The monitoring skills of troubled mothers: their problems in defining child deviance

Thirty-three clinic-referred mother-child dyads were observed in their home settings and one of the home observations was videotaped. These pretreatment observations were analyzed to determine the degree to which mothers provided indiscriminate reactions to their children's prosocial/neutral and deviant responses. We suspected that these reaction tendencies were connected to maternal deficiencies in their monitoring of child behavior. To pursue this suspicion, monitoring performance was assessed by having the mothers watch their own videotaped home observations and, using their own definitions, code their children's positive and aversive responses. Professional observers then replicated this coding task. Results showed mothers and professionals to be in fair agreement in coding child positive responses, but in poor agreement coding the child aversive responses. Mothers tended to undercode these latter responses and to be highly inconsistent in their own coding. When measures of maternal coding bias were correlated with maternal indiscriminate child care reactions, the bias in coding child aversive responses proved to be associated, while the positive coding bias was not. Discussion of these findings was focused on maternal insensitivity as promoted by the mothers' conservative and ambiguous definitions of child deviance.