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Article Excerpt
Beginning in early childhood, children start the lifelong process of self-discovery. The emergence of a coherent and positive self-concept is undeniably a critical aspect of social and emotional development (Harter, 2006). Children who come to know and understand themselves acquire an important guide for their behavior and social relationships. As such, children's early self-perceptions provide a glimpse of personality development in the making (Eder, 1990).
Nevertheless, we still know little about the factors that might be responsible for individual differences in early self-concept development, particularly those factors that are associated with children's perceptions of their own personalities (Eder & Mangelsdorf, 1997). Theoretical accounts posit that the self-concept develops as a function of numerous intrapersonal and social influences, with many emphasizing the role of children's emotional characteristics and parent-child interactions (Thompson, 1998). In general, however, these hypotheses have yet to be validated with empirical work. It remains to be seen whether factors such as temperament, parenting, and whole family interaction are related to the ways in which young children describe themselves, despite a vast body of research implicating each of these variables as influences on many other aspects of social and personality development (e.g., Lindahl & Malik, 1999; Maccoby & Martin, 1983; Sanson, Hemphill, & Smart, 2004).
Despite substantial interest in self-concept development, less work has attempted to link children's self-concepts to individual characteristics of the child or aspects of their social environment. Conceptually, the developing self is influenced by a wide variety of broad, contextual factors, including gender (see Ashmore, 1990) and the culture in which one resides (see Markus & Kitayama, 1991). But it also develops in the context of more proximal social environments, including friendship (e.g., Tarrant, MacKenzie, & Hewitt, 2006) and peer groups (e.g., Buhs, 2005). Clearly, the child's sense of self is likely to be multiply determined by a vast array of social interactions and life experiences as well as by the cognitive processes with which these experiences are interpreted. Still, developmentalists have long privileged the role of the family in children's emergent personality, and it is family relationships that have received the most attention as possible correlates of early self-concepts (Thompson & Goodvin, 2005). As such, it is striking that empirical work to date has not yet examined the associations between family relationships and young children's self-reported personality.
The present study examines the correlates of children's self-concepts primarily through the lens of family systems and ecological perspectives. A family systems perspective (e.g., Minuchin, 1985) focuses attention on the unique role of each individual family member and family relationship (mother-child, father-child, mother-father-child triad) in self-concept development, and an ecological perspective (e.g., Bronfenbrenner, 1979) emphasizes the role of family as well as children's own characteristics on self-concept development. Belsky's (1984) process model was similarly influential in highlighting the interrelations among family subsystems and how these relations may affect development. Finally, this work also borrows from the notion of goodness of fit (see Thomas & Chess, 1977), which argues that temperamental characteristics develop differently as a function of the child's social environment and emphasizes the importance of examining interactive effects of temperament and parenting (Sanson et al., 2004). Children's self-views may reflect both early emotional tendencies and the ways in which parents differentially respond to this emotion. All of these theoretical frameworks suggest that children's self-concepts are likely associated with child, parent, and family characteristics. Although we cannot yet establish the developmental mechanisms underlying this aspect of development, a logical starting point is documenting the relations of these child and family elements to children's early self-concepts. Accordingly, this study is among the first to examine how observed child temperament, mothers' and fathers' parenting, and triadic family interaction at age 3 are related to children's perceptions of their own personalities at age 4.
Conceptual and Measurement Issues in the Study of Children's Self-Concepts
One barrier to the study of children's self-concepts has involved the various ways in which this construct has been conceptualized. An important and well-developed distinction in terminology in this field is that between self-esteem and other aspects of the self-concept (Damon & Hart, 1982; Harter, 2006). Self-esteem refers to the evaluative aspects of the self-concept--that is, how good or bad children are in a particular domain (Harter, 1998)--and this construct has received the most attention in the self-development literature (see Butler & Gasson, 2005). In contrast, other derivatives of the self-concept, such as self-perceptions (e.g., Measelle, Ablow, Cowan, & Cowan, 1998; Measelle, John, Ablow, Cowan, & Cowan, 2005) and self-understanding (e.g., Hart & Damon, 1986), refer to less valenced evaluations of the self, that is, how children view themselves largely independent of their subjective evaluations. Given that self-perceptions in early childhood may play a prominent role in shaping subsequent self-esteem, their development is an important (and underrepresented) area of investigation in self-concept research (Damon & Hart, 1982; Hart & Damon, 1986; Wylie, 1989).
In addition to this conceptual distinction, the study of young children's self-concepts has been characterized by methodological challenges. The most prominent problem stems from the fact that young children often lack the cognitive and linguistic ability to accurately and coherently describe certain aspects of their self-concepts (see Eder & Mangelsdorf, 1997; Thompson & Goodvin, 2005). Early research demonstrated that when children were asked to complete open-ended statements about themselves, they failed to describe themselves in terms of psychological traits (e.g., Keller, Ford, & Meacham, 1978). Consequently, some concluded that children younger than 7 or 8 years old either did not possess an integrated understanding of their psychological selves or were unable to express this psychological self-concept in a meaningful way (e.g., Hart & Damon, 1986; Harter, 1998; Ruble & Rholes, 1981).
More recently, conducting self-concept research with young children has become increasingly feasible due to advances in measurement (e.g., Davis-Kean & Sandler, 2001; Marsh, Debus, & Bornholt, 2004) represented by assessments such as the Children's Self-View Questionnaire (CSVQ) (Eder, 1990) and the Berkeley Puppet Interview (Measelle et al., 1998). These measures have adopted forced-choice methodologies in which children are asked to answer "Which one is like you?" regarding a pair of competing statements made by puppets. By providing evidence that children as young as 4-5 years old can form coherent representations of their own psychological (e.g., social, emotional, and personality) characteristics (for a review, see Marsh et al., 2004), these measures have revised the timetable for conducting self-concept research. Moreover, with the inclusion of items designed to assess children's perceptions of their own personality characteristics, these measures have expanded the domain of inquiry in self-concept research with young children (Brown, Mangelsdorf, Agathen, & Ho, 2008; Measelle et al., 2005) and have provided an opportunity to examine the emergence of early individual differences in self-reported personality.
The present study builds upon these methodological advances in self-concept measurement (e.g., Eder, 1990; Measelle et al., 1998) and conceptualizes the self-concept as children's perceptions of their personality. This work also extends the study of personality development (see Brown et al., 2008; Measelle et al., 2005; Shiner, 2000) by being among the first to examine individual differences in and correlates of young children's personality self-reports. We were particularly interested in whether young children's self-concepts were related to (1) child temperament, (2) mothers' and fathers' parenting behavior, and/or (3) triadic family interaction patterns. Each of these variables has been empirically linked to other aspects of children's self-concepts and/or theoretically linked to children's self-reported personality in unique and important ways, and each will be discussed in turn.
Child Temperament and Children's Self-Concepts
Temperamental characteristics are considered relatively stable early-emerging individual differences in the expression and regulation of emotion (Rothbart & Bates, 1998). These individual differences may be an important influence on the self given that emotion is presumed to be at the core of self-concept development (Eder & Mangelsdorf, 1997). Conceptualizing the self-concept as an inherently affective construct has led some to speculate that temperament is a key contributor to self-concept and personality development in early childhood and beyond (Goldsmith, Buss, Plomin, & Rothbart, 1987; Thompson, 2006). Although past research suggests that temperament is a substrate of child personality (e.g., Rothbart & Bates, 1998), the degree to which temperament is related to children's self-understanding and how this self-understanding is articulated is less well known. A necessary first step is establishing that early individual differences in emotional expressiveness are actually reflected in the ways that children describe their own personalities.
There is reason to believe that the preschool period might be a critical age for examining these emotional underpinnings of the self-concept. Eder & Mangelsdorf (1997) proposed that 3-4-year-olds develop dispositional self-concepts that serve the purpose of helping children organize emotions. They also noted that by age 4, children demonstrate many individual differences in temperament and child personality, but it remains unclear whether these differences correspond to differences in their self-reported personalities. In theory, children's self-concepts have an emotional undertone, and different phenomenological experiences (i.e., a lower threshold for distress, a greater tendency to approach novel situations, etc.) are integrated into the child's understanding of her or his place in the world. If this is true, we might expect observed differences in child temperament to be reflected in children's self-concepts by age 4. Such a finding would lend credence to claims that the self-concept may in part be a reflection of children's early emotional characteristics.
Parenting and Children's Self-Concepts
A prominent notion in theory and research on self-development is that the early self-concept is formed in the context of children's intimate relationships with caregivers (Harter, 1998, 2006; Miller & Mangelsdorf, 2005; Thompson, 1998, 2006). This emphasis on the caregiver as integral to the self-concept has been best delineated by attachment theory. Bowlby (1969) claimed that a working model of the self is constructed via early interactions between caregivers and their infants. Through these interactions, children develop an internal working model that guides self-understanding and subsequent expectations for close relationships (e.g., Bretherton, 1991; Sroufe, 1990). Prior research has indeed linked attachment security to a more positive self-view in 5-6-year-old children (e.g., Cassidy, 1988; Verschueren, Marcoen, & Schoefs, 1996). Likewise, past research has found concurrent associations between attachment and self-esteem in the early school years (Clark & Symons, 2000; Easterbrooks & Abeles, 2000).
Although this work suggests that the parent-child relationship is an integral context for self-concept formation, less research has linked specific patterns of parenting behavior to specific dimensions of the self-concept. Moreover, the limited body of research that does exist has been primarily concerned with documenting the influence of parenting behavior on children's global self-esteem (Harter, 1998) in both early childhood and adolescence (e.g., Lamborn, Mounts, Steinberg, & Dornbusch, 1991; Nelson, 1984; Rosenberg, 1979). The present study extends this work by examining children's perceptions of their own personalities rather than self-esteem judgments.
Although existing evidence is limited, prior work does suggest links between parenting behavior and children's conceptions of their personalities. For example, some researchers have...
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