"As suggested by Thomas and Chess (1968), it is not temperament alone that determines the developmental course, but the interaction of the child's temperament with the adequacy of environmental responses to it. For very young children, much of their environment consists of their relationships with caregivers, and, for many, the mother-child relationship is of primary importance. These relationships are co-constructed (Weatherston, 2000), influenced not just by the child's reactive tendencies, but also by mothers' subjective experience, how they receive, accept, and respond to their children's reactivity. The developmental impacts of inborn traits like temperament may be best understood as a function of person x environment fit and the complex interplay between parent and child characteristics. Proceeding from a person x environment fit perspective, the purpose of the first study was to examine patterns of stability and change in mothers' subjective experience of relational stress in the context of parenting children with varying degrees of temperamental reactivity. Dyads were classified into five patterns, one comprised of children with an easy temperament whose mothers reported very little relational stress, and four profiles of highly reactive children whose mothers experienced different patterns of relational stress throughout the course of early childhood. Membership in each profile was differentially related to mothers' knowledge of child development and their sense of personal mastery. Considering the primacy of the mother-child relationship in early development and the evidence that temperamentally reactive children are more sensitive to environmental influences, the aim of the second study was to expand on the results of study 1 by examining mean differences on subsequent child outcomes for five distinct subgroups of mother-child dyads characterized by quantitative and qualitative variation in mothers' subjective experience of relational stress in early childhood in response to children's individual differences in temperamental reactivity. Profiles were differentially related to children's academic and social-emotional outcomes at the transition to Kindergarten and in 5th grade. Profile comparisons provided some evidence of increased environmental sensitivity such that reactive children in least optimal environments fared worse than children in all other profiles and better, in some cases, that even their less sensitive, "easy" temperament, peers. For two of the eight outcomes of interest, these results were moderated by sex. Findings confirm that there is distinct heterogeneity in maternal response to children's heightened reactivity, which suggests that there is wide variation in the relational environments experienced by highly reactive children. Results highlight the important role maternal perceptions and beliefs have in influencing both their own experience of and satisfaction in the parenting role as well as shaping the relational environments in which highly reactive children develop."--Pages ii-iii.
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