Goodness-of-fit in Preschool-aged Children's Relationships with Mothers and Fathers
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Date
2024-03
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Abstract
The concept of goodness-of-fit was initially proposed by Thomas and Chess in 1977, and pertains to the alignment between a child’s temperament and the requirements, anticipations, and possibilities present in their environment (Shiner et al., 2012). Goodness-of-fit is an important concept in understanding children’s development, especially in the preschool years, a critical period of development for children to refine their social, emotional, and behavioral skills (Trawick-Smith, 2014). In this study, we focused on three research questions: 1) How does parental support affect developmental outcomes in preschoolers? 2) How does child temperament affect child emotional development? 3) Does the goodness-of-fit between child temperament and parenting behavior affect children’s internalizing and externalizing behavior? This study used survey and observational data from 112 families (mother, father, 4-year-old child) that participated in The Parents and Preschoolers Study. Measures used in this study included mothers’ and fathers’ observed parenting behavior, child temperament reported by parents, and child internalizing and externalizing behaviors reported by parents. We found that children with high levels of surgency exhibit more externalizing behaviors when mothers choose higher sensitivity parenting behaviors. This contradicted our expectations, as high sensitivity levels in parenting are generally considered to yield positive outcomes. This suggests that parents should choose the parenting style that matches their children’s characteristics, because the mismatch between the child’s temperament and parenting style would lead to challenges in parent-child interactions and the child’s social-emotional development. Education and supportive resources can help parents better understand their children’s temperament.
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Human Experience (The Ohio State University Denman Undergraduate Research Forum)
Keywords
Goodness-of-fit, preschoolers, parenting behaviors