were clear about how they taught requests but had no clear script for refusals. It can be argued that their frequent use of justifications is modelling a non-assertive approach to refusals.

This investigation of mothers’ behaviours in disputes and their comments about disputes suggest that they are using a number of social rules, some consciously, some unconsciously. The adoption of a Valsiner’s framework focused the work on the processes within disputes and allows for a broader interpretation in terms of the mother’s role as the expert in the dispute. Further investigation of possible rules hidden in our patterns of interaction could be used to help our ‘experts’ make more informed decisions about the types of learning they wish to pass on to their ’novices’.

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