Childhood Self-Control and Adjustment in Early Adulthood: The Contribution of Maternal Support

• In Event: 3-122 - Socialization of Cognitive and Socioemotional Development Across Cultures

Integrative Statement

Self-control, the ability of voluntary regulation of attention, emotion, and behavior to maintain social standards and behavioral appropriateness in social interactions, is recognized as central in the developmental processes of self-regulation and socialization. Despite the growing interest in self-control, few studies have examined the longitudinal prediction from early effortful control to developmental outcomes in adulthood. On the other hand, researchers have demonstrated that supportive parent-child relationships link positively to children’s self-control and social, academic, and psychological development. However, little work has done to address the role of parenting in the relations of early self-regulatory capabilities to developmental outcomes, particularly when individuals are in the period of early adulthood.

Thus, the primary purpose of this study was to investigate the general patterns of relations between self-control in toddlerhood and social and psychological adjustment outcomes in early adulthood in an urban Chinese sample. In addition, we examined whether and how supportive and unsupportive parent-child relationships moderated the contributions of early self-control to early adulthood outcomes in China. There were initially 228 toddlers (M age =24.4 months, SD = 2.2) randomly selected for the study in 1996-97, and the second wave of data collection was conducted five years later. In the third wave of follow-up study, these children were young adults (approx. 19-20 years). At Time 1, toddlers’ self-control was assessed using two delay tasks and a clean-up task. Child delay behavior was coded according to the latency to touch the novel crayons or the snack and their scores on the two tasks were aggregated to form a single index of delay behavior. During the clean-up task, toddlers’ behaviors were coded using a compliance coding scheme. At Time 2, mothers completed the Child-Rearing Practices Report Q-Sort and their scores on the indices of warmth/acceptance and induction/reasoning were aggregated to form a composite score of maternal support. At Time 3, the youth were asked to rate their peer integration, academic achievement, engagement in deviant and other problem behaviors, self-esteem and depression.

Results showed that for children with high maternal support in mid-childhood, their early self-control was positively associated with social adjustment and negatively associated with socioemotional difficulties and relationship problems (e.g., peer integration, academic achievement, school effort, problematic behaviors), but the pattern of the associations was mostly nonsignificant in children with low maternal support. These findings indicate that the contributions of self-control in toddlerhood to socioemotional development in early adulthood might depend on the quality of maternal support children received.

Authors

• Rui Fu, University of Pennsylvania
  Presenting Author

• Xinyin Chen, University of Pennsylvania
  Non-Presenting Author

• Dan Li, Shanghai Normal University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Li Wang, Peking University
  Non-Presenting Author