Grandparental Beliefs About the Autonomy of Elementary School Children and Younger Adolescents
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.14515/monitoring.2024.6.2590Keywords:
grandparents, beliefs, autonomy, volitional functioning, independenceAbstract
Carrying out regulatory, integrative and socializing functions, and being part of the family system, grandparents act as bearers of ideas about autonomy, directly or indirectly influencing its formation in children. Having experience of living in different time periods and observing social and cultural changes in Russian society, grandparents can representatively reproduce the transformation of ideas about autonomy. This study aimed at examining grandparental beliefs about children's autonomy in the past and present. The convenience sample included 14 grandmothers of younger schoolchildren aged 7—10 (n=7) and younger adolescents aged 11—14 (n=7). All the informants were aged 53 to 76 (M = 65.27; SD = 7.72), interacted with their grandchildren on a regular basis (several times a month, shared weekends, vacations) but not lived with them at the time of the study. While processing the empirical data, the authors applied thematic data analysis (in a post-positivist paradigm).
The structure of autonomy as a construct and its deviation according to the age of the grandchildren were replicated according to the beliefs of the grandparents. The assumptions about the inclusion of two aspects of autonomy in the definition of autonomy — independence and volitional functioning — were confirmed. Own autonomy (in the past) was characterized as "non-autonomy and discipline", autonomy of the second generation was described through the same behavioral characteristics. The autonomy of modern children had new characteristics: the ability to resist the temptations of the environment, to multitask (attending clubs and sections) and the ability to find useful information on the Internet. In terms of mobility, the autonomy of the third generation seemed more structured than that of previous generations. Thus, grandparents noted changes in the structure of perceived autonomy of third-generation children, but not in the autonomy of second-generation children compared to their own autonomy at the corresponding age.
Acknowledgments. The study was supported by a grant from the Russian Science Foundation (RSF), project No. 22-18-00416, https://rscf.ru/project/22-18-00416/.
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