Maternal autonomy granting: predictors of normal and depressed mothers' compliance and noncompliance with the requests of five-year-olds.

Maternal compliance and noncompliance to child requests, thought to represent an autonomy-granting aspect of socialization, were studied in 24 well mothers and 26 mothers with a history of depression and their 5-year-old children. Mothers continued to retain substantially more power than children in the control process. There were no differences between normal and depressed mothers in the extent to which they granted or denied their children's requests, but the determinants of maternal autonomy granting differed in the 2 groups. Depressed, but not well, mothers' responses to child requests could be predicted from their self-reported mood prior to the interaction and from the concurrent child's behavior. Depressed mothers who reported negative mood and whose children were uncooperative most often denied their requests. Depressed mothers' noncompliance to their children's requests was determined by the quantity rather than quality of their children's behavior: they did not discriminate between skillful and unskillful forms of the children's autonomy expressions.