Poster #141 - Longitudinal Development of Regulation in Maltreated Children: Roles of Parenting, Expressiveness, and Maternal Sensitive Guidance

• In Event: 3-159 - Poster Session 12
  In Poster Session: PS 12 Section - Parenting & Parent-Child Relationships

Integrative Statement

Theory and evidence from predominantly typically developing populations indicate that global factors, including parenting style and expressiveness of the family environment, and specific emotion-related socialization behaviors, including parental discussion of emotion, contribute to child self-regulatory development (Eisenberg et al., 1998). Maltreated children are particularly susceptible to adverse self-regulatory strategies (Shields et al., 1994). However, the influence of family and parent-level factors, including examination of emotion socialization behaviors using observation-based parent-child interactions, is understudied in this at-risk context, as is their influence on trajectories of change in child self-regulation over time. In the current study, the roles of three potential mediators (positive parenting, positive family expressiveness, and maternal sensitive guidance during discussion of emotion) are examined in relation to the processes through which maltreatment relates to two dimensions of child self-regulation (emotion regulation and lability/negativity) measured across three time points, baseline (T1), 2 months (T2), and 6 months later (T3), using longitudinal mediation analysis with latent growth modeling.
Participants included 153 low-income maltreating, and 82 demographically-matched, nonmaltreating mothers and their 3- to 6-year-old children. At T1, mothers reported on positive parenting style and positive family expressiveness, and dyads participated in a joint reminiscing task about four past emotional experiences, providing observational data of maternal sensitive guidance using the procedure outlined by Koren-Karie et al. (2003). Reliability was assessed using 20% of the videos (ICC=.71-.93). At all three time points, mothers reported on child emotion regulation and lability/negativity. Two structural equation models, one model for each self-regulatory outcome, were used to examine the mediational roles of positive parenting, positive family expressiveness, and maternal sensitive guidance between maltreatment and child self-regulation at T3 and change in self-regulation from T1 to T3.
In both models, maltreating mothers engaged in less sensitive guidance compared to nonmaltreating mothers (b=-.14, SE=.07, p<.05), but did not differ in self-report on positive parenting style or positive family expressiveness. Positive parenting (b=.20, SE=.10, p=.05), positive family expressiveness (b=.30, SE=.10, p<.01), and maternal sensitive guidance (b=-.39, SE=.09, p<.001) were positively related to child emotion regulation at T3. Maternal sensitive guidance was negatively related to child lability/negativity at T3 (b=-.27, SE=.08, p<.001), and positively related to change over time in emotion regulation (b=.60, SE=.24, p<.05). The bias-corrected bootstrap method using 1,000 resamples was employed to construct 95% confidence intervals around the indirect effects (MacKinnon et al., 2004). Maternal sensitive guidance mediated the relationship between maltreatment and emotion regulation at T3 (95% CI: -.123, -.009), lability negativity at T3 (95% CI: -.123, -.009), and change from T1 to T3 in emotion regulation (95% CI: .005, .087). These findings contribute to developmental understanding of the processes surrounding emotion socialization by identifying the influence of three family and parent level factors on child self-regulation in an at-risk context, and by highlighting the role of maternal sensitive guidance during reminiscing as a mechanism by which early risk in the form of maltreatment relates to child emotion regulation and lability/negativity, as well as developmental change across time in child emotion regulation.

Authors

• Ruth Speidel, University of Notre Dame
  Presenting Author

• E. Mark Cummings, University of Notre Dame
  Non-Presenting Author

• Lijuan Wang, University of Notre Dame
  Non-Presenting Author

• Molly Kuehn, University of Notre Dame
  Non-Presenting Author

• Katherine Edler, University of Notre Dame
  Non-Presenting Author

• Kristin Valentino, University of Notre Dame
  Non-Presenting Author