Faculty of Education - Theses
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ItemLiteracy and learning in preschool aged children(University of Melbourne, 2010)
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ItemEvaluation of a parenting intervention aimed at improving preschool children's emotional competence : issues related to the measurement of emotion-focussed parenting skills(University of Melbourne, 2010)Emotional competence is thought to be related to a range of positive outcomes for children including their ability to develop effective social skills and form friendships, achieve well academically and reduce their likelihood of developing externalising or internalising difficulties. The way in which parents respond to their children�s emotions is thought to play a significant role in children�s emotional development. Tuning in to Kids, Emotionally Intelligent Parenting (TIK) is an emotion-focussed parenting intervention designed to teach parents the skills involved in emotion coaching with their children. The purpose of the current study is to evaluate the effectiveness of the TIK intervention and explore issues related to measuring changes in emotion-focussed parenting over time. The participants in this study were 95 preschool children (46 boys and 49 girls) and their parents who were allocated as either intervention or wait-list control. Assessments of parents� emotion coaching skills and children�s emotion knowledge were carried out prior to the intervention group beginning the parenting program and six months after they completed the program. Parents� emotion coaching was measured via a storytelling observation task and the Parent Emotional Styles Questionnaire. Children�s emotion knowledge was assessed using the Affective Knowledge Test. Results showed that parents who received the TIK intervention improved significantly more than the control group on both observed and self-reported emotion coaching 6 months after completing the program. No significant relationship was found between these two measures of emotion coaching suggesting the two measures captured different aspects of the construct, being parents� use of emotion coaching language compared to their beliefs and attitudes towards emotion coaching. Intervention group children�s emotion knowledge did not improve significantly more than the control group and there was no significant relationship between parents� emotion coaching and children�s emotion knowledge, suggesting elements of emotion coaching were not captured by the parent measures used. Future research on the definition and measurement of emotion coaching may extend the current findings regarding evaluation of emotion-focussed parenting programs.