gender differences in stories of violence and caring by preschool children in post-divorce families:...

Child and Adolescent Social Work Journal, Vol. 20, No. 6, December 2003 ( 2003)

Gender Differences in Storiesof Violence and Caringby Preschool Childrenin Post-Divorce Families:Implications forSocial Competence

Timothy Page, Ph.D., and Inge Bretherton, Ph.D.

ABSTRACT: Themes of violence and caring in the spontaneous play of pre-school-aged children in response to a revised version of the Attachment StoryCompletion Task (Bretherton, Ridgeway, & Cassidy, 1990) were analyzed inrelation to their social behavior in child-care settings. All children (n = 66, 39boys) lived in post-divorce families, primarily in the custody of their mothers.Some story enactments of violence predicted negative social behavior in child-care for both boys and girls. Other story enactments were strongly associatedwith gender and did not uniformly predict social behavior, suggesting thatgender socialization plays a significant role in children’s play representations

Timothy Page is Associate Professor, School of Social Work, Louisiana State Univer-sity. Inge Bretherton is Professor, Department of Human Development and FamilyStudies, University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Address correspondence to Timothy Page, Ph.D., Associate Professor, School of SocialWork, 216 Huey P. Long Fieldhouse, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, LA;e-mail: [email protected].

The research reported here was funded by grant number R01 HD267766 awarded tothe second author by the National Institutes of Health (NICHD). Supplementary sup-port was provided by the University of Wisconsin Graduate School Research Commit-tee, the Waisman Center, the Vilas Trust and the Aid Association for Lutherans. Wewish to express our gratitude for this support. We would also like to thank Patti Her-man for assisting with data analysis and Barbara Golby, Chris Halvorsen, ReghanWalsh, and Laura Winn for assisting with data collection. Last, but not least, we wishto express our appreciation to the mothers, children and teachers who participated inthis study. For copies of the Attachment Story Completion Task (adapted for childrenof divorce) and the coding manual write to Inge Bretherton, Department of HumanDevelopment and Family Studies, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI53706; e-mail: [email protected].

485 2003 Human Sciences Press, Inc.

486 CHILD AND ADOLESCENT SOCIAL WORK JOURNAL

of violence and caring. Implications for children’s development and the inter-pretation of children’s play behavior are discussed.

KEY WORDS: Attachment; Narratives; Post-Divorce; Preschool Children.

Children in post-divorce families typically have had to cope with se-vere stress and uncertainty as a result of conflict between parents andthe dissolution and reorganization of their families (Hetherington,Bridges, & Insabella, 1998). Younger children have often been consid-ered especially vulnerable to the damaging effects of family stress andconflict because of their relatively limited powers of comprehensionand experience (Wallerstein & Kelly, 1980; Emery, 1999). Althoughmost children eventually make successful adjustments to the divorceof their parents, a significant minority experience substantial psycho-social problems, including academic problems and problems in peerrelationships, both of which are important markers of future socialand emotional development (Hetherington, Bridges, & Insabella,1998).

The ways in which children cope with severe stress has long beenconceptualized in terms of the externalizing-internalizing dichotomy,which corresponds to aggressive and/or hyperactive behavior and anx-ious and/or depressed and withdrawn behavior, respectively. At thesame time, it is well documented that these two broad styles arestrongly associated with gender, with boys more likely to exhibit ex-ternalizing and girls internalizing styles (Emery, 1999; Kearney,1999). Moreover, some researchers have recently reported that condi-tions of severe stress are likely to promote and reinforce gender-stere-otypic behavior problems in children that reflect the basic externaliz-ing and internalizing dimensions (Benenson, 1996). It may thus bethat the familiarity of traditional gender role behavior even in youngchildren, and social reinforcements for this behavior, contribute to thepromotion of gender stereotyped behavior in high stress conditions.Familiar behavioral patterns may provide a measure of order and pre-dictability to uncertain circumstances.

Understanding young children’s experience of uncertainty, stress,and coping, from their point of view, has long been a challenge forclinicians and researchers. While behavioral measures reported byparents and teachers such as the Child Behavior Checklist (Achen-bach, 1991) have proven to be very valuable indices of social behavior,assessments of children’s own perceptions and motivations towardothers provide unique and valuable information about the child’s ex-

TIMOTHY PAGE AND INGE BRETHERTON 487

perience with stress and coping. Play therapists have traditionally re-lied on children’s spontaneous play to indicate significant themes ofpsycho-social relevance, from the child’s viewpoint (Timberlake & Cut-ler, 2001). While a considerable body of clinical reports based on playtherapy methods exists, there has been relatively little empirical re-search that has examined some of the assumptions and conclusionsbehind this clinical experience (e.g., see Landreth, Homeyer, Glover, &Sweeney, 1996; Shirk & Russell, 1996).

In recent years, however, attachment researchers have begun to ad-dress some of the problems of child assessment from the child’s pointof view. According to attachment theory, children’s experience withtheir caregivers, especially caregivers’ responses to expressions of at-tachment, gradually become organized into representational models,known as “internal working models” (Bowlby, 1973, 1982). Internalworking models principally serve predictive and guiding functions:Children raised with adequately responsive caregiving figures learnto expect support when it is needed, and thereby bring a sense of confi-dence to the new social relationships they establish in ever-wideningsocial spheres outside the home. Attachment theory has proven to bean extremely fertile scientific paradigm, generating an extensive em-pirical literature, because of the clear, measurable concepts uponwhich it is based, specifically the expression of attachment behaviorand the response of caregivers to this. In recent years, these conceptshave been employed to devise new instruments for assessing youngchildren’s attachment experiences from their points of view. These in-struments, designed for children between the ages of approximatelythree to six years, rely on projective techniques to assess children’sperceptions of social relationships. The “representational level” of at-tachment relationships that is tapped by these instruments thus re-flects the organization of children’s internal working models (Main,Kaplan, & Cassidy, 1985). Substantial evidence has been providedthat these instruments reliably correlate with behavioral measures ofattachment security and other dimensions of social relationships (e.g.,Bretherton, Ridgeway, & Cassidy, 1990; Page, 2001; Woolgar, 1999).

One of these instruments, the Attachment Story Completion Task(ASCT; Bretherton, Ridgeway, & Cassidy, 1990), was used in the pres-ent study, revised for use with children in post-divorce families. TheASCT-R, discussed in detail below, consists of story-beginnings orstems portraying mildly stressful situations with which children arelikely to be familiar. Children’s spontaneous responses are coded forthemes of interest.


The current study expanded previous attachment research with theASCT by examining the responses of children in post-divorce familiesand assessing their representations of mother and father figures sepa-rately. In our previous work, we examined the portrayal of six differ-ent attachment themes and found that children’s representations ofparents as nurturing, of the father as authoritative disciplinarian, ofchildren’s empathic responding to parents, and, especially, of chil-dren’s representations of attachment behavior to parents, predictedpositive social behavior in child-care settings with peers and, to alesser extent, with the preschool teacher or daycare provider herself(Page & Bretherton, 2001). We concluded that the ASCT is capable ofilluminating important elements of children’s internal working mod-els of attachment relationships and, in accordance with theory, theseelements predict significant characteristics of their actual social be-havior.

Unexpectedly, we also found a pattern of gender differences, partic-ularly in relation to children’s representations of the father figure. Forboys, this pattern conformed to our expectations; higher frequenciesof representations of child protagonists’ empathic responding and at-tachment to the father figure were positively related to social compe-tence in child-care settings. For girls, however, the pattern was theopposite: higher frequencies of these narrative variables were associ-ated with relatively lower social competence ratings (see Page &Bretherton, 2003). We also noticed that among the boys who enactedfewer representations of empathic responding to the father figure, en-actments of random family violence (e.g., killing, hitting, stomping,and kicking each other) without any apparent provocation, appearedto be common. These representations were rare among girls (18 boysand 2 girls).

Similar gender-based differences in a limited number of other stud-ies using the MacArthur Story Stem Battery, a related story stemprocedure (Bretherton, Oppenheim, Buchsbaum, & Emde, 1990), havebeen reported (von Klitzing et al., 2000; Zahn-Waxler, et al., 1994). Inaddition to finding that boys created more violent enactments andgirls more caring enactments in their narratives, von Klitzing et al.(2000) reported that violence in boys’ narratives was unrelated to rat-ings of behavior problems on the CBCL, while the opposite was truefor girls. These authors relied on an aggregate measure of aggressiveacts in the narratives, instead of separate examinations of specific dy-adic interactions (e.g., father-child, mother-child), the approach taken


in our study. Similar gender differences in children’s representationalplay have also been reported with other, less structured narrativemethodologies (Murray, Woolgar, Briers, & Hipwell, 1999). In con-trast, some other studies with versions of the ASCT or MSSB havenot found gender differences in these dimensions of narrative repre-sentations (MacFie et al., 1999; Oppenheim, Emde, & Warren, 1997).More research is needed to understand better the ways in which gen-der may contribute to the characteristics of children’s narrative repre-sentations.

The purpose of this paper, then, is to further investigate the violentnarrative enactments in our study to determine whether they may beassociated with social competence differentially for boys and girls. Wehypothesize that they are indicators of poorer social competence, butdo not make a hypothesis about the extent to which this will differ forboys and girls, since only one other study has examined this question.We also compare violent story representations with enactments of car-ing to see how these two dimensions relate, and perhaps reflect gen-dered differences in expectations of social behavior. It was clear fromour previous work that boys enacted more violent story representa-tions and girls enacted more representations of the mother in nurtur-ing roles, and that, as noted above, there were different associationsfor boys and girls of social competence with enactments of children’sempathic responding to parents (Page & Bretherton, 2001). We weretherefore interested in whether a comparison of violent representa-tions with caring representations would provide a more complete un-derstanding of the ways in which boys and girls employ these in theirstory creations. Understanding these narrative enactments promisesto contribute to a broader understanding of how boys and girls copewith stress, and the extent to which children’s creative expressionsmay provide insight into their social behavior.

Methods

Sample

Participants were 66 children (39 boys) from lower- to upper-middleclass, predominantly white families, residing in a mid-size universitytown. The mean age of the children was 56 months (range 54–60months). These children took part in a larger study of post-divorce


families conducted by the second author. (Five children in the originalstudy were excluded from the present study because their child-careproviders were relatives.) The great majority of the mothers wereidentified from public court records, though 17% of the families weredirectly recruited through local preschools. Mothers were contacted ifthey had at least one preschool child aged 4.5 to 5.0 years of age, andhad been either divorced and not remarried, or legally separated forat least two years. This interval has been reported as a benchmarkfor family restabilization after the immediate crisis associated witha divorce (Hetherington, Cox, & Cox, 1982). Only mothers who wereemployed, engaged in full-time education, or a mixture of both, wereenrolled in the study. Those currently receiving public assistance werenot invited to participate in order to avoid confounding severe eco-nomic hardship with potential stressors of divorce. Mothers’ averageage was 33 years (range, 23–47), and their average income was$25,800 annually (including child support). Although legal custodywas shared in most cases, primary physical placement was with themother for 91% of the children and shared on an equal basis for theremaining 9%. All but 10% of the children had regular contact withtheir fathers, and 75% of the children saw him at least every otherweekend. Thirty-four percent of the mothers shared their residencewith another adult: 15% with a cohabiting partner; 11% with an adultfamily member; and 8% with parents. Fifty-four percent of the moth-ers who were contacted and fulfilled eligibility criteria agreed to par-ticipate. Mothers received $75 in acknowledgment of their and theirchildren’s participation in the larger study.

Instruments

The Attachment Story Completion Task-Revised (ASCT-R). TheASCT-R is composed of ten story stems presented with the aid of fam-ily figures and props, consisting of father and mother figures, grand-mother, two siblings the same gender as the study child, a friend ofthe children, and the family dog. Since all children’s parents had di-vorced, parents were portrayed in the protocol as living in separate“houses,” represented by square pieces of felt placed at opposite endsof the child-sized table at which the stories were administered. Follow-ing the delivery of each story stem, the child is asked to “Show meand tell me what happens now,” and the child’s responses are codedfor themes of interest. (See Appendix 1 for a list of the story stems in


the ASCT-R.) A coding system consisting of 74 codes was developedfor this study and is available from the authors (Page & Bretherton,1993). Frequencies of codes were calculated across the entire ASCT-R, and collapsed into 32 conceptually distinct themes, capturing re-sponses related to attachment, socialization, the mother-father rela-tionship, and sibling interaction. Inter-rater agreement was assessedin the following sequence: The first author coded all transcripts, whichwere then checked by a second coder against the coding manual. Thesecond author (one of the originators of the ASCT) then reviewed thetranscripts and recommended changes. The point-to-point correspon-dence between a randomly selected sample of 10 transcripts from thefirst author’s original coding to the second author’s revisions was 82%.

This report focuses on six themes derived from the ASCT-R tran-scripts, three of which are representations of violence (parent-to-par-ent violence, child-to-parent violence, and parent-to-child violence),and three of which are representations of caring, paralleling the dy-adic relationships of violence (i.e., parent-to-parent, child-to-parent,and parent-to-child) (see Appendix 2 for operational definitions ofthese variables). Child violence to both mother and father, mother andfather violence to child, child caring to mother and to father, andmother and father caring toward child were included, for a total of tennarrative variables analyzed.

Social Competence. Social competence with peers in child-care set-tings was measured by three survey instruments, completed by child-care providers, each with established reliability and validity: The Pre-school Competence Questionnaire (PCQ; Olson, 1985; Olson & Lif-gren, 1988) is a measure of children’s pro-social behavior with peers;the Preschool Behavior Questionnaire (PBQ; Behar, 1977; Behar &Stringfield, 1974) is a measure of interpersonal problems with peers;and the Student-Teacher Relationship Scale (STRS; Pianta, & Stein-berg, 1991; Pianta, 1996) provides a total score that reflects positivequalities (e.g., warmth, communication, low conflict) in the child’s re-lationship with teacher or child-care provider. Social competence sur-veys were completed within two weeks of the administration of theASCT-R. Overall, children were rated fairly high in social competenceby child-care providers, identical to national norms on the STRS,somewhat lower than norms, but not as low as a clinical sample re-ported by Behar (1977) on the PBQ. Alpha coefficients for the threescales were .93, .92, and .88 respectively.


Results

Data Analysis Procedures

Following the presentation of zero-order correlations among the nar-rative variables, t-tests are provided to examine differences betweenboys and girls in the frequencies of the ten narrative variables. Hier-archical multiple regressions are presented next to examine relation-ships between each of the narrative variables and each of the threesocial competence measures. Five control variables were identified forwhich we obtained some significant zero-order correlations with nar-rative variables: Mother’s income, father’s occupation, child gender,child age, and the presence of another adult in the mother’s home.The final equations contained an interaction term of the narrativevariable with child gender.

Relationships Among Narrative Variables

Zero-order correlations among the ten narrative variables are pre-sented in Table 1. While they cannot be considered independent, thesenarrative themes were not consistently correlated; only 31% of theinter-correlations were significant, and even these were, for the mostpart, of a moderate magnitude. As seen in Table 1, narrative themesof the same behavioral valence (e.g., empathy and nurturing versusviolence) tended to be correlated, but with only one correlation acrossthese valences. This lone exception was the negative correlation ofEmpathy to Mother with Parent Violence. This may be noteworthy inthat the constructs upon which these two narrative themes are based,the child-mother relationship and parent conflict, have been identifiedin the divorce literature in mother-custody families as primary predic-tors of children’s social-emotional adjustment (see discussion below).

T-tests on the ten narrative variables reveal that boys were signifi-cantly more likely to enact violence of the child toward the mother(p < .05), of the child toward the father (p < .001), the father as violenttoward the child (p ≤ .001), and violence between parents (p < .01) (Ta-ble 2).

Girls, on the other hand were significantly more likely to enact themother as nurturing (p ≤ .001). There were no differences betweenboys and girls in enactments of the mother as violent toward the child,of caring between parents, of representations of the father providingnurture to the child, or in enactments of the child’s empathic respond-


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TABLE 2

Mean Frequencies of Narrative Variables by Child Gender

Narrative Variable Boys Girls

Empathy to Mother 2.56 2.74Empathy to Father .77 .85Mother Nurture 3.00 7.33***Father Nurture 4.77 3.81Violence to Mother .74* .22Violence to Father .56*** .07Mother Violence .36 .11Father Violence .77*** .07Parent Affection .77 1.22Parent Violence .67** .11

*p ≤ .05, **p ≤ .01, ***p ≤ .001.

ing to either parent. In general, these results show that boys enactedsignificantly more violent exchanges in their narratives than girls,with some tendency to involve the father more than the mother inthese representations. Conversely, girls were significantly more likelyto enact affectionate exchanges as indicated by one of the narrativevariables, the mother as nurturing, which also reflects consistency ingender.

The relative numbers of boys and girls who enacted violent and nur-turing representations also reflect the degree to which these variableswere associated, in predicted directions, with child gender. The fivevariables representing violent interactions were each enacted by anaverage of 16 boys, or 40% of the boys in the sample. An average ofonly 2 girls enacted these five variables, or 6% of the girls in the sam-ple. Therefore, while a minority of both boys and girls enacted violentrepresentations, these enactments were very rare for girls. The fivevariables representing caring were enacted by an average of 27 boyseach, which represents 70% of all boys, while the average number ofgirls enacting these representations was 21, or 79% of all girls. Enact-ments of caring interactions were therefore common, with girls enact-ing these in somewhat higher numbers.


Representations of Violence in Relation to Social Competence

To answer the question of whether narrative enactments of violenceand caring were associated with social behavior with peers and child-care providers, a series of multiple regressions were performed withthe 5 narrative variables representing violence as predictors and the3 social competence variables as criterion variables (see Table 3).

Enactments of the mother as violent against the child significantlypredicted child behavior problems as a main effect (PBQ, p < .02) andwas marginally significant as a main effect in relation to socially com-petent behavior (PCQ, p < .08). The interaction term of father violenceagainst the child and child gender was marginally significant in rela-tion to the PBQ (p < .054) and PCQ (p < .07).

Violence of one parent against the other in children’s narratives wasnegatively related to socially competent behavior (p < .05) and posi-tively to behavior problems (p < .05), for both girls and boys.

A significant interaction of child violence against the mother andchild gender in relation to behavior problems (PBQ; p < .01) wasfound. This interaction term was marginally significant in relation tothe PCQ (p < .06) and the STRS (p < .06). The interaction of child vio-

TABLE 3

Hierarchical Regressions Predicting Social Competencefrom Narrative Variables and Narrative

Variables-by-Gender Interactions

Beta (t-value)Pre-School Beta (t-value) Gender

Narrative Variable Measure Main Effect Interaction R2

Child-Mother Violence PBQ NS .42 (2.85**) .34***Mother-Child Violence PBQ .30 (2.41*) NS .36***Parent-Parent Violence PCQ −.25 (1.99*) NS .30**

PBQ .26 (2.11*) NS .33***Child-Mother Empathy PCQ NS .28 (2.03*) .30**Child-Father Empathy PCQ .32 (2.18*) .36 (2.59**) .33***Cumulative Caring PCQ .38 (2.15*) .45 (2.69**) .33***

*p ≤ .05, **p ≤ .01, ***p ≤ .001.


lence against the father and gender was marginally significant in rela-tion to the PBQ (p < .06) and PCQ (p < .09).

To understand the nature of the significant interaction term of childviolence against mother and gender in relation to behavior problemswith peers, these variables were graphed, splitting the narrative vari-able at its median (see Figure 1). The graph shows that, for girls only,this relationship conformed to our expectations. That is, enactments ofchildren’s violence against the mother varied positively with behaviorproblems with peers. In sharp contrast, this relationship for boys con-tradicted our expectations. For boys, more representations of child vio-lence against the mother corresponded with slightly lower peer behav-ior problem scores (the magnitude of this effect was less than that forgirls). Each of the marginally significant interactions of gender andthe other narrative variables associated with violence follows thissame pattern.

Our expectations of relationships of narrative enactments of vio-lence and socially competent behavior were therefore confirmed for 2of these 5 narrative variables, while for a third (child violence against

FIGURE 1. Interaction of child-mother violence and gender in rela-tion to the PBQ.


the mother), our expectations were confirmed for girls but in the oppo-site to expected direction for boys.

Representations of Caring in Relation to Social Competence

Two of the five narrative variables representing caring were foundto predict children’s social competence, though the pattern of theserelationships differed unexpectedly for girls and boys. Significant in-teractions were found of children’s empathic behavior toward themother and toward the father in relation to socially competent behav-ior with peers (PCQ) (p < .05 and p < .01, respectively) ( Page & Breth-erton, 2001). Representations of the mother and father as nurturingtoward the child were unrelated to social competence measures, aswas the narrative variable of inter-parental caring.

For both of the interactions of child empathy (toward mother andtoward father) the same pattern of effects was found (see Figure 2).For boys, but not girls, more frequent enactments of child empathywere associated with more positive social behavior. For girls, the pat-

FIGURE 2. Interaction of child empathy to mother and gender inrelation to the PCQ.


tern was the opposite; more frequent enactments of child empathytoward the mother and toward the father were associated with lowerratings of social competence in interactions with peers.

Aggregated Narrative Variables as Predictors of Social Competence

Finally, in order to examine whether the over-arching interactivequalities of narrative representations, violence or caring, would bebetter predictors of social competence (irrespective of the specific char-acters involved in these interactions) two aggregate variables, onecomposed of the five violent representations and one of the five caringrepresentations, were examined in relation to the social competencemeasures via multiple regression. The composite violence variablewas unrelated to social competence measures. A significant genderinteraction of the composite caring variable was found to significantlypredict children’s social competence scores (PCQ, p < .01). The patternof the interaction term was similar to the pattern reported above inFigure 2, in that caring representations were related to higher socialcompetence for boys. For girls, there was little relationship betweenthese variables and preschool behavior.

Discussion

Recent interest on the part of researchers and clinicians in the waysin which children create meaning about their life experiences in theirspontaneous creative activities has led to increasing empirical exami-nation of correlates between play and social behavior. The focus formany such examinations tends to involve a dichotomous division ofsocially positive (i.e., caring) and negative (i.e., violent) behavior inchildren’s play (e.g., see Oppenheim, Emde, & Wamboldt, 1996).Hypotheses based on this approach are often framed in terms of posi-tive representational behavior predicting pro-social behavior and neg-ative representational behavior predicting anti-social behavior. Thispositive-negative behavior dichotomy of course corresponds with tra-ditional female-male gender-role behavior. The likelihood, therefore,of gender-specific meaning attached to behavior means that interpre-tations of positive and negative representational and social behaviorshould take into consideration the question of how this behavior maybe influenced by gender socialization, beyond the meaning inherent


in the enactment itself. The results of this study show that, in someimportant respects, the social meaning of representational positiveand negative behavior depends on the gender of the child who enactsit. For certain other representational behavior, however, social mean-ing did not vary with gender.

For 2 of the 5 narrative enactments of violent behavior, associationswere in the predicted direction: For both boys and girls, more narra-tive representations of the mother as violent toward children and ofviolence between parents predicted more social problems and less so-cial competence. It seems noteworthy that for preschool-aged childrenliving in mother custody, post-divorce families these specific enact-ments would predict their social behavior, findings that are consistentwith other reports in the divorce literature about young children’s ad-justments to post-divorce circumstances. The two major predictors ofchildren’s post-divorce social and emotional adjustments have consis-tently been shown to be the quality of parenting of the custodial par-ent (who is usually the mother) and parental conflict (Emery, 1999;Hetherington, Bridges, & Insabella, 1998). It is a significant method-ological finding that the child’s perspective of these important familycircumstances may be observable through the use of this representa-tional measure.

In contrast to these expected associations, the relationship of childviolence toward the mother with social competence conformed to ourprediction for girls only. In this case, violent behavior enacted by achild, which is more consistent with male gender-role behavior, wasnot a meaningful predictor of actual social behavior for boys. A signifi-cant amount of the variance associated with this narrative variable inrelation to social competence is thus accounted for by gender (p < .02),which may be a reflection of the socially-derived gender expectationsassociated with this form of behavior.

One boy’s response to the first story of the protocol, the Spilled Juicestory, provides an example of an extremely violent attack of the childagainst the mother.

The younger child knocks over the older child, shouting “I want lemon-ade!” repeatedly. He then jumps on the mother’s head and knocks herover, shouting repeatedly, “I want lemonade!” . . . Subject holds the childfacing the mother and says, “I want lemonade, Mommy.” (Mother): “No,dear, ’cause you knocked us down.” The younger child screams and at-tacks the mother, stomping her repeatedly . . . (Child): “I’m going to throwyou out in the dirt and bury you.”


This boy exemplifies the unexpected, contradictory finding for boysthat enactments of child violence against the mother were unrelatedto social competence in the preschool context. This boy was rated wellwithin the normal range of social competence (even somewhat lowerin problem behaviors) by his pre-school teacher.

An example of family violence involving inter-parental violence thatwas associated negatively with social competence for boys and girls isprovided by another boy’s completion of a story stem about a lost dog(Barney):

(Experimenter): What did they do about Barney being gone? (Subject):They come over and they fight (all family members engage in a swirling,haphazard fight). Subject then carefully places both “houses” on top offamily as covers. (Subject): They’re cold . . . Subject pushes the familyand covers over to Experimenter. (Subject): Now . . . over to you. (Experi-menter): What are they doing? (Subject): They fight. Subject moves fig-ures together while still under the covers.

This boy’s story is particularly chaotic and alternates between fam-ily images of a vulnerable togetherness and violence. He was rated byhis pre-school teachers as very low in social competence.

In contrast to the representations of violent behavior, the narrativerepresentations of caring behavior were not associated with socialcompetence for girls. Only the two variables representing children’sempathic responsiveness to parents, both the mother and the father,were positively related to social competence, but this effect held forboys only. A significant portion of the variance associated with theserelationships was accounted for by child gender (p < .05). It appearsthat for girls, narrative enactments of caring behavior were affectedby gender-role expectations, just as violent enactment were for boys.

An example of caring behavior that was likely to be associated withsocial competence for boys but not girls is provided by one girl’s UncleFred story.

Story stem: The mother is sitting on the couch, crying and Jane walksin. The mother says, “I’m so sad because Uncle Fred has died.” . . . Inresponse, the subject walks Jane to the couch, and sits her there next tothe mother. (Jane): “I am too.”

Unexpectedly, higher frequencies of empathic responding to themother and father figures were associated with lower social compe-tence ratings for girls. We suspect that this counter-intuitive findingis first explained by the extremely high social competence scores ob-tained by girls who enacted low frequencies of narrative empathic re-


sponding. In this sample there were several very reserved girls whoenacted very few representations of any kind in their story responses.It is possible that their social behavior in preschool settings is also veryreserved and that they are seen by their teachers as well-behaved. Also,in another paper (Page & Bretherton, 2003), we explored a similar rela-tionship, among these same subjects, of representational attachmentbehavior to the father and social competence where, for girls, higherfrequencies of these representations were related to lower social compe-tence ratings. It is possible that the finding presented here involvingrepresentational empathic responding to the mother and father reflectsthe same dynamics. In the previous report we showed that it was likelythat higher frequencies of representational attachment behavior towardthe father involved a perception of responsibility for parents’ well-beingamong girls and not boys. Higher narrative empathic responding to par-ents may similarly hold very different meanings for girls and boys. Evenat the pre-school age, girls may identify more with caregiver roles andthis identification may contribute, for some, to a higher sense of respon-sibility for the welfare of other family members. The burden that thisrepresents for some girls may become expressed in settings outside thefamily in compensatory, relatively less competent social behavior.

It is interesting that the mother’s caring behavior, the positive con-trast to violence, was not related to children’s social behavior on thesemeasures, as mother’s violent behavior was. It may be that represen-tations of anomalous, negative behavior, which one would assume vio-lent behavior to be, is a better predictor of social behavior than com-mon, positive behavior.

The absence of associations between the cumulative variables repre-senting violence, and caring and social competence (with the exceptionof the positive relationship of cumulative caring and social competencefor boys) suggests that children create character-specific meanings intheir narrative play. In order to achieve understanding of children’sviewpoints using this methodology, therefore, specific family dyadicinteractions should be examined.

Limitations

There are several limitations in the present study. First, the fact thatfrequencies of narrative variables were tallied across the ten storiesof the protocol meant that in some instances more context-specificmeanings may have been neglected. For example, an enactment ofchildren’s empathic responding to a parent that was followed by a


violent enactment was counted as equivalent to an enactment of em-pathy that stood alone. While a clear logic exists for making a tally offrequencies, it is possible that more context-dependent meanings arenot sufficiently accounted for with this approach.

The fact that our sample consisted of almost all white participantsindicates an important need for replication of studies with this meth-odology among ethnically and racially diverse populations. On theother hand, our relatively high response rate and the fact that partici-pants were recruited primarily from court records are among thestudy’s strengths. The cross sectional nature of the study, of course,precludes causal inferences with regard to relationships between nar-rative and social competence variables. It is impossible to determinefrom these data whether children’s representational models of familyinteractions as assessed with this narrative method were the productof family experience, and in particular, events associated with paren-tal divorce. The degree to which children’s representational models ofrelationships may be influenced by the quality of their social relation-ships outside the family is an important question for future research.

It should be noted that the first author, a male, was the person whodelivered the narrative protocol to each of the children. It is conceiv-able that his gender provided a cue that uniquely affected the boys byeliciting more enactments of aggression from them than the presenceof a female examiner would have done. This effect may have beenmade more potent by the fact that the boys in this study had experi-enced separations from their fathers. The degree to which the genderof the examiner may influence gender stereotyped behavior with thismethodology is an important question for future research, and com-parisons of children living with and without their fathers or motherswould be especially valuable.

Finally, while story themes clearly do not reflect a literal reportingof events, they do appear to communicate significant social and emo-tional meaning of a symbolic nature. The interpretation of thesemeanings, of course, is imprecise. As this research shows, however,the task of interpretation of children’s creative expressions is not onlypossible but is likely to provide new information about how they viewsocial relationships.

Conclusion

The central finding from this study is that the significance of chil-dren’s enactments of social relationships in their play varies to some


extent with their gender. It appears that some, but not all, relation-ship enactments can be accounted for by expected gender-role behav-ior and may not necessarily have any predictive significance in reallife. Specifically, not all violent representations enacted by boys intheir play appear to have socially significant meaning. Conversely, notall responsive and caring representations enacted by girls in their playappear to have socially significant meaning. Gender-stereotypical be-havior in children’s play must, to some extent, be regarded as expectedand not necessarily relevant to social and emotional adjustment. Onthe other hand, non-stereotypical play representations do indeed ap-pear to be socially relevant. When boys represented children as em-pathic and when girls represented children as violent toward parents,there were clear social correlates in the expected directions. Finally,some play enactments, probably because of the specific characters in-volved, appear to carry social significance beyond the influence of chil-dren’s gender. In this study of children in post-divorce families, theserepresentations consisted of the mother as violent toward childrenand parents as violent toward each other. It is possible that the signif-icance of these roles and these behaviors in the post-divorce familycontext are much more potent in terms of the social meaning associ-ated with them than the influence of gender-role socialization. Percep-tions of aberrant (violent) behavior enacted by the proximal parent incharge of caregiving on a daily basis, and between parents, are likelyto be especially frightening experiences for young children, with sig-nificant ramifications for their social and emotional adjustments.


APPENDIX 1

The ASCT-R Story Stems

1) Spilled Juice* The younger child spills juice at the dinner table2) Hurt Knee:* The children and the father go to the park. The

younger child hurts his/her knee trying to climba rock at the park.

3) Monster in the The mother tells the younger child to go to bed.Bedroom:* The child goes to the bedroom, then calls out

that there is a monster in the bedroom.4) Departure*: The mother leaves for an overnight trip; the

grandmother babysits.5) Reunion*: The mother returns from her overnight trip.6) Headache**: The mother and younger child are sitting on the

couch with the t.v. on. Mother turns off the t.v.and asks for quiet, saying she has a headache.The child’s friend comes and asks to watch t.v.

7) Lost dog**: Part I: The younger child goes outside to playwith the family dog, but the dog is lost. Part II:Later, the dog returns.

8) Bathroom Part I: The mother goes briefly to the neighbor’s,Shelf**: telling both children not to touch anything on

the bathroom shelf while she is away. After themother leaves, the younger child cuts his/her fin-ger on the toybox and asks the older for a band-aid. Part II: The mother returns.

9) Uncle Fred***: The mother is sitting on the couch, crying. Themother tells the younger child who is standing ata distance that she is sad because Uncle Fredhas died.

10) Wagon**: The older child and friend are playing in thewagon. The younger child asks to join them. Thefriend tells the older child that if he/she allowsthe younger child to play, he/she will not be his/her friend any more (the parent figures arestanding on their respective houses).

*ASCT (see Appendix of Bretherton, Ridgeway, & Cassidy, 1990).**MacArthur Story-Stem Battery (Bretherton, Oppenheim, Buchsbaum, Emde and

the MacArthur Narrative Group, 1990).***Zahn-Waxler, Cole, Richardson, Friedman, Michel and Belouad (1994).


APPENDIX 2

Definitions of Story Variables with Examples

Story Variable Brief Definitions and Examples from Stories

1. Parent-to- Explicit, direct physical violence of one parentParent Violence against the other.

Uncle Fred: After first approaching the motheras she is crying, the father knocks her off thecouch.

2. Child-to-Parent Explicit, direct physical violence of child towardViolence the parent.

Lost Dog: After looking for the lost dog, the childattacks the father, stomping him.

3. Parent-to-Child Explicit physical violence of parent toward child,Violence unrelated to any wrongdoing on the child’s part,

or parental violence toward objects in the pres-ence of the child.Uncle Fred: The mother goes to the child andknocks him down.Headache: The mother destroys the t.v. in thechild’s presence; according to the child inter-viewee, she “kills it.”

4. Parent-to- Verbal or physical affection, comfort, protection,Parent Caring support, or companionship

Reunion: The mother kisses the father upon re-turn from her trip.Spilled Juice: The father offers to help themother clean up the juice.Monster: The father and mother sleep together,apart from the children.

5. Child-to-Parent Providing comfort or affection to a parent in dis-Caring tress; or child interviewee provides care to

parentUncle Fred: The child sits next to the motherand explains: “he was old, he just had to die.”Monster: The child interviewee (not a story fig-ure) lays the mother on a pretend bed and care-fully arranges the felt house as blanket.


APPENDIX 2 (Continued)

Story Variable Brief Definitions and Examples from Stories

6. Parent-to-Child Providing comfort, protection, reassurance, en-Caring couragement

Hurt Knee: Father goes to child with “band-aidsand cream” in his pocket and says, “Are you ok,little girl?”, tending to her knee.Monster: "He [the younger child] ducks way un-der the covers and daddy came and he [youngerchild] said, “There’s a monster in my room.” (Fa-ther) “I’m staying here all night, until there’s nomonsters in his room.”

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