A Latent Profile Analysis of Joint Chinese Parenting Effects on Child Aggression, Withdrawal, and Prosociality

• In Event: Leveraging Innovative Person-centered Approaches to Study the Antecedents and Consequences of Parenting and Child Behaviors

Abstract

While the effect of parenting on children’s behavioral outcomes has long been studied, recent metanalyses suggest that parenting dimensions tends to produce small effect sizes in relation to child outcomes (e.g., Lei e al., 2018; Pinquart, 2017; Wong et al., 2020). This paper furthers a rational for employing a person-centered approach for examining the joint effects of multiple parenting dimensions on children’s social withdrawal, aggression, and prosociality while also accounting for individual differences in children’s temperament. Participants included parents and young children (N = 441, 47.3% girls, average age 4.8 years) selected from preschools in Beijing and Dalian, China. Parents provided ratings of their own parenting behaviors and children’s temperament and teachers rated children’s social withdrawal, aggression, and prosociality. Confirmatory factor analyses (CFA) were used to evaluate measurement properties of parenting, child temperament, and behavioral outcomes. Latent factor scores of parenting and behavioral outcomes were then specified as indicators of latent classes in a mixture model, while child gender and age, parental educational levels, and child temperament were incorporated as covariates to examine potential class inclusion. Comparison of information criterion suggested that a five-class model fit the data best (see Table 1). The joint effects of multiple parenting dimensions across parents yielded medium to high class differences. Parents who were high in authoritarian parenting, psychological control, and overprotectiveness had moderately aggressive children (see Figure 1). Parents low across all three parenting dimensions (disengaged parenting) had children who exhibited the highest levels of aggression and social withdrawal. Authoritative mothering and authoritarian fathering combined with overprotectiveness was linked to higher levels of social withdrawal while average authoritative parenting was linked to slightly higher prosociality in children. Parents near averages across all three parenting dimensions (moderate parenting) was linked to the highest levels of prosociality in children. Findings suggest that analyses at the parent-child triadic level using a person-centered approach may provide advantages over more traditional statistical methods when examining parenting effects on child outcomes.

Authors

• Chongming Yang, Family, Home and Social Sciences Research Support Center

• Chris L Porter, Brigham Young University

• Craig H Hart, Brigham Young University
  Presenting Author

• David A Nelson, Brigham Young University

• Wen Gao, Liaoning Normal University

• Nan Zhou, Capital Normal University