Poster #74 - Parental Risk Factors and Children’s Cognitive Outcomes: A Time Varying Analysis of Maternal Age

• In Event: Poster Session 05

Abstract

Increased maternal age has been shown to be associated with a variety of positive psychosocial and cognitive outcomes in offspring. Research is still needed in order to understand the complex dynamics associated with increased maternal age on offspring and the mechanisms that underlie the benefits of maternal aging. Newer methodological advances, such as Time-varying effect modeling (TVEM), have the potential to provide a degree of specificity in delineating when maternal age might begin to confer advantage. Duncan et al. (2018) found a linear relationship between maternal age and school achievement and it may be beneficial to extend that work to examine whether maternal age might operate more discretely based on specific age milestones. A theoretical perspective that might explain maternal aging benefits is a risk and resilience perspective that represents older parents as generally more resilient due to a variety of complementary and interacting variables, including increased educational, financial, and mental health status. It is the confluence of these multiple protective characteristics that buffer them against individual risk factors as parents and that consequently serve to produce better average child outcomes relative to younger mothers.

In order to study the dynamics of maternal aging and child cognitive outcomes in infancy, data from the NICHD Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development (1991-1994) (N = 1,364; female = 48.3%; 80.4% White, 12.9% Black) was utilized. TVEM was utilized to investigate how maternal depression across maternal ages 20 to 48 differentially relates to 24-month-old children’s cognitive development. Multiple linear regressions were also specified to determine how parenting stress and maternal depression interact with maternal age to affect children’s cognitive outcomes.

As shown in Figure 1, TVEM analysis indicates that maternal depression is negatively associated with children’s mental development across maternal ages 20 to 30 but is nonsignficant after age 30. Using this empirically identified age (30) to delineate older and younger mothers, multiple linear regressions were specified in which the child 24 month cognitive outcomes were regressed on the parenting variables and the interactions of the parenting variables with the dichotomous age variable. Parenting stress was negatively associated with children’s mental development for both younger (β = - .48, R2 = .051) and older mothers (β = - .14, R2 = .004) but the associations were much stronger for younger mothers. Maternal depression indicated a similar association such that the associations were greatly attenuated for older mothers [Younger mothers (β = - .35, R2 = .054) and old mothers (β = - .13, R2 = .005)]. Figure 2 represents this interaction.

Taken as a whole, these findings suggest that maternal age moderates the impact of parent stress and maternal depression on children’s cognitive development at 24 months. Notably, the results suggest that for older mothers (age > 30), the negative associations between risk factors become weaker. The results of this work highlight a model of unique maternal resilience that emerges at the age of 30 and is potent in reducing the negative impacts of various risk factors on children’s cognitive development.

Authors

• Linghua Jiang, Syracuse University
  Presenting Author

• Matthew Keefe Mulvaney, Syracuse University