Chinese Mothers’ Practice of Traditional Teaching Behaviors During Mother-Child Interactions: An Example from Shared-Reading Context

As early as in preschool period, Chinese parents have already placed a high value on learning and reveal their emphasis in the way they interact with their child. These interactive behaviors that parents display may not only correspond with their beliefs concerning ability and effort but also associate with the adaptability of their child’s temperament in learning contexts. In Chinese culture, shared-reading is often regarded as more than just a channel for parent-child communication and emotion sharing, for it also provides fruitful language, cognitive, moral, and conventional knowledge and stimulation for children to learn. This study thus attempted to describe the Child-Centered Behaviors (CCB), Parent-Centered Behaviors (PCB), and Traditional Chinese Teaching Behaviors (TCTB) that mothers of Chinese preschoolers display during a shared-reading context as well as to test how these behaviors are associated with maternal beliefs, which included the Entity View of Intelligence (EVI; Dweck & Leggett, 1988), the Pragmatic Concepts of Effort (PCE; Lay & Tsai, 2005), and the Entity View of Effort (EVE; Lay & Tsai, 2005). Furthermore, how perceived child temperament was accounted for in the relation between mothers’ beliefs and behaviors was also tested. This study adopted the video-recorded data of shared reading collected and coded by Wu, Lay, and Huang (2016). Fifty 4- to 5-year old preschoolers and their mothers participated in the study and the maternal behaviors of CCB, PCB, and TCTB were coded using time-sampling method. Mothers also filled up questionnaires for EVI, PCE and EVE and Children''s Behavior Questionnaire-very short forms (CBQ-VSF; Putnam & Rothbart, 2006) for the assessment of temperament. After controlling for maternal educational level and child’s gender, the results of hierarchical regression analyses revealed that (1) neither the main effect of EVI nor the interaction between EVI and temperament could predict the three types of maternal behaviors. (2) The mothers who held stronger belief in PCE were more likely to display Traditional Chinese Teaching Behaviors if they also perceived their child being less likely to be adaptive during learning in terms of the temperament indices of effortful control, activity level, attentional focusing, or inhibitory control. Mothers holding stronger PCE were also less likely to display Child-Centered Behaviors if they perceived their child as lacking interest in quiet activities. (3) Mothers holding stronger EVE were less likely to display TCTB or Parent-Centered Behavior if they perceived their child as low in the temperament indicator of attentional focusing. Those mothers were also less likely to display TCTB if they perceived their child as seeming to feel depressed when unable to accomplish some task. Moreover, those mothers were also less likely to show CCB if they perceived their child being low in activity level. On the whole, this study demonstrated that Chinese maternal pragmatic concept of effort has already been put into practice in preschool period. The connection between PCE and maternal behaviors is revealed particularly when their child’s temperament is simultaneously accounted for. Furthermore, the entity view of effort keeps Chinese mothers from implementing power-assertion, non-responsiveness, and the teaching styles that emphasizing correction and repetitiveness especially when their child’s temperament is perceived as less adaptive in shared-reading context. In sum, cultural specificity has already been realized in mother-child interaction for Chinese families as early as in preschool period.