Relations between maternal interactive behavior and mastery motivation in children with developmental disabilities

The Miller et al. study is of interest because it provides evidence that consistent and positive parental discipline is related to mastery motivation, an important aspect of child development. Mastery motivation is a multifaceted, psychological force that stimulates the child’s attempt to master tasks that are moderately challenging. Two aspects of mastery motivation are persistence (the duration of task-directed behavior) and mastery pleasure (positive affect during or immediately after task-directed behavior). Children’s mastery motivation is a force that energizes, directs, and sustains goal-directed behavior and is a predictor of later functioning. For children with developmental disabilities, mastery motivation is also a predictor of later performance of daily activities and academic achievement. The book ‘From Neurons to Neighborhoods’ identifies mastery motivation as a key developmental concept, which should be assessed as part of a child’s evaluation. The article by Miller et al. demonstrates that inadequate parenting relates cross-sectionally to lower mastery motivation for school-aged children with congenital hemiplegia, using the parental report Dimensions of Mastery Questionnaire (DMQ). With cross-sectional studies it is less possible to know whether maternal behavior has an effect on children’s motivation than with a longitudinal study design. Previous studies of children with developmetnal disabilities have used the behavioral individualized mastery tasks for investigating the relations between parents’ interactive behaviors and children’s motivation. Some of these studies found that higher quality parental interactive behaviors were related to more motivation of their children with developmental delays, while others did not (P.J. Wang, G. Morgan, A.W. Hwang, L.C. Chen , H.F. Liao, unpublished data). Such inconsistent results might be produced by different motivation measures, different indicators of parenting, or different cultural contexts. Motivation may be different when measured by observation of children’s behavior during mastery tasks than when maternal ratings are used. Several studies of children with delays have not shown lower persistence and pleasure when given tasks that were moderately challenging, using the individualized mastery tasks. However, mothers usually rate their children with delays lower using the DMQ. Some items on the DMQ do not clearly indicate moderate task difficulty. Thus, it is likely that parents assume that ‘difficult or hard tasks’ are more than moderately challenging. On the other hand, the individualized mastery task method provides moderately difficult tasks for each individual child, providing measures closer to the definition of mastery motivation. Cultural differences may lead to different relations between maternal behaviors and children’s motivation. We demonstrated that higher quality maternal behavior correlated significantly with DMQ mastery pleasure but not with DMQ persistence, and not with the individualized task scores in Taiwanese toddlers with motor delays. Our results are different from some previous studies in Western countries which found positive associations between maternal behavior and task motivation in toddlers with delays or disabilities. For children with developmental problems in Western countries, maternal perceived motivation was significantly correlated with task motivation, but these variables were not significantly correlated for toddlers in Taiwan. Taiwanese mothers of children with motor delay might be more influenced by having a special child, and perceive them to have lower mastery motivation even though their children did not have lower motivation on the individualized tasks.