The Interaction of the Parent with the Young Child: Structure and Dynamics of Parental Responsiveness

The article presents a theoretical justification of the concept of Parental Responsiveness (PR) based on the cultural and historical concept, the activity paradigm and the results of an empirical study, the purpose of which is to operationalize the psychological construct of parental responsiveness and build an explanatory model of the dynamic functioning of parental responsiveness. The study involved 55 mothers with children between the ages of 2.4 and 3.3 years, developing within the norm. The method "Evaluation of child-parent interaction (ECPI)", which provides video surveillance, was used. The data was processed using the Observer XT-14 computer program. The Principal component analyses the method with orthogonal rotation Varimax was used to identify generalizing categories that characterize PR and allows describing their variations. As a result, there were 4 categories (scales) that determine the manifestation of responsiveness by the parent: Dominance, Apathy, Sensitivity, and Support. Their stability was shown in the process of parent-child interaction. A profile of parental responsiveness is constructed for each parent, which determines the extend of each scale when interacting with the child. The developed dynamic multidimensional autoregressive model of Parental Responsiveness allows us to evaluate the dynamics of parental behavior and determine the nature of the relationship between scales during the session.

The psychological birth of the human infant and consequent development during early childhood is analyzed from various perspectives, but regardless of the approach, all of them look at these processes through the prism of parent-child interaction. Parent-child interaction is a set of behaviours that could be observed and measured with the help of scales that are marked during the observation.

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