Abstract

The purpose of the present study was to explore the reciprocal interaction that may take place in the parent-child relationship within the family. The study used the data set of the project, Longitudinal Study of Korean Children which Korean Institute for Research in the Behavioral Sciences has been carrying out since 1975 to date. In the present study, it was assumed that the time lag characteristics of the longitudinal data fit well for exploring the relationships between parental variables and child outcomes and vice versa, which will indicate reciprocal interaction between parent and child. In order to ascertain the causal relation between environmental process variables and child's IQ, linear structural relation analyses were performed. The parent→child one-way interaction and parents⇄child bidirectional interaction models were set up to see which model fits the data better. The variables included in the analyses were mother's level of education, press for achievement motivation, and press for language development as the process variables and child's IQ at the age of 3, 5, and 7 years of age as the child variables. The results showed that the reciprocal interaction model fits the data better than the unidirectional influence model. Further, the reciprocal influences in the early years (i.e. 3~5 yrs) were found to be weaker than those in the later years (i.e. 5~7 yrs), which indicated that the reciprocal influences is stronger in the childhood than earlier in the case of IQ. The relationship between environment and IQ explored in the present study suggests a new look into environment-heredity issue. If the correlationship between IQ time₁ and IQ time₂ could be separated into direct and indirect effects, which the present study showed, indirect effects may be considered environmental whereas the remaining variation, i.e. the direct effects, may be genetic. Such an inference will provide a new clue to environment-heredity issue. The notion of reciprocal interaction suggests to the parents to change their perspectives about education of children. Since reciprocal interaction presupposes that child-rearing behavior is in part influenced and changed by the child characteristics and behavior, the parents must constantly monitor themselves and evaluate their behavior in their child-rearing practices.