Erken çocukluk döneminde sosyal ve davranışsal gelişim ile ilişkili mikro ve makro etkenler

The developmental literature directed its attention to externalizing behaviors, because problems in early childhood years were related with problems in peer and family relationships, and academic and disruptive problems in adolescence. Relevant with the importance of familial and environmental factors, this study aimed to identify how the child social-behavioral development during the early childhood years was formed. There were four consecutive studies to investigate the possible factors affecting the child social-behavioral development. This thesis examined (1) how the family structural characteristics (socio-economic status and maternal education) and the support from different sources (husband, family, neighborhood) were linked with the negative and positive parenting practices; (2) how socio-economic status (SES) was linked to externalizing behaviors and prosocial behaviors of 3 year-old children through the characteristics of their developmental environments (family and neighborhood resources), (3) the inter-individual variation in trajectories of aggressive behaviors in children, and the association of trajectories of three different types of parenting behaviors (responsiveness, parental warmth, and power assertion) with the level and change in aggression through age 3 to 8; (4) the dynamics and bi-directionality of parenting and child externalizing problem, and the tri-directionality of parenting, child behaviors, and social support that mothers received. The data were obtained from the study of Early Childhood Developmental Ecologies in Turkey (ECDET) which was a longitudinal and representative study included children form age 3 to 8, and their mothers (N=1052). The results indicated that: (i) the support from the family had a protective role for the positive parenting practices for the parents with risk status of low SES and education level; (ii) maternal warmth and responsiveness was an important protective factor for children's prosocial behaviors if their families were economically disadvantaged; (iii) almost all of the family and neighborhood characteristics of the children, and their vocabulary knowledge and prosocial behaviors significantly differed by the two indicators of SES (i.e., maternal education and family economic well-being); (iv) on average, children's aggression declined by about 1SD in early childhood; (v) the change in maternal power assertion was positively and significantly associated with the change in child aggression such that a delay in the decline in power assertive behaviors by 1.5SD resulted in a 2-year delay in the decline in aggression when the children were 7; (vi) maternal power assertion had a significant and substantial concurrent and longitudinal effects on child externalizing behaviors, but the effects of child externalizing behaviors systematically did not predict later maternal power assertion; (vii) there were substantial mother-to-mesosystem, and child-to-mesosystem effects.