Emotional Conversations of Mothers with Their Children: The Relationship between Mothers' Beliefs on Emotions and Child's Emotion Regulation Skills

The aim of this study was to examine pre-school children's (36-60 months) delay of gratification behavior depending on the mothers' parental attitudes and the gender of the children. Seventy-three mothers and their pre-school children (35 female and 38 male) participated in this study. Demographic Information Form and Parents Attitude Scale (Karabulut-Demir & Sendil, 2008) were used to measure mothers' parenting attitudes. The children's delay of gratification was measured by Mishel and Ebbesen's (1970) Delay of Gratification Paradigm. Accordingly, three critical behaviors (touching, tasting and eating) were chosen as a signal of the delay of gratification and length of delay for the each behaviour was coded. Interrater reliability was established. The data was analysed with Two-Way 4 (democratic, authoritarian, overprotective and permissive) X 2 (child's gender) MANOVA to determine whether delay of gratification behaviour identified as touching, tasting or eating changes depending on parental attitudes (democratic, authoritarian, overprotective and permissive) and the child's gender. As a result, it was found that there is a main effect of the mothers' parenting attitudes on the childs' delay duration, but there is no significant main effect for the childs' gender or the interaction effect of parent attitudes and the childs' gender on the delaying gratification. The children of democratic and authoritarian mothers have waited more than the children of pc' missive mothers for tasting and eating. The results were discussed in the light of literature.