'Speak roughly to your little boy'? Sex differences in the relations between parenting and preschoolers' understanding of mind

The present stud) explores relations between young children's understanding of mind and parental emotional expression and disciplinary style, along wi th gender differences in these relations. Participants were recruited from a study of 125 same-sex twin-pairs (58% female, group mean age = 43 months, SD = 1 month). Each child received a comprehensive set of theory-of-mind t asks, and was filmed at home for 20 minutes in dyadic interactions with the primary categories, who was also interviewed about disciplinary strategies . Ratings of discipline and positive and negative parental affect and contr ol were made from direct observation, from the interview and from the video ed interactions. Strong correlations were found between family SES, parenti ng measures, and child verbal re and theory-of-mind score. However, regress ion analyses showed that parental behaviours were significant predictors of children's theory-of-mind performance, even when sex, verbal IQ and family SES were taken into account. Sex differences in these relations were also identified; parental affect,vas especially salient for understanding of min d in girls, while discipline was more salient for boys. Taken together, the se findings highlight the importance of individual differences in the proxi mal processes associated with early understanding of mind, and suggest that development in mental-state awareness is associated with distinct aspects of parenting for girls and boys.