To stimulate children to initiate and to continue engaging in an
activity, parents can rely on different motivating styles. According to
Self-Determination Theory, parents can be autonomy-supportive and
inviting, thus encouraging children’s sense of choice and ownership.
They can also be controlling and domineering, thus pressuring the
child to think, act, or feel in parent-prescribed ways. Abundant
research focused on what parents do and say, that is, the
motivational content, when parents direct their children
(“what”-component). Yet, no parenting study to date has examined
the way in which these motivational contents are expressed nonverbally,
that is, through a different tone of voice (i.e., prosody;
“how”-component). It is well possible that unique voice
characteristics, such as sharpness, speed, and volume, influence
children’s reactions. In three experimental studies among parents of
toddlers, this proposal will examine (1) whether autonomy-supportive
and controlling motivational contents are conveyed through
differential voice patterns; (2) the unique and interactive contribution
of the motivational content and the motivational prosody in the
prediction of children’s motivational, behavioral, and physiological
reaction patterns during a cleaning and puzzle solving task; (3) if
autonomy-supportive and controlling motivational prosody can be
experimentally activated when parents are placed under pressure, as
they often are in daily life.