The Role of Father-Child Attachment in Toddlers' Executive Functioning

• In Event: Poster Session 03
  In Poster Session: PS 03 Topic - Parenting & Parent-Child Relationships

Abstract

In recent years, developmental psychology has established the importance of studying the development of higher cognitive processes involved in the voluntary control of thoughts, emotions, and actions, i.e., executive functions (EF; Diamond, 2013). EF combine several cognitive skills that are crucial for children's social, behavioral, and academic adjustment (Blair, 2002; Best, Miller, & Naglieri, 2011). EF have both ‘cool’ cognitive and ‘hot’ emotional components (Zelazo & Carlson, 2012). Cool components are involved in cognitive regulation, while hot components support emotion regulation. A growing body of research supports the role of parenting behaviors and parent-child relationships in the development of cool and hot components of EF (Matte-Gagné, Bernier, Sirois, Lalonde, & Hertz; Valcan, Davis, & Pino-Pasternak, 2018). However, research on EF development is just beginning to address the potential contribution of father figures and there is a lack of research that considers both maternal and paternal influences simultaneously. This study is the first to examine the unique contributions of both child attachment to father and to mother in the development of cool and hot EF during toddlerhood. The sample includes 80 children met at home with their parents at 12 and 18 months of age. At 12 months, mother-child and father-child dyads engaged in a variety of activities during a 90-minute home visit. Child attachment to mother and to father was evaluated by independent coders using the Attachment Q-Sort (AQS; Waters, 1995), based on a 45-minute observation sequence with each dyad. 25% of the dyads were double-coded and interrater agreement was excellent for both mother-child and father-child dyads (ICCs > .80). At 18 months, child EF were measured using three tasks: the Prohibition task (Friedman et al., 2011) involving hot EF, and the Hide and Seek (Garonetal, 2014) and Reverse Categorization (Carlson et al., 2004) tasks both targeting cool EF (scores were standardized and averaged to compute a composite score of cool EF). Correlational and regression analyses were performed. Parental education (mean of maternal and paternal number of years of schooling) and child baseline language skills were included as covariates in the regressions. Child attachment security to father (r = .40, p < .01) and mother (r = .39, p < .01) were associated with cool EF, but not with hot EF (r = .09 and r = -.01, ns, for child attachment to father and mother respectively). Regression analyses revealed that child attachment security to father (β = .31 p < .01) and mother (β = .22, p < .05) both contribute uniquely to the prediction of child cool EF above and beyond parental education and language skills at 12 months (see Table 1). This study highlights the unique role of child-father attachment in the development of cool EF during toddlerhood. It also underscores the importance of distinguishing the cool and hot dimensions of EF and suggests comparable effects of child attachment to father and to mother on child EF during toddlerhood.

Authors

• Frederic Theriault-Couture, Laval University
  Presenting Author

• Célia Matte-Gagné, Laval University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Annie Bernier, University of Montreal
  Non-Presenting Author

• George M Tarabulsy, University Laval
  Non-Presenting Author

• Chantal Cyr, Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM)
  Non-Presenting Author