How Difficult Temperament and Parenting Processes Predict Toddler’s Social Competence: Differential Susceptibility or Vantage Sensitivity?

• In Event: Parenting-Temperament Transactions in Early Childhood Across Cultures

Abstract

Several developmental theories propose that some children are more sensitive to the quality of their rearing environment than others. For instance, children with difficult temperaments, compared to children who are not difficult, have been found to be more vulnerable to negative rearing environments and even flourish in more positive ones (Belsky & Pluess, 2009). Nevertheless, most studies examining temperament by parenting interactions have focused on negative child outcomes and few have focused on actual parenting practices (Slagt, et al., 2017). Addressing these limitations, this research focused on positive developmental outcomes (toddler’s social competence in several domains) and tested developmentally sensitive models of temperamental susceptibility to parenting processes (i.e., warmth and actual practices) in predicting toddler’s social competence. Specifically, guided by a domain-specific approach (Grusec & Davidov, 2010), we examined (1) the unique contribution of child temperament, parental warmth and practices to toddler’s social competence, and (2) whether toddler’s difficult temperament moderated associations among the parenting characteristics and toddler’s social competence in a manner consistent with differential susceptibility or vantage sensitivity models.
The sample consisted of 112 Dutch toddlers (Mean age = 21.89 months), parents, and daycare teachers followed two times across a 6-month period. At both times, we measured toddler’s social competence through observing their prosocial behaviors (sharing, instrumental helping, empathic helping) in structured tasks (Aknin, et al., 2012; Svetlova, et al., 2010), also collecting parental and teachers’ reports on social competence using the empathy, prosocial, and compliance subscales of the Infant-Toddler Social and Emotional Assessment scale (Briggs-Gowan & Carter, 1998). In addition, at T1 parents also reported on child’s difficult temperament in the frustration/anger and inhibitory control subscales of the Children’s Behavior Questionnaire Short Form (Putnam & Rothbart, 2006), their own warmth (de Brock et al. 1992), and socialization practices related to prosocial behaviors (Gross, et al. 2015). We conducted hierarchical regression analyses in Mplus 8.3 to examine the proposed models, with T1 toddler’s social competence controlled. Significant interactions were followed by estimating the predictor variable and the outcome variable at temperament values exactly at, plus or minus one SD from the sample mean (Cohen et al., 2003). The conceptual model is presented in Figure 1 and findings from the models with significant interactions are presented in Table 1.
Results showed that toddler’s difficult temperament moderated the associations between both warmth and practices and toddler’s two competence outcomes (observed sharing and teacher-reported prosocial behavior). Follow-up probing of the interactions revealed similar patterns for both outcomes. For toddlers high on difficult temperament parental warmth was unrelated to competence, whereas for toddlers low on difficultness parental warmth was positively associated. Additionally, for toddlers high on difficult temperament parenting practices were (marginally) positively related to social competence, while for toddlers low on difficultness parenting practices were negatively associated with competence. Taken together, these results do not support prior research indicating difficult temperament to be a marker for differential susceptibility, instead suggest that low levels of difficult temperament may be a marker of vantage sensitivity in young children.

Authors

• Yue Song, Nanjing Normal University
  Presenting Author

• Judith Semon Dubas, Utrecht University
  Non-Presenting Author