Kate L. Kogan

The Process of Interpersonal Adaptation Between Mothers and Their Cerebral Palsied Children

The interaction between 10 young children with cerebral palsy (all under five years of age) and their mothers was analysed during play and therapy sessions on three occasions at ten‐monthly intervals. Sessions between children and therapists were similarly studied. Expressions of affection and positive acceptance by the mothers and therapists were seen to decrease gradually over time. Without exception, all mothers exhibited some loss of affection, particularly those mothers whose children were not walking by the end of the study. The possibility is discussed that the emphasis placed by doctors and other workers on the physical disability of children with cerebral palsy may be a contributory factor to such parental reactions.

Effects of birth of a sibling on mother-child interactions

The interactions of working-class mothers and their firstborn children were studied in a playroom situation shortly before, as well as shortly after, the mother delivered a new baby. Both mothers and children exhibited less warmth and increased neutral affect subsequent to the birth of the new baby. Thus, in the sample, the analytic view that birth of a sibling has a major effect on the mother-child relationship was confirmed.

An Approach to Defining Mother-Child Interaction Styles

The study describes the development of a method for coding and recording the objective non-verbal interactions which take place between preschool-aged children and their mothers. Trained observers speak the codes into one channel of a stereophonic tape recorder while the verbal interactions are simultaneously being recorded on the other channel. Illustrative data from two culturally advantaged and two culturally disadvantaged subject pairs were analyzed in terms of the avenues by which they communicated to demonstrate that the quantitative measures have sufficient consistency on two comparable occasions to warrant applying detailed pattern and sequence analysis techniques.

Behavior Transactions Between Disturbed Children and Their Mothers.

10 children between 4 and 6 yr. of age, coming from families who had sought help from the University of Washington Child Psychiatry Clinic, were observed in the laboratory in interaction with their mothers. Interactive patterns were analyzed, utilizing observational methods and rating procedures developed in other research. Ss each tended to exhibit some unique and deviant occurrences of certain classes of behaviors, but the only respect in which they systematically differed as a group from the comparison sample of non-clinic mother-child pairs was in the more frequent occurrence of strongly controlling behaviors on the part of the mothers. This control characteristically occurred in the context of some degree of high status on the part of the child, whereas in the comparison Ss the child tended to be displaying neutral status when his mother was being strongly controlling. Comparison mothers tended to exercise their control by directing their children what to do; clinic mothers tended to exercise their control by non-acceptance of what their children had already done. Two illustrative cases summarized the application of sequence analysis methods to understanding the unique interaction styles of individual pairs.

Interpersonal Behavior Constructs: A Revised Approach to Defining Dyadic Interaction Styles

Methods for analyzing mother-child interactions which have been used in clinical and research studies over a 10-yr. period have been revised in the interests of greater economy and more precise clinical utility. This paper reports data to document the comparability of the old and new approaches, the reliability of the method when used by several observers, and the usefulness of the new instrument in delineating behavioral change before and after therapeutic intervention.

Help-seeking mothers and their children.

Forty-three mothers sought help with management of childhood behaviors. Presenting complaints in half or more of the families included stubbornness, talking back to parents, disobedience and other traits indicative of parent-child interaction difficulties. Pretreatment behavioral observations revealed that mothers shared common characteristics of being low in positive warmth and high in negative and oppositional responses. The children were observed to share common traits of little independent play, frequent frustration, and either ignored their mothers or were verbally and physically oppositional. Behavioral counselling and monitored rehearsal served to reverse many of the behaviors. Almost all mothers reported reduction in problem behaviors. Mothers varied widely in attributing usefulness to different program components.

Engagement in behavioral family therapy: A multisite investigation

For 2 years, eight sites providing behavioral family treatment collected data about demographic characteristics, the type of intervention provided, and the record of treatment attendance, yielding data on 181 families. A stepwise discriminant analysis found four functions which distinguished between locations: family communication training, home token economy, marital intervention, and parent support group, and accounted for 76% of between-locations variance. These functions describe naturally occurring clusters of treatment and family characteristics, suggesting that properties of the family ecology were taken into account when type of behavioral family intervention was selected. A second discriminant analysis contrasted families engaged (74%) and not engaged (26%) in treatment and found that engaged families tended to receive family communication training (often together with other types of intervention) and to have fathers and mothers with high occupational prestige, fathers who worked many hours, and two natural parents. Taken together these results suggest that evaluation of a behavioral family intervention must consider background family characteristics as well as the magnitude of family behavior change.

Specificity and stability of mother-child interaction styles

Dyad interaction patterns between a mother and two different children in the same family were compared in a series of five families, in order to explore the similarity or uniqueness of mother-child interaction styles within and between families. Another body of data compared mother-child interaction patterns in six children at the ages of four or five years and again three years later. This kind of information is basic to clinical research directed toward evaluating change in single cases. The hypothesis that interfamily consistency might be a meaningful dimension for comparing families was also raised.

Conventional Sex Role Stereotypes and Actual Perceptions

Theoretical constructs of marital sex-role differentiation have not generally been substantiated in studies sampling the role perceptions and expectations of groups of married Ss. In an initial phase of the study reported here, masculinity-femininity scale values were obtained for the items of the Interpersonal Check List, and from these values a Femininity Score was derived. The ICL responses of two samples of wives of alcoholics were compared with the role perceptions of two samples of wives of non-alcoholics. In neither group of comparison Ss was there any significant sex-role differentiation between the wifes perception of herself and her husband. However, in both samples of wives of alcoholics there was significant role differentiation in the wifes perception of herself and her spouse, residing almost entirely in the wifes tending to view herself as highly feminine. The data were construed as lending support to the view that in the “normal” family of today the roles of husband and wife are more likely to be analogous than they are to be differentiated.

A mother instruction program: Behavior changes with and without therapeutic intervention

Mother-child behavior changes over therapeutic intervention and no-contact periods were compared. Fifteen dyads had 8 weeks of instruction followed by no contact; 15 followed a reversed schedule. Overall change was about the same in both groups, and both changed more during instruction than during no-contact periods. Mothers receiving immediate instruction showed greater and more systematic immediate changes following instruction. Children in the group with later follow-up exhibited a greater proportion of behavior change during the no-contact period than during instruction. Thus, no-contact periods cannot be considered no-change periods, though immediate intervention probably ensures more systematic change than intervention preceded by waiting-list experience.