Child Executive Function Mediates the Relation Between Caregiver Depression and Academic Achievement in Kindergarten

• In Event: Poster Session 11
  In Poster Session: PS 11 Topic - Education, Schooling

Abstract

Children’s academic achievement depends partly on their interactions with family members. For example, previous research has shown that parents with depression engage less positively with their children than those without depression (Cummings & Davies, 1994). According to family stress theory, caregivers experiencing poor psychological functioning can negatively influence their child’s development (Conger et al., 1984). Maternal depression also predicts lower academic achievement in kindergartners (Baker & Iruka, 2013). Understanding the mechanisms that connect caregiver depression and child achievement is important to support children’s success in school and later in life (Dahlen, 2016).
Our study aimed to address whether the association between caregiver depression and child achievement in kindergarten was mediated by children’s domain-general executive functioning skills. We hypothesized that caregiver depression would negatively predict children’s executive function, and lower executive function would predict lower academic performance.
We used data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study (ECLS-K) collected in the 2010-2011 school year. Our sample included 18,166 kindergarteners who participated in the first two waves of data collection. Caregiver depression was assessed by 6 items from a mental health questionnaire. Executive function was assessed by child measures of attention shifting and working memory and a teacher-reported measure of children’s inhibitory control skills. For academic achievement, we created a composite of children’s standardized scores in math, reading, and science from assessments administered in the spring of kindergarten. Table 1 summarizes descriptive statistics for each measure. We controlled for caregiver education, household poverty level (below/above poverty line), child age, sex, whether the child attended preschool in the year prior to kindergarten in our analyses.
To address our research questions, we estimated a structural equation model to test for direct and indirect effects of caregiver depression and child executive functioning on children’s academic achievement using Mplus version 8.1.7 (Muthen & Muthen, 2019). First, we estimated a measurement model to examine the relations between measured variables and the corresponding latent variable of caregiver depression, child EF, and child achievement. The measurement model fit the data well, ꭓ2(51, 17,627) = 739.58, p < .001, CFI = .99, RMSEA = .03, and all factor loadings for each latent variable were significant. Second, we estimated a structural equation model to test for the direct and indirect effects of caregiver depression and EF on children’s academic achievement after adjusting for covariates (Figure 1). We corrected the standard errors with replication sampling weights using Jackknife2 method. As hypothesized, caregiver depression significantly predicted child EF (𝛽 = -0.06, p = .018), child EF significantly predicted achievement (𝛽 = 0.97, p < .001), and caregiver depression had a significant indirect effect on child achievement (𝛽 = -0.05, p = .018) but a non-significant direct effect (𝛽 = 0.02, p = .218).
In summary, our results suggest children whose primary caregiver suffers from depression will generally have lower academic achievement in kindergarten. However, this association was fully mediated by children’s executive functioning. Future research should investigate parent-child interactions that contribute to the development of children’s EF skills to mitigate the effects of caregiver depression on child achievement.

Authors

• Ana Maria Ortiz, University of California - Irvine
  Presenting Author

• Nicole R Scalise, Washington State University
  Non-Presenting Author