Poster #47 - Household Chaos, Parenting Quality, and Children Self-Regulation Skills in Ethnic Minority Children

• In Event: Poster Session 20

Abstract

Household chaos has been linked to child outcomes that include behavioral problems (Coldwell et al., 2006), adverse cognitive and academic outcomes, communication (Marsh et al., 2020), and diminished self-regulation abilities (Andrews et al., 2021). The focus of the present study was to examine associations between household chaos, parenting quality, and three components of children’s self regulation in middle childhood. The study uses data from a longitudinal study that recruited 407 Black and Latinx (primarily Mexican American) children in 2010 at age 2½ years to study the development of self regulation and school readiness among ethnic minority preschoolers and their families (The Dallas Project on Education Pathways, DPREP). Followed for 11 years, and using a planned missing design, the observed sample in Wave 5 (mean age 10.35 (SD= .25) totaled 169 (72 African American and 97 Hispanic/Latinx children. A majority of the families reported household incomes at or below the federal poverty level.
Measures of children’s self regulation and of parenting quality were collected during home visits. Self regulation was measured using the Behavior Rating Inventory of Executive Function, 2nd Edition (BRIEF-2; Gioia et al., 2015), a validated inventory of executive function and self-regulation skills for youth ages 5 to 18 years. The CHAOS measure (Matheny et al., 1995) is a standing parent administered questionnaire that assesses household chaos and organization. Mothers also completed the acceptance subscale of the Parent Rating of Parenting Behaviors Inventory (PRPBI; Schludermann & Schludermann, 1988), which addresses how warm, helpful, and supportive the parent’s behavior is toward the child.
Descriptive statistics and bivariate correlations among the measures of self regulation, household chaos, and parenting acceptance are shown in Table 1. Household chaos and the three components of self regulation were moderately correlated, indicating that greater chaos in the home was associated with higher t-scores in the BREIF measure. Higher scores in the self regulation measure indicated higher difficulties in the domain evaluated. Hierarchical regression analysis was used to examine prediction of three aspects of self regulation – inhibition, set shifting, and working memory from household chaos in Step 1 and chaos and parental quality in Step 2. Results are shown in Table 2. Both household chaos and parental quality accounted for significant portions of variance in the children’s inhibition and working memory. Household chaos accounted for a significant proportion of variance in the scores of children’s set shifting, but parenting acceptance was unrelated and independent of household chaos. The interaction of chaos and parenting acceptance was not significant in the models tested. Interactions with child ethnicity were significant for working memory and inhibition.
The differential importance of household chaos and parenting quality for these different features of self regulation among middle school children from low-income households will be the focus of the discussion of these findings. Such information is relevant to a greater understanding of the roles of household chaos and of stability such as regular routines, as well as parenting acceptance, in supporting children’s important skills of self regulation in middle childhood.

Authors

• Mayra Alexandra Padilla Cardoso, University of Texas at Dallas
  Presenting Author

• Margaret Tresch Owen, University of Texas at Dallas

• Margaret O'Brien Caughy, University of Georgia