Poster #138 - Maternal Supportive Behaviors Moderate the Association Between Emotion Regulation and Learning Engagement in Early Childhood

• In Event: 3-003 - Poster Session 09
  In Poster Session: PS 09 Section - Parenting & Parent-Child Relationships

Integrative Statement

Despite the growing body of evidence suggesting that learning engagement contributes to academic achievement and school adjustment during school years (Sasser, Bierman, & Heinrichs, 2015), little is known about the factors that predict learning engagement in early childhood. Emotion regulation is likely a precursor of learning engagement given that it may allow children to attend to instructions, show persistence, and engage by helping them regulate frustration and anxiety during learning-related tasks. However, this association may not be uniform across all children. Having better emotion regulation may especially be critical for children receiving low levels of caregiver support as such skills may compensate for not having frequent opportunities to develop learning-related behaviors during parent-child interactions. This relation may not be as strong for children who already receive high levels of support from caregivers given that supportive caregivers may enhance children’s learning-related behaviors by reinforcing such behaviors during learning-based interactions. We examined whether maternal supportive behaviors (i.e., emotional & cognitive support) moderate the association between emotion regulation in preschool and learning engagement in kindergarten, controlling for family income-to-needs ratio and ethnicity.

Participants (N=278, 55% female, 59% European American) were recruited as part of a longitudinal study examining the development of learning engagement. Maternal behaviors (emotional & cognitive support) were observed during a semi-structured mother-child problem-solving task in preschool. Emotion regulation was measured as a composite of mother-report of emotional reactivity and observed emotion regulation (global regulation, verbal negativity & latency to distress) in preschool. Learning engagement was measured as a composite of six behaviors (attention to instructions, on-task behavior, persistence, enthusiasm/energy, monitoring/strategy use, and negative affect) observed during two learning-based tasks in kindergarten.

Maternal emotional and cognitive support were modestly associated (r=.34, p<.01); as such, their moderating roles were examined separately. Moderation analyses were conducted in Mplus 8.0. to test whether maternal behaviors (emotional & cognitive support) moderated the associations between child emotion regulation in preschool and learning engagement in kindergarten. Maternal emotional support in preschool moderated the association between child emotion regulation and learning engagement (β=-.19, p=.007), such that emotion regulation was more strongly associated with learning engagement among children whose parents showed lower emotional support (β=.42 p<.001) compared to those whose parents showed greater emotional support (β=.15, p=.048; see Figure 1). Maternal cognitive support moderated the association between child emotion regulation in preschool and learning engagement in kindergarten (β=-.21 p<.001), such that greater child emotion regulation was associated with better learning engagement for children who had low maternal cognitive support (β=.52, p<.001) but not for children who had high maternal cognitive support (β= .08, p=.421; see Figure 2).

Results suggest that children’s early emotion regulation is an important predictor of later learning engagement in the context of low maternal emotional and cognitive support, suggesting that emotion regulation is particularly important in relation to learning engagement in the context of less supportive caregiving. These findings suggest that improving children’s emotion regulation skills may serve as a protective factor in less supportive parenting contexts.

Authors

• Selin Zeytinoglu, University of Maryland, College Park
  Presenting Author

• Simone Halliday, University of North Carolina at Greensboro
  Non-Presenting Author

• Elif Isbell, University of Michigan
  Non-Presenting Author

• Esther Leerkes, University of North Carolina at Greensboro
  Non-Presenting Author

• Susan Calkins, University of North Carolina at Greensboro
  Non-Presenting Author