Poster #96 - Impact of Environmental Chaos on Self-Regulation in Young Homeless and Highly Mobile Children

• In Event: 2-110 - Poster Session 07
  In Poster Session: PS 07 Section - Family Context & Processes

Integrative Statement

Environmental chaos, such as household noise and commotion, is negatively associated with children’s socioemotional, cognitive, and behavioral functioning later in life (Shamama-tus-Sabah et al., 2011). Because chaos tends to be linked to lower parent education and household income, it is critical to explore how chaos is related to child outcomes in families facing extreme socioeconomic disadvantage (Evans et al., 2005), such as those experiencing homelessness. One outcome of interest in young children is self-regulation because of associations with academic outcomes and socioemotional competence (Blair & Razza, 2007; Carlson & Moses, 2001). Although, child self-regulation has been observationally measured in numerous studies, these tasks are designed to be frustrating, such as retrieving a desired toy from a locked box (e.g., Dennis et al., 2010). These measures yield fruitful information about behavioral and emotional regulation in the presence of a stressor, but fail to capture self-regulation in a context similar to a school. In our own research in an emergency shelter, we observed that children who were dysregulated during academic achievement tasks such as the Woodcock Johnson (WJ), which is not designed to be frustrating, were highly regulated during a later explicitly frustrating task. The current study addressed this issue by employing an observational coding system for global regulation and 5 different categories of self-regulation during an academic task. We then examined associations between environmental chaos and self-regulation in a sample of children residing in an urban emergency homeless shelter.
Participants were 94 3- to 6-year-old children (Mage= 4.93; 51% male;) who were primarily African American (81%) and lived with their families in a homeless shelter during the summers of 2016 and 2017. Children completed the WJ Applied Problems subtest (Blackwell, 2001), and parents completed the short version of the Confusion, Hubbub, and Order Scale (CHAOS; Matheny et al., 1995) to measure environmental chaos. Self-regulation was coded during the WJ using a manual that combined Dennis and colleagues’ (2010) 4 categories of self-regulation (problem solving, behavioral distraction, attentional distraction, and focus) and the global effectiveness of self-regulation scale from Hill et al. (2006). Dual coder inter-reliability was acceptable (ICC = 0.73). Linear regressions were used to determine the relationship between environmental chaos and children’s self-regulation.
Results indicated that chaos was not a significant predictor of any of the 4 observationally coded self-regulation subscales, after controlling for length of the task, child gender, and child age. These results suggest that in young homeless and highly mobile children, as environmental chaos increases, self-regulation may not be directly impacted. It may be that current environmental chaos may show greater impacts on children’s self-regulation later in life. Another possibility may be that at this level of disadvantage, chaos may have less of an effect on child outcomes. Our sample size may not have been large enough to detect the effects of chaos. Thus, further analyses should be done with a larger sample of preschoolers. Other factors such as availability of resources and parenting quality should be explored as alternative influences on environmental chaos and children’s wellbeing.

Authors

• Alicen A Whiting, University of Minnesota
  Presenting Author

• Rebecca Linnea Distefano, University of Minnesota Twin Cities
  Non-Presenting Author

• Kayla M. Nelson, University of Minnesota Twin Cities
  Non-Presenting Author

• Ann S. Masten, University of Minnesota Twin Cities
  Non-Presenting Author