Mothers’ Perspectives on Resistance and Defiance in Middle Childhood: Promoting Autonomy and Social Skill
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This study explored mothers’ perceptions of their children’s resistance to their requests and defiance of parental authority during middle childhood and early adolescence. We were interested in parental perceptions of change in resistance, their interpretations of the meaning of resistance, and parental responses to these behaviors. Forty Canadian mothers of children 9–13 years of age participated for one week in a study focused on parents’ experiences of children’s resistance and opposition. Procedures consisted of a qualitative analysis of mothers’ reports from a five-day event diary and a 1 h semi-structured interview. Mothers reported developmental changes in the quantity and quality of children’s resistance to parental requests and expectations. Most mothers reported increasing displays of defiance and direct and indirect expressions of attitude but also noted changes in the skill with which children expressed resistance. Mothers interpreted children’s resistance as annoying but normal expressions of children’s developing autonomy. Mothers supported children’s right to expression of agency through resistance but attempted to channel children’s resistance toward socially competent expressions of assertiveness. The findings have implications for a relational perspective on autonomy-supportive parenting and parents’ goals for children’s developing social competence in the 21st century.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".