Les relations mères-enfants lorsqu'un enfant enfreint une règle : étude de l'impact des stratégies visant à renforcer les règles et du climat interpersonnel

The parenting literature suggests that in order to promote children’s optimal development, parents should use practices that are structuring and that support children’s autonomy (Grolnick & Pomerantz, 2009). However, in some situations, for example when a child breaks a rule, it may seem difficult, or even impossible, for parents to adopt parental strategies that combine these two dimensions. Surprisingly, few studies have examined how parents can enforce structure while simultaneously taking into account the needs and individuality of their children, and to our knowledge, no study has done so in rule-breaking situations. The objective of this thesis is to evaluate the impact of three rule enforcement strategies (to repeat the rule without authority exertion, to give a punishment or to use a logical consequence) that are assumed to vary in the degree of structure and autonomy support they convey, and to verify their effects when used in either an autonomy-supportive or a controlling interpersonal climate. Two articles are presented to assess the impact of these parental strategies on determinants of children’s socialization. The first article aims at understanding the joint impact of the rule enforcement strategies and the interpersonal climates on indicators of compliance and internalization as reported by 221 children and their mothers. Results show that mothers consider logical consequences used in an autonomy-supportive climate as the most effective and acceptable strategies (interactive effect). Children also believe that autonomy-supportive interpersonal climates are more effective and more acceptable than controlling interpersonal climates. Furthermore, results suggest that children consider logical consequences to be as effective as punishments to prevent future transgression, but they consider them as more acceptable than punishments. Repeating the rule without authority exertion is judged as an acceptable strategy, but not a very effective one compared to the other two strategies. For children, the results show that these effects are additive, such that there is no interaction between the rule enforcement strategies and the interpersonal climates. The second article investigates the potential emotional reactions of the same children (N = 221) to the three rule enforcement strategies and interpersonal climates. Four important emotions in the internalization process are studied, that is anger, sadness, guilt, and shame. Results first show that controlling interpersonal climates would lead children to experience more anger, sadness, and shame than autonomy-supportive climates. However, children report as much guilt in both interpersonal climates. Results also suggest that punishments would elicit more sadness, guilt, and anger than logical consequences, that logical consequences would make children feel more sad and guilty than repeating the rule, and that punishment would lead children to feel more shame than repeating the rule. Finally, results suggest that the impact of the rule enforcement strategies and the interpersonal climates are additive; there is no interaction between these two factors. The theoretical contributions of this thesis to the literature on parenting and child development, as well as its practical implications for parents are discussed.

Keyphrases: Structure, Autonomy support, Compliance, Consequences, Emotions, Internalization, Parenting practices, Punishments, Rule enforcement, Self-determination theory, Structure