Longitudinal Relations Between Paternal Activation Parenting and Children’s Socioemotional Adjustment in the Preschool Years

• In Event: Beyond Caregiver Sensitivity: An Exploration of Parental Behaviors in Mothers and Fathers

Abstract

Extant research on paternal caregiving in early childhood has typically relied on traditional caregiving dimensions derived from research and theory on mothers (e.g., sensitivity; Fagan et al., 2014). However, developmentalists have argued that fathers play a unique role in promoting children’s activities and relationships with individuals outside of the security provided by attachment relationships through activation parenting (AP; Paquette, 2004). AP includes behaviors that challenge children to approach novel situations, explore their environments, and take physical and socioemotional risks, through a balance of encouragement and limit-setting (Feldman & Shaw, 2021; Stevenson & Crnic, 2013; Volling et al., 2019). Whereas components of AP have been linked to children’s socioemotional functioning, comprehensive measures of AP and longitudinal research on families from low socioeconomic backgrounds is lacking (Feldman & Shaw, 2021). Accordingly, the current study tested associations between paternal AP during two traditionally used observational procedures (clean-up and teaching tasks) and children’s externalizing and internalizing problems in a sample of low-income, ethnically-diverse fathers. We hypothesized that observed paternal AP in both tasks at age 3 would be associated with lower levels of children’s externalizing and internalizing problems at age 5.
Children (n = 171) with participating fathers (22% Black, 65% white, 13% other race; 11% Latinx) were drawn from the larger cohort of the Early Steps Multisite (ESM) study (N = 731). The ESM study is a RCT l designed to test the effectiveness of the Family Check-Up intervention for families using WIC services in three diverse communities in the US (Dishion et al., 2008). At age 3, children completed videotaped clean-up and teaching tasks with their fathers, which were coded for AP. Mothers reported on their children’s externalizing and internalizing symptoms at ages 2 and 5 (CBCL). Primary caregivers (n = 161, 94% biological mothers) also completed a demographic interview at age 2.
Using structural equation modeling to generate a latent factors paternal activation parenting and accounting for sociodemographic covariates (i.e., study site, intervention status, income-to-needs ratio, child gender), higher levels of observed paternal activation parenting during the teaching task at age 3 were associated with lower levels of internalizing problems at age 5 (β = -.27, SE = .13, p = .03), but not externalizing problems (see Figure 1). After controlling for age 2 problem behaviors, paternal AP during the teaching was associated with lower levels of children’s externalizing problems (β = -.24, SE = .11, p = .04), but not internalizing problems at age 5 (see Figure 2). In both models, paternal AP during the clean-up task was not associated with child problem behaviors. Implications of the study’s findings will be discussed in relation to measurement of paternal AP and advancing understanding of AP’s relations with children’s adjustment across early childhood.

Authors

• Julia Sarah Feldman, University of Pittsburgh
  Presenting Author

• Melvin N Wilson, University of Virginia -Charlottesville

• Daniel S. Shaw, University of Pittsburgh