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Longitudinal Associations Between Inhibitory Control and Parenting Stress in Early Childhood: Relations with Verbal Ability

Wed, April 7, 1:10 to 2:40pm EDT (1:10 to 2:40pm EDT), Virtual

Abstract

Understanding how child characteristics and the home environment interrelate, and shape cognitive functioning in early childhood represents an important line of inquiry that has implications for children’s success during elementary school. There are many potential indices of the home environment and child characteristics that are important to consider, and we focus on parenting stressors and children’s inhibitory control (an index of self-regulation) given their prominence in numerous theories (e.g., Crnic & Greenberg, 1990; Rothbart & Bates, 2006). There are theoretical reasons to expect transactional relations between parenting stress and children’s inhibitory control (Crnic & Greenberg, 1990; Eisenberg, 2020; Rothbart & Bates, 2006). If parents are experiencing stress related to their parenting role, they may be modeling or teaching a dysregulated way of interacting with others (Mathias, 2012; Vrijhof et al., 2017). In addition, children who are low in inhibitory control may exacerbate difficult situations, thereby contributing to parental stress. To date, there is relatively little direct work on the transactional relations between children’s inhibitory control and parenting stressors, especially during the preschool years. In order to fill this gap in the literature, we examined longitudinal relations between parenting stress and children’s inhibitory control when children were 2, 3, and 4 years old. We expected negative bidirectional associations between inhibitory control and parenting stress across time. A secondary goal of the study was to test if parenting stress and inhibitory control were related to children’s verbal ability at age 5. Based on previous work, we tentatively expected inhibitory control to mediate the relation between parenting stress and children’s verbal ability.
Participants (N = 731) were part of a longitudinal study assessing the effectiveness of a parenting intervention designed to improve child disruptive behavior (blinded). Data were collected annually from children across ages 2-5. When children were 2-4 years old, parents completed the Child Behavior Questionnaire to report on children’s inhibitory control (Rothbart, et al., 2001) and parenting stressors were indexed via parents’ reports on the Daily Parenting Hassles measure (Crnic & Greenberg, 1990). Children’s age 5 verbal ability was assessed with the Letter-Word Identification and Spelling Skills Subscales of the Woodcock Johnson Tests of Achievement. Covariates for this study included sex, intervention condition, ethnicity, and study site location.
A cross-lagged model was estimated in Mplus (Muthen & Muthen, 2007) to test our predictions. As expected, we identified consistent cross-lagged negative relations between inhibitory control and daily hassles from ages 2 to 3 and 3 to 4. Children’s age 5 verbal ability was predicted by their age 4 inhibitory control, but not age 4 daily hassles frequency. Additional tests demonstrated that the relation between age 3 daily hassles frequency and verbal ability was indirect, via age 4 inhibitory control.
The findings presented here extend previous research by demonstrating that parents’ stress and children’s inhibitory control are bidirectionally related during the preschool years. Interestingly, parenting stress was indirectly related to children’s verbal ability, suggesting that parenting stress may relate to children’s academic performance by fostering children’s inhibitory control (Swanson et al., 2012).

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