To hold a child responsible for negative behavior, parents will have to think children who have caused negative effects that the children both foresaw and intended these effects (1989). Belief that children are not truly competent or responsible should, in turn, cause parents to become less upset and to think that calm explanation and reasoning is a proper response to the child’s behavior. Using a cognitive model, the researches aim to find whether attributions about children’s competence and responsibility for misconduct facilitate the effects parenting attitudes (parent effects) and children’s ages and behaviors (child effects) have on mothers’ discipline preferences. In two studies, mothers of 4-12 year-old children read situations of negative behavior performed by their own children and others’ children, made inferences about the children’s competence and responsibility for each negative act, and rated their responses along the dimensions of induction or power assertive (Dix, Ruble, & Zambarano, 1989). The more the mothers inferred that the child understood the rules and dishonored them and …show more content…
These sociologists examined dyads and triads to further their study of interactions between individuals of society. The introduction to the idea of “the primary group” has lead to the study of intimate associations with people we share sense of belonging, such as our family and friends. One sociologist, George Herbert Mead, emphasized that as we gained an idea of how people in general see things, we develop a sense of the “generalized other” (Babbie, 2013). Mead felt that most interactions revolved around the process of individuals reaching common understanding through the use of language and other such system, hence the term symbolic interactionism (Babbie, 2013). This paradigm can end insight into the nature of social interactions in ordinary social life—i.e. family. The application of symbolic interaction to family studies allow for the examination of socialization, role performance, identity formation, and meaning making; it also focuses on reward and cost in relation to patterned meanings and interpretations. One particular socialization is disciplinary techniques used on children, whether verbal control discipline or physical control discipline. Many researchers have studied the affects and views of verbal and physical control discipline among children and their parental figures.