Learning to Let Go: Over-engaged Parenting Predicts Poorer Child Self-regulation

• In Event: 2-114 - Too Much of a Good Thing? Dynamic Microsocial Analyses of Parent Engagement Predicting Child Self-Regulation

Integrative Statement

Introduction: Parental scaffolding behaviors such as prompting, praising, elaborating, and redirecting have been shown to foster early cognitive skills in children (Fay-Stammbach et al., 2014; Obradović et al., 2016; Weisleder & Fernald, 2013). These interactions also provide opportunities for parental socialization of children’s emotions and self-regulation, as children get discouraged, disengaged, or dysregulated when challenged. But could parental scaffolding backfire if it is not contingent on the child’s needs? As parents are increasingly encouraged to turn everyday routines into teachable moments (York et al., 2018), it is necessary to consider whether parents’ strategies to regulate children’s attention, behaviors, and emotions may actually undermine the development of children’s own self-regulation. We employed an innovative State Space Grid methodology (Hollenstein, 2013), which captures second-to-second changes in the parent-child interaction quality, to shed new light on how parental over-engagement relates to children’s performance on hot and cool executive function (EF) tasks and observer-rated self-regulation skills.
Method: Using a diverse sample of 102 four- to six-year-olds and their parents, two independent raters coded parent behaviors and child behaviors on a moment-to-moment basis during four interaction tasks. Parental over-engagement was defined by the proportion of time that parents were using positive control strategies (e.g., instructing/explaining/requesting, teaching about emotions, re-directing child’s attention, providing comfort) rather than following the child’s lead (e.g., attentive monitoring, encouragement, acknowledgment) while the child was active on task (e.g., leading play or playing independently, engaging parent in joint attention, social referencing, or positive affect sharing). Direct assessment of children’s EFs was conducted via laboratory tasks assessing hot EFs (i.e., gift wrapping, dinky toys) and cool EFs (i.e., go/no-go, flanker, self-ordered pointing, digit span backwards). Observed self-regulation was measured using the Preschool Self-Regulation Assessment (PSRA) assessor report.
Results: Path analysis results are presented in Table 1. Over-engaged parenting emerged as a significant negative predictor of children’s hot EFs and observed self-regulation (but did not predict cool EFs) while accounting for the child age, family income, and parental education. The findings were robust to the inclusion of global observed ratings of sensitive and responsive parenting for observed self-regulation.
Discussion: This study extends recent findings showing that higher levels of parent-reported emotion socialization behaviors traditionally identified as supportive are associated with parents’ and teachers’ reports of poorer child outcomes (e.g., Castro et al., 2018; Mirabile et al., 2018; Nelson et al., 2013). Rather than relying on parents’ reports of parenting and child behavior, which can be biased (Herbers et al., 2017), the current study employs microsocial coding of parenting behaviors during everyday tasks and direct assessments of children’s self-regulation skills. The findings provide additional evidence that seemingly “supportive” parental responses may not have positive effects when they are not responsive to children’s needs in the moment. To support the parent as the child’s first teacher, it is important to elucidate when children are best served by exploring and learning on their own.

Authors

• Jelena Obradovic, Stanford University
  Presenting Author

• Michael Sulik, Stanford University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Anne Shaffer, University of Georgia
  Non-Presenting Author