Standing in your child’s shoes: Parental perspective taking moderates the influence of limit setting on child compliance

Previous research on parenting practices has mostly focused on the relationship between parental limit-setting strategies and child compliance and self-regulation outcomes. We propose that parental perspective taking, the parents’ ability to stand in their child’s shoes, moderates the influence of parental limit setting on child compliance. We recruited 139 parents of children between 4- and 6-years old from Hong Kong. Parents reported their limit setting behaviors, perspective taking abilities, and their child’s compliance behavior in questionnaires. The chosen measures were shown to be reliable with high internal consistency (α = 0.72-0.82). The results showed that an additional 4.8% of the variance of child compliance can be explained by the interaction term, indicating that parental perspective taking ability moderates the relationship between parental limit setting behavior and child compliance. (∆R2=.048, Fchange(1, 133) = 8.691, p < .01). The regression coefficient associated with the interaction term (β = .046) was significant with t = 2.948, p < .01. This result suggested that if parent had higher perspective taking ability, their limit setting behavior would have a stronger relationship with child compliance than that when they had lower perspective taking ability. These findings demonstrated that when parents put themselves into their children’s shoes, their limit setting practice are more effective. Copyright © 2017 The Education University of Hong Kong.