1-060 - Parental self-regulation as a determinant of parenting of young children across diverse contexts

Session Type: Paper Symposium

Integrative Statement

Parenting behaviors have long been studied as important predictors of child development, with less focus on predictors of parenting behavior that may influence how parents respond to their children. The ability to regulate oneself plays a critical role in meeting the demands of parenting, and recent research has begun to document empirical links between parents’ self-regulation to parenting behavior.

The four papers comprising this symposium represent the cutting edge of research on self-regulation as a predictor of parenting, including multiple methods and spanning several socioeconomic and cultural contexts. The first paper presents the associations of parental executive functions (EFs) and emotion regulation (ER) to both sensitive/responsive parenting and quality of parent-child interaction in an ethnically diverse sample of parents and kindergarten-age children. The second paper takes a novel approach to measuring intra-individual variability in behavioral indicators of maternal EFs, and relations to maternal ER and parenting of preschool/school-age children. In the third paper, the authors test the independent effects of maternal anxiety and attention bias on maternal appraisals of parenting among low-income urban Latina mothers of young children. The final paper examines how maternal EFs and related cognitive capacities mediate the effects of family economic resources and early intervention exposure on maternal scaffolding in a large sample of mothers of preschool-aged children in rural Pakistan. Together, these papers address how cognitive and emotional self-control in adulthood shape the developmental tasks of parenting across global contexts, and will stimulate discussion on ways that self-regulation can be targeted by two-generation intervention approaches.

Sub Unit

• Family Context & Processes

Chairs

• Anne Shaffer, University of Georgia

• Jelena Obradović, Stanford University

Individual Presentations

• Unique contributions of emotion regulation and executive functions in predicting parenting behavior - Presenting Author: Anne Shaffer, University of Georgia; Jelena Obradović, Stanford University

• Harsh Parenting and Within-Person Variation in Maternal Executive Function - Presenting Author: Kirby Deater-Deckard, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA, USA; Martha Ann Bell, Virginia Tech

• Parenting in Poverty: Attention Bias and Anxiety Interact to Predict Parents’ Cognitive Appraisals - Presenting Author: Eric D. Finegood, New York University; C Cybele Raver, New York University; Meriah Lee DeJoseph, New York University; Clancy B. Blair, New York University

• Maternal Scaffolding in a Disadvantaged Global Context: The Role of Maternal Cognitive Capacities - Presenting Author: Ximena Portilla, Stanford University; Jelena Obradović, Stanford University; Muneera Rasheed, Aga Khan University; Aisha Yousafzai, Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health