Marvin and Stewart and Byng–Hall proposed that effective family
collaboration requires family members to construct “shared family
working models,” and that the renegotiation of these working
models during family transitions is facilitated by family members'
“interactional awareness” (ability to be perceptive
observers of family relationships). We apply these constructs to data
collected from 71 mothers and their 4.5- to 5.0-year-old preschool
children, 2 years after parental divorce. Maternal representations of
the father as coparent and ex-spouse, and of father– and
mother–child relationships were assessed via two interviews. A
family story completion task captured child representations of
mother–child and father–child, coparental and ex-spousal
interactions. Maternal accounts of mother–child conversations
illustrated the negotiation of shared working models. Primarily
qualitative analyses contrasting maternal and child perspectives are
presented in the first section. Then we use regression analyses to
predict children's story themes from maternal representations of
flexible, sensitive, and effective discipline-related interactions;
maternal depressive symptoms; and perception of the child's
father. Finally, we identify gender differences in children's
enactments of divorce-related and child-empathy themes. We conclude by
considering how our findings could be used to assist postdivorce
families in constructing shared rather than conflicting working models
of family relations.This research was
funded by Grant R01 HD267766 awarded to the first author by the NICHD.
Additional support was received from the University of Wisconsin
Graduate School Research Committee, the Waisman Center, and the Vilas
Trust. We express our deep appreciation to the mothers and children who
participated in this study. We also thank Barbara Golby, Angel
Gullon–Rivera, Patti Herman, Chris Halvorsen, Vicky Lenzlinger,
Kristine Munholland, Reghan Walsh, and Laura Winn for assisting with
data collection and analysis and acknowledge helpful advice from John
Byng–Hall, Robert Emery, Paul Amato, and Daniel
Veroff.