Correlates of parental teaching strategies in families of children evidencing normal and atypical development

Eighty-six families with a 6-year-old (target) child participated in a study of the relation between children's competency levels and parents' teaching strategies. Of these families, 44 included a target child who had been diagnosed as communication handicapped (CH) by service professionals in the community and was currently enrolled in an intervention program. The remaining families consisted of children who had no known disabilities or handicaps. Using a family-systems approach, it was hypothesized that the intellectual ability of both the target children and their siblings would be related to teaching behaviors evidenced by mothers and fathers during interactions with the target child. When the target child evidenced a communication handicap, however, it was hypothesized that family dynamics would be altered. As a result, the target child's ability level was expected to be more strongly related to the parents' behaviors when the target child was communication handicapped than when the child was nonhandicapped. The siblings' contributions to parental teaching strategies were expected to be diminished when there was a child in the family who evidenced atypical development, as in the case of a communication handicap. Correlational analyses and path analyses revealed these differences in patterns of relations obtained for families with and without a CH child, and provided some support for a systems approach to the study of determinants of parents' teaching strategies.