The commencement of school attendance is an important developmental milestone, which is sometimes accompanied by fear in the child. This, of course, is related to what can parents and teachers do at this time for the benefit of the child, to enable the child to develop in a truly harmonious way in the world that surrounds him, to develop appropriately to his/her age, maturity, mental capacity, and capabilities. I believe that to teach a child to be inquisitive, to discover new knowledge with joy, to gradually "take control" of the surrounding world is a long process and the long-term task of educators.

We present here the outputs of data acquisition in children before their entry to the first grade. We collected data in three moments of the transition – before the entry, in September at the beginning of the first school year and in November. To discover the resilient characteristics of the personality of the child, we used the questionnaire DECA (Devereux Early Childhood Assessment), focuses on the resilient characteristics of the child: Initiative, Self-regulation, Attachment/Relationships and Behavioral Concerns. The questionnaire was filled out by parents. We asked parents also three questions about expectations and worries, children express about entering first grade of school. Questioning parents was a pragmatic choice because parents have the ability to perceive various manifestations of expectations about the first class in the context of everyday life. Statements from children during direct interviews may be affected situationally. We chose to interview children after entering the school, where children can talk about direct experience (T2 and T3 of the research). The research sample consists of 111 children aged 4-7 years. According to the parents, children on average do not express worries concerns about starting school. Of the total sample only 2 children express strong worries about entering the school, which we consider a very favorable outcome. Any concerns are related to the demands of the curriculum, next is the fear that the child will not find friends and least concern expressed children in relation to the new teacher.

Objective: Drawing upon Self-Determination Theory (Deci & Ryan, 2000) and Reactance theory (Brehm, 1966) and inspired from the vignette-based study in the school domain developed by Van Petegem, et al. (2015), the present study aimed to examine the association between parental controlling (as opposed to autonomy-supportive) communication style about alcohol-related rules and adolescents’ motivation to change alcohol use. Thereby, we tested for the intervening role of experienced need frustration (i.e., autonomy and relatedness), coping responses (i.e., oppositional defiance and submission) in this association. Method: One hundred thirty-four Swiss adolescents (53% women, Mage = 17.46 years) were offered a vignette describing a parental reaction to an adolescent alcohol use episode. They were randomly assigned to a controlling or an autonomy-supportive condition. Then, we assessed their experienced need frustration, their coping responses, and their motivation to change. Results: Path analyses indicate that a controlling communication style related to autonomy and relatedness frustration, which predicted more submission and more oppositional defiance, respectively. In turn, oppositional defiance was negatively associated with the intent to change alcohol use patterns (i.e., moderation and abstention), whereas submission related positively to change motivation. Adolescents’ trait reactance proneness related to more relatedness frustration and more oppositional defiance. Conclusions: These results suggest that parental communication style plays an important role in adolescent’ intention to change alcohol use patterns.

Many students do not seem interested in learning and therefore make no effort. Some factors such as interest, effort, goals, progress, sense of self-worth, autonomy, cost, expectations and commitment shape the class, teacher and family motivational climates in which students learn, and they are built in interactions with the contexts in which they develop. This study develops and validates the Family Motivational Climate Questionnaires for Parents and Adolescents (FMC-P and FMC-A, which consider the aforementioned motivations factors. Both comprise four indicators: communication, parents as models, activity structure and relationship with teachers. 800 families (adolescents in middle and high school and their parents) from Madrid and Santiago de Cuba completed the questionnaires along with other measures for validation purposes. Reliability and factorial analyses were performed. Results support the expected reliability and structure of the questionnaires. The FMC-A predicted the degree in which parents attributed changes in different motivational variables (interest, effort, expectations of success and satisfaction) to themselves. Additionally, communication and relationship with teachers had more influence on the FMC for parents than for adolescents. Cultural differences emerged in all factors between Cuban and Spanish families, particularly in school-family relationship and opportunity of autonomy offered to adolescents. The questionnaires have been cross-culturally validated in two countries showing good reliability and predictive power. They provide clues for the development of a psychoeducational intervention and can be used to identify areas of the FMC that may need some improvement to foster adolescents’ learning motivation.