Mother-Child and Father-Child Affective, Behavioral, and Physiological Coregulation as Developmental Mechanisms Across Early Childhood

• In Event: Context Matters: Expanding Understanding of Child Emotion Regulation within Family Interactions and Conditions of Risk

Abstract

Parent-child coregulation has emerged as a meaningful correlate of developmental psychopathology in early childhood, showing relations with maladaptive parenting and child behavior problems (Depasquale, 2020; Lunkenheimer et al., 2016; Lunkenheimer et al., 2021). This research suggests coregulation may be an important developmental mechanism, but to date no research tests whether coregulation mediates early parental risk effects on later child outcomes. Further, studies often examine domains of coregulation (e.g., affect, behavior, physiology) separately, leaving an incomplete picture of how they work together to influence child development. Accordingly, the present study examined mother- and father-child affective, behavioral, and physiological coregulation as mediators of the longitudinal effects of adaptive and maladaptive parenting on child behavior problems across ages 2 ½, 3, and 4 years, accounting for stability in behavior problems over time.

Participants were 150 families (53% female children) oversampled for lower income, higher parent stress, and higher maltreatment risk. Child race/ethnicity was 65% White, 22% Latinx, 2% Black, 2% Native American, 8% Multi-racial, and 1% Other. Parents reported non-violent discipline, psychological aggression, and physical aggression on the Conflict Tactics Scale Parent–Child version (Straus et al., 1998) at age 2 ½ and externalizing and internalizing problems on the Child Behavior Checklist (Achenbach & Rescorla, 2001) at age 4. Respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA) and video coding of affect and behavior were collected from parent-child problem-solving tasks at age 3. Coregulation was operationalized as the duration of dyadic positive affective states from State Space Grids (affect), transitional probabilities between parental directives and child compliance from sequential analysis (behavior), and RSA synchrony parameters extracted from multilevel models (physiology). Longitudinal structural equation models were run separately for mothers and fathers, and for externalizing and internalizing (four models).

The mother-child internalizing model (Figure 1A) showed that more non-violent discipline predicted stronger affective and behavioral coregulation over time, and stronger affective coregulation predicted lower child internalizing problems over time; however, this indirect effect did not reach significance. The mother-child externalizing model (Figure 1B) showed similar predictions, with the addition of physiological coregulation predicting externalizing problems, but no mediational pathways were significant.

The father-child externalizing model (Figure 2B) showed that non-violent discipline predicted stronger behavioral coregulation, and physical aggression predicted weaker affective coregulation and stronger physiological coregulation over time; also, physiological coregulation significantly mediated the pathway from higher physical aggression to higher child externalizing problems, indirect effect=.24, 95% CI [.15, .35]. The father-child internalizing model (Figure 2A) showed similar predictions of coregulation, but none of the three types of coregulation were related to internalizing outcomes.

Results offer multiple novel contributions, indicating that: a) parenting predicts parent-child coregulation over time for mothers and fathers; b) coregulation may act as a developmental mechanism in early childhood, with physiological coregulation mediating the effects of fathers’ parenting on externalizing problems; c) there are differences in coregulation effects for mothers versus fathers; and d) there is value in examining multiple domains of coregulation in conjunction to understand their etiological and predictive utility in developmental research.

Authors

• Erika S. Lunkenheimer, Pennsylvania State University, University Park
  Presenting Author

• Kayla Melissa Brown, Advocates for Human Potential

• Catherine Diercks, Pennsylvania State University, University Park

• Anneke E. Olson, Pennsylvania State University, University Park

• Longfeng Li, Pennsylvania State University, University Park

• Kivilcim D. Engel, Pennsylvania State University, University Park