Growth Mixture Modeling of the Impact of Adolescent Mothers’ Parenting Stress Trajectories on Children’s Self-Regulation

• In Event: 1-155 - Mixture Modeling in Applied Developmental Research: Challenges and Opportunities

Integrative Statement

Though parenting stress, the psychological distress resulting from the demands of parenting, is a normative experience among most parents, adolescent mothers report higher rates of parenting stress than adult mothers (Deater-Deckard, 2004; Mollborn & Dennis, 2012). Parenting stress may be detrimental to children’s self-regulation (the cognitive and behavioral processes that facilitate appropriate engagement in settings such as school); therefore, the study of parenting stress may help researchers understand how to best support parent and child functioning (Mathis & Bierman, 2015; Blair, 2010). Despite the high rates of parenting stress among adolescent mothers, several studies demonstrate considerable variability in adolescent mothers’ life circumstances and trajectories (e.g., Chang & Fine, 2007; Easterbrooks, Chaudhuri, Bartlett, & Copeman, 2011), suggesting the importance of individual and temporal differences in patterns of parenting stress. Growth Mixture Modeling (GMM) accounts for both individual and temporal patterns and affords a person-centric approach allowing the identification of groups of individuals that differ in comparable ways across metrics (Muthén & Muthén, 2000). In our study, we use GMM to help provide a comprehensive view of how variations in parenting stress impact children, in turn supporting the development of targeted family-support programs and policies.

Accordingly, our study explores the trajectories of parenting stress among adolescent mothers, as well as the impacts of different trajectories on children’s self-regulatory capacities. The sample for this project is comprised of 1,146 adolescent mothers and children enrolled in the Early Head Start Research and Evaluation Project. Mothers were less than 20 years old at study enrollment. Table 1 contains selected demographic information on the analytic sample. Data were collected when children were 14, 24, 36 months (e.g., 0-3 phase) and prior to kindergarten entry (Administration for Children and Families, 2002; Love et al., 2010). Parenting stress was assessed during the 0-3 phase using the Parenting Stress Index Short Form (PSI-SF; Abidin, 1995). Child self-regulation is operationalized as a latent construct combining the Cognitive/Social and Emotion Regulation Scores of the Leiter-R (Roid & Miller, 2002).

Presently, we are using GMM to measure longitudinal patterns of adolescent mothers’ parenting stress in early childhood. We will further explore variation in distal outcomes, such as children’s self-regulation, across the identified longitudinal patterns. Based on prior work done within this sample (e.g., Chang & Fine, 2007), we hypothesize that the data display three trajectories of parenting stress: chronically high, chronically low, and decreasing. Figure 2 portrays the variability in parenting stress across the mothers comprising the study sample. In the final presentation, we will discuss steps taken to select the final model, the specification and features of the identified trajectories of parenting stress, the specification and testing for distal outcomes across trajectories, and the technical challenges inherent in GMM with distal outcomes. In addition, the proposed presentation will include further discussion of the challenges and opportunities afforded by GMM modeling when addressing applied developmental research questions.

Authors

• Meera Menon, Tufts University
  Presenting Author

• Sara K Johnson, Tufts University
  Non-Presenting Author