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Poster #214 - The Impact of Parental Socialization Practices on Toddlers’ Social Competence: Evidence from Low-Income Latino Families

Sat, March 23, 2:30 to 3:45pm, Baltimore Convention Center, Floor: Level 1, Exhibit Hall B

Integrative Statement

Given the impact of social competence on social and school-related outcomes, considerable research has been dedicated to understanding individual differences in the development of these skills. While researchers have identified a variety of parenting and socialization factors that contribute to children’s social competence in preschool and elementary school (e.g., Sroufe et al., 1999), few studies have examined these associations in infants and toddlers. Fewer still have considered the impact of parenting and socialization factors on early social competence among minority children living in poverty, who face substantial psychosocial risk and are at-risk for developing social and school related problems (Briggs-Gowan et al., 2001). In the current study, we examined whether one aspect of parental socialization that has been shown to predict preschoolers’ social competence, parental verbal responsivity (i.e. parents’ tendency to engage their children in interactions that involve reciprocal verbal exchanges) would predict toddlers’ social competencies in a group of low-income, primarily Latino families.

The sample consisted of 75 mother-child dyads who were enrolled in a larger longitudinal study (Smart Beginnings). Demographic variables were assessed at baseline (see Table 1). At 18m, parents were interviewed using the Parental Verbal Responsivity subscale of the StimQ2-Toddler (Mendelsohn et al., 2011) as well as the Edinburgh Postnatal Depression Scale (EPDS; Cox et al., 1995) and an adapted version of the Perceived Stress Scale (PSS; Cohen et al., 1994). The StimQ is a structured interview that assesses parent-child interactions within the home. It has been validated for use in low-income populations in English and Spanish. At 24m, parents completed the Infant and Toddler Social and Emotional Assessment (ITSEA; Briggs-Gowan & Carter, 2007) social competence subscale. The ITSEA is commonly used to examine social-emotional problems and competencies in children between 12 and 36m.

We performed hierarchical multiple regression to examine the relationship between parents’ verbal responsivity at 18m and children’s social competence at 24m (see Table 2). Potential confounding variables including intervention group (from the larger study), demographic, psychosocial, and child factors were entered at Step 1 and accounted for 27% of the variance in children’s social competence scores, F(8, 66) = 3.06, p = .005. Parental Verbal Responsivity scores were added at Step 2 and accounted for an additional 8% of the variance in children’s social competence scores, F(1, 65) = 7.39, p = .008, suggesting that parental verbal responsivity significantly predicted children’s social competence, even after accounting for a variety of family and psychosocial risk factors.

These findings add to the previous body of literature on the relationship between parenting factors and children’s social competence in preschool and school-aged samples and extend them to younger Latino children from low-income families. These results highlight the role that socialization factors play in facilitating the development of social competencies among children who are especially at risk for developing school and social problems. Our results have important implications for optimizing parenting interventions focused on decreasing poverty-related disparities in social-emotional outcomes and school readiness, especially among mothers with infants and toddlers.

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