Parenting and executive functions in early childhood: The moderating role of environmental sensitivity

• In Event: New Insights on Environmental Sensitivity in Early Childhood

Abstract

Introduction. The quality of parental behavior has been considered an essential factor in explaining individual differences in executive functions (EF). However, a growing body of research suggests that some children are more susceptible to positive and negative parenting qualities (Pluess, 2015). This would imply that the quality of parent behavior may have a greater effect on EF in more sensitive children. The present study addresses this premise by examining the moderating effects of environmental sensitivity regarding the parenting - EF relationship.
Hypotheses. We expected highly sensitive children experiencing negative parenting (i.e., corporal punishment) to perform substantially worse on the EF tasks than sensitive children not exposed to corporal punishment. We also expected highly sensitive children experiencing positive parenting (i.e., involved parenting) to outperform sensitive children on the EF tasks.
Sample. The final sample consisted of 266 kindergarten children and first graders (50.4 % female, M = 6.0 years, SD = 0.7). Participants were recruited from public schools in Switzerland. They were predominately from middle-class families. Sixty-three percent of the mothers had a university degree, 27 % completed vocational training, 1.5 % completed compulsory school, and 0.5 % of all mothers reported no educational qualification.
Methods. Two EF tasks were administered to the child: A process-general EF task and a specific EF sub-process estimate of EF capturing executive attention. The Minnesota Executive Function Scale (MEFS; Feld Carlson & Zelazo, 2014) was administered for the process-general EF task. For the specific EF task, the visual search task (Breckenridge et al., 2013) was administered. The child’s parents filled out a questionnaire on their parenting and the child’s sensitivity. Parenting behavior was assessed with the German version of the Alabama Parenting Questionnaire (APQ; Frick, 1991; subscales parental involvement and parental corporal punishment were used). Sensitivity was assessed with the parent version of the Highly Sensitive Child scale (Pluess, 2018).
Results. Significant interaction effects between parenting and sensitivity predicting EF were found. Results showed that sensitive children exposed to corporal punishment performed lower on the process-general EF task than sensitive children who were not exposed to corporal punishment (see Figure 1, left). And sensitive children with highly involved parents performed better on both EF tasks than sensitive children with non-involved parents (see Figure 1, right for the process-general EF task). No such effects were found for low-sensitive children, neither for parental involvement nor for corporal punishment. The findings expand on previous work suggesting that children are differentially susceptible to parenting qualities with implications for cognitive performance. The results suggest that EF may not only be shaped by parenting behavior but that for some children, the quality of parent behavior may have a greater effect on EF than for others.

Authors

• Niamh Oeri, Universität Bern
  Presenting Author

• Nora Tilda Kunz

• Michael Pluess, Queen Mary University of London