Direct and Indirect Associations between Cocaring, Parent-Child Relationships and Toddlers’ Social Emotional Adjustment

• In Event: 2-211 - It Takes a Village: Exploring the Antecedents, Outcomes and Patterns of Family Engagement in ECE

Integrative Statement

Young children benefit from consistent and positive environments (Hale-Jinks et al., 2006; Landry et al., 2001). However, children develop in an array of interacting systems (Bronfenbrenner, 1979; Minuchin, 1985). To provide appropriate support for children, and the individuals who care for them, we must understand the complexity of interactions between home and educational environments. Parent-teacher relationships are one critical component of home-childcare interactions. Previous research investigating parent-teacher, or cocaring, relationships has established that they are multidimensional (Elicker et al., 2013; Author, 2016), and that dimensions of the cocaring relationship are associated with parental involvement (Author, 2017). In the current study, we examine if parents’ perceptions of their cocaring relationship with their child’s teacher are related to young children’s social emotional adjustment, and whether these associations are mediated by the quality of the parent-child relationship.

Method: Data was collected from 90 families of 12-38 month old children who attended full-time, center-based childcare. Parents completed the Cocaring Relationship Questionnaire (Author, 2017) to assess their perceptions of support (level of trust, communication, help and encouragement one receives from their partner), endorsement (affirmation one’s cocaring partner is a good caregiver), undermining (level of distrust, subversion, and criticism one feels from their partner), and agreement (level of accord with the others’ childrearing practices or behaviors) in their parent-teacher relationship. Parents also completed the Child-Parent Relationship Scale – Short Form (CPRS-SF; Pianta, 1998) to assess closeness and conflict in the parent-child relationship, and the Infant Toddler Social Emotional Assessment (Carter & Briggs-Gowan, 2006) to assess their child’s externalizing, internalizing, dysregulation and social emotional competence. Variable details and correlations are provided in Table 1.

Results: We conducted path analysis to simultaneously estimate direct and indirect associations. We found significant direct associations between parents’ reports of higher cocaring endorsement and greater child competence (b* = .35, SE = .12, p < .01), and between higher cocaring undermining and greater child internalizing problems (b* = .35, SE = .13, p < .01) and dysregulation (b* = .27, SE = .12, p < .05) after controlling for parent-child relationships, child age, gender, and total time spent with the focal teacher, and parent gender and educational attainment. Figure 1 presents the indirect associations. We found parents' perceptions of higher cocaring agreement and undermining were both associated with lower levels of children's externalizing behavioral problems through increased parent-child closeness (agreement indirect b* = -.01, SE = .00, p < .05; undermining indirect b* = -.01, SE = .00, p = .05).

Discussion: These results demonstrate that aspects of the cocaring relationship are associated with both the quality of the parent-child relationship and toddlers’ social emotional adjustment, and indicate that cocaring relationship quality may contribute to children’s adjustment over and above parent-child relationship quality. Our findings help clarify where practitioners should focus their efforts when creating and maintaining parent-teacher relationships. Creating contexts in which parents can develop trust and confidence in their child’s teacher may ultimately help foster children’s social emotional competence, and decreasing expression of undermining may help reduce toddler dysregulation and internalizing.

Authors

• Sarah Naomi Lang, Ohio State University
  Presenting Author

• Lieny Jeon, Johns Hopkins University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Michael Benjamin Wells, Karolinska Institute
  Non-Presenting Author