Verbally aggressive mothers also more controlling

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Mothers who are generally "verbally aggressive" also tend to try to tightly control their children's activities -- possibly creating behavior problems instead of preventing them, a small study suggests.

In observations of 40 mothers and their 3- to 8-year-old children, researchers found that mothers who acknowledged a tendency to be verbally aggressive with other people also tended to take over their child's playtime.

During a 10-minute playtime, the researchers observed these mothers frequently directing their children -- telling them to play with a different toy or to stop playing altogether, for example. They were also more likely than other mothers to physically restrain their children.

However, these tactics did not seem to encourage their children to listen, the study found. Instead, these children were less likely than other kids to go along with their mothers' wishes.

Lead researcher Steven R. Wilson and his colleagues at Purdue University in Indiana report the findings in the journal Human Communication Research.

"It's hard to tell parents how to interact with their children based on one study, but what we see here is that parents who have a propensity for being verbally aggressive have a tendency to try to direct and control their children during a play period," Wilson explained in a university statement.

"As a result," he said, "these children were less cooperative, and not only are parents setting up situations that are challenging for them to handle, but they also are subtly undermining their child's self-esteem."

For their study, the researchers gave mothers a questionnaire designed to gauge their propensity for being verbally aggressive -- asking, for example, whether they often used insults during disagreements with other people.

Wilson's team then videotaped the mothers during an unstructured playtime with their children.

Overall, the researchers found, verbally aggressive mothers tried to exert the most control over their children's play. For example, the four mothers who scored highest on the aggression scale attempted to control their children's actions every 12 seconds, on average.

The least verbally aggressive mothers, on other hand, directed their children about half as often.

The findings do not appear to be a matter of the aggressive mothers having to respond to worse behavior in their children. Often, Wilson's team found, these mothers tried to control the play period right from the start. Yet this only seemed to make their children more resistant, the researchers say.

What's more, a parent's constant need for control may end up damaging the child's self-esteem, Wilson noted.

"For example," he said, "if the parents always have to control what activity they and their children are going to play -- as well as for how long and how they are going to play it -- you wonder if this communicates to the child that what they want to do doesn't matter."

SOURCE: Human Communication Research, July 2008.