Longitudinal Changes in Young Children’s Strategy Use for Emotion Regulation

• In Event: Emotional Competence from Infancy to Late Childhood

Abstract

The development of emotion regulation during early childhood is described as a transition from reliance on caregivers and relatively automatic strategies (e.g., gaze aversion) to the emergence of more self-reliant, effortful strategies that draw on children’s internal resources (Kopp, 2009). Cross-sectional evidence indicates changes in the frequency of strategy use in early childhood, with some strategies appearing to increase as children grow older and others to decrease (Rothbart et al., 1992). We address the need for longitudinal investigation to document developmental change in observed strategy use during early childhood, and whether those longitudinal changes are meaningful indicators of children’s ability to manage their emotions appropriately. We first tested age-related changes in the frequency, duration, and dominance of three strategies—self-soothing (relatively automatic), bidding to an adult about the demands of the situation (reliance on caregiver), and distraction (self-reliant, effortful attention control)—commonly observed in delayed reward tasks designed to frustrate young children. We then predicted that growth in distraction would be associated with independent adult ratings of children’s ability to manage their emotions appropriately.

We tested these hypotheses with data from a sample of 120 children (54% male, 93.3% white, from economically strained semi-rural and rural households), followed from ages 24 months to 5 years. They were observed during a waiting task in which mothers told children they had to wait to open a gift until mothers finished work and children had only one boring toy. One coding team recorded children’s strategy use second-by-second, which allowed computation of duration and dominance (% of total strategy use) in addition to frequency. A second independent team coded whether children’s overall behavior was well-regulated, i.e., tolerating waiting in a calm, appropriate way. We used growth curve modeling to document age-related changes in the frequency, duration, and dominance of the three strategies and regressions to test the relation between strategy use trajectory parameters (intercept, slopes) and ratings of emotion regulation by age 5 years.

Results largely supported the predictions; we found declines in frequency and dominance of self-soothing, an inverted curvilinear pattern for frequency, duration, and dominance of bidding to mother, and increases in frequency, duration, and dominance of distraction from ages 24 months to 5 years, all ps < .05. Growth in duration and dominance of the use of distraction predicted better ratings of children’s emotion regulation by age 5 years, ps < .01. Growth in dominance of bidding to mother predicted poorer ratings of children’s emotion regulation by age 5 years, ps < .01. In sum, this is the first longitudinal evidence of age-related changes in strategy use during early childhood, showing that, on average, children increasingly deploy a strategy that draws on internal, cognitive resources and self-reliance as they transition from toddlerhood to later preschool age. Moreover, strategy use trajectories may be meaningful indicators of the development of emotion regulation. Specifically, our results suggest that children’s increased reliance on distraction relative to other strategies and decreased reliance on bidding across this age period is an important predictor of their emotion regulation.

Authors

• Kizzann Ashana Ratcliff, other
  Non-Presenting Author

• Lauren Vazquez, The Pennsylvania State University
  Presenting Author

• Erika S. Lunkenheimer, Pennsylvania State University, University Park
  Non-Presenting Author

• Pamela M Cole, Pennsylvania State University, University Park
  Non-Presenting Author