Parent-child co-regulation of affect in early childhood pathways to children's externalizing behavior problems.

Affective synchrony in early parent-infant interaction is essential to the development of children's emotion regulation. However, we know less about parent and child co-regulation of affect in early childhood and its relationship to individual differences in children's behavioral and regulatory difficulties. The present study examined affect co-regulation in early parent-child interactions and its effect on children's externalizing problems across the transition to school. Child gender, child temperament (effortful control), and parental risk (problem drinking) were also incorporated as developmental risk factors for externalizing behavior problems. Participants (N = 235) were part of a longitudinal study of children at risk for conduct problems. Mother-child and father-child dyads were assessed for affect co-regulation via a videotaped, challenging block design task completed at home when children were 3 years old. Using a new method designed for simple affect coding systems, co-regulation was operationalized as trends of concurrent and time-lagged relations between parent and child affect (positive and negative) across the interaction. Externalizing problems were assessed via mothers', fathers', and teachers' CBCL reports. Effortful control was a composite of laboratory assessment and maternal report. Mixed modeling, hierarchical linear modeling, and linear regression were used to examine between-dyad differences in affect co-regulation and their effects on children's concurrent (3 years) and later (6 years) externalizing behavior problems. Co-regulation predicted later externalizing problems beyond the effects of effortful control and baseline externalizing, which were robust. When parents' positive affect was typically followed by a greater increase in children's positive affect, children showed greater declines in externalizing overtime. Conversely, a response of increased negativity to a partner's negative affect predicted lesser declines in externalizing over time, but this effect differed by parent: the mother's negative response to the child and the child's negative response to the father were associated with higher risk. There were no effects of child gender or parental problem drinking. Findings suggest that the study of structure in early parent-child dyadic interaction, in this case the co-regulation of positive and negative affect, may inform the etiology of individual differences in developmental psychopathology in early childhood.Ph.D.Developmental psychologyPsychologyUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/126226/2/3238025.pd

Breaking down the coercive cycle: How parent and child risk factors influence real-time variability in parental responses to child misbehavior.

Objective: Parent–child coercive cycles have been associated with both rigidity and inconsistency in parenting behavior. To explain these mixed findings, we examined real-time variability in maternal responses to children’s off-task behavior to determine whether this common trigger of the coercive cycle (responding to child misbehavior) is associated with rigidity or inconsistency in parenting. We also examined the effects of risk factors for coercion (maternal hostility, maternal depressive symptoms, child externalizing problems, and dyadic negativity) on patterns of parenting. Design: Mother–child dyads (N = 96; M child age = 41 months) completed a difficult puzzle task, and observations were coded continuously for parent (e.g., directive, teaching) and child behavior (e.g., on-task, off-task). Results: Multilevel continuous-time survival analyses revealed that parenting behavior is less variable when children are off-task. However, when risk factors are higher, a different profile emerges. Combined maternal and child risk is associated with markedly lower variability in parenting behavior overall (i.e., rigidity) paired with shifts toward higher variability specifically when children are off-task (i.e., inconsistency). Dyadic negativity (i.e., episodes when children are off-task and parents engage in negative behavior) are also associated with higher parenting variability. Conclusions: Risk factors confer rigidity in parenting overall, but in moments when higher-risk parents must respond to child misbehavior, their parenting becomes more variable, suggesting inconsistency and ineffectiveness. This context-dependent shift in parenting behavior may help explain prior mixed findings and offer new directions for family interventions designed to reduce coercive processes. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved