A new investigation gives an account of something that we already assumed and that refers to the relationship between parents and children during the first years of life. And is that the way in which mothers talk to their children when they are young have a lasting effect on the social skills of the little ones.
Can we imagine a brief, superficial, lack of contact or aggressive communication? Obviously, it would have an impact on the present, but also on the future of children, that once adults would be very determined by that form of communication.
Also the opposite. According to a study by the University of Sussex, whose results have been published in a statement by the Economic and Social Research Council of the United Kingdom, children whose mothers tell them about people's feelings, beliefs, desires and intentions developed better social understanding than those whose mothers did not include in their conversation talks about mental states.
The study followed children between 3 and 12 years and measured their ability and social understanding. One of these tasks, developed by researchers to analyze social understanding between the ages of 8 and 12, used fragments of a television comedy in which one of the protagonists lacks sensitivity and interprets social situations incorrectly.
The children, especially from the age of 8, were uncomfortable with situations in which the character was wrong (although they understood them), and accepted other "normal" situations.
The researchers also observed how each mother spoke to her children when they were three years old and watched a series of photos together. They discovered that the children whose mothers had described in a more habitual way the mental state of the people in the photos, their emotions or what they might be thinking or were going to do, performed especially well the tasks of social understanding.
It is important to emphasize that the link between the talks on the mental state at an early age and the development of social understanding was especially strong in the early years of childhood. Once children grow up, it was more difficult for such conversations to influence their social perception. So it is never too early to start talking to children about emotions, feelings and experiences.
One result that has caught my attention is that children with the most developed social understanding also showed the most negative behavior towards their mothers when they were developing a task in which they needed to work as a team such as driving a remote control car through a circuit. Will it also make them more demanding, or more direct, with close beings?
The study, which I have not been able to access in its full version, also leaves me with other doubts, as if it has been tried with parents instead of mothers, if there will be differences ... The research is titled "The Relation Between Parenting, Children's Social Understanding and Language "(Relationship between Maternity, Childhood social understanding and language).
