Responsiveness

Child-Parent Relationships

Much of the research on child-parent relationships examines how responsive or unresponsive parenting behavior influences the formation of attachment security and affects social and academic development. Typically, the mother is the focus of the investigation. Responsive parents provide warm, sensitive, and consistent caregiving that is contingent on the infants' physiological and emotional needs, including carefully monitoring and attending to the child's distress signals. Parents who offer such security then serve as a secure base from which children can explore their environment, and responsive parents encourage and support such exploratory behaviors that are directed by the child. In contrast, unresponsive parents provide insensitive, neglectful, critical, or inconsistent caregiving that is not contingent on the infant's needs; unresponsive parents do not provide a secure base for their children and may also restrict or become overly involved with the child's exploratory behaviors.

Other research on responsive parenting examines the role of active engagement with the child, such as providing order and structure, teaching cooperativeness, and providing rich language input.

Research on parenting responsiveness usually takes the form of naturalistic observation of child-parent interaction, either in the laboratory or in the child's natural environment. A coding system is often used to record the behaviors of both the parents and the children. For example, parents may be coded on sensitivity to the child's needs, their accepting mannerisms, and engagement of the child in a noninterfering manner. This observation can occur once or multiple times over an extended period of time. Other research may take the form of an intervention study, where parents are experimentally assigned to receive either responsive-parenting training or no training, and the effects of the training on the children are measured.

Whether the research is observational or experimental, the outcome typically focuses on infant behaviors, such as distress and contact-seeking behavior upon separation, and on markers of development, such as cooperative behavior, exploratory behavior, and motor and language skills. For older children and adolescents, outcome measures may include social skills, parent-child relationship quality, and levels of motivation and academic achievement. In research where both parents' report of own responsiveness and child's perception of parental responsiveness are obtained, much of the evidence suggests that perceived responsiveness of parental responsiveness by adolescents is a better predictor of children's achievement than parental report of their own responsiveness.

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