Social Development

Parents' responses to children's negative emotional states play a key role in the socialization of emotion regulation skills in childhood. Much of the prior research on child ER has focused on early development using cross-sectional designs. The current study addresses these gaps by using a longitudinal design to examine individual differences of ER at two times points in middle childhood. We examined the development of children's ER by testing hypotheses about the interplay of parent response to emotions and household chaos in the prediction of individual differences in children's ER...

Parent emotion socialization refers to the process by which parents impart their values and beliefs about emotion expressivity to their children. Parent emotion socialization requires attention as a construct that develops in its own right. The socialization of child worry, in particular, has implications for children's typical socioemotional development, as well as their maladaptive development towards anxiety outcomes. Existing theories on emotion socialization, anxiety, and parent-child relationships guided our investigation of both maternal anxiety and toddler inhibited temperament as predictors of change in mothers' unsupportive (i...

Extracurricular involvement in the school-age years has widespread potential benefits for children's subsequent socioemotional development, especially for low-income youth. However, there is a dearth of research on interventions aimed at increasing school-age extracurricular involvement in low-income youth. Thus, the present study aimed to test the collateral effect of a brief, family-focused intervention for low-income families, the Family Check-Up, on children's school-age extracurricular involvement via improvements in maternal Positive Behavior Support in early childhood...

The Family Stress Model (FSM) is an influential family process model that posits that socioeconomic disadvantage impacts child outcomes via its effects on parents. Existing evaluations of the FSM are constrained by limited measures of socioeconomic disadvantage, cross-sectional research designs, and reliance on non-population-based samples. The current study tested the FSM in a subsample of the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study ( N = 2,918), a large population-based study of children followed from birth through age 9...

Behavioral regulation is one of the key developmental skills children acquire during early childhood. Previous research has focused primarily on the role of parents as socializing agents in this process, yet it is likely that older siblings also are influential given the numerous daily interactions between siblings. This exploratory longitudinal study investigated developmental heterogeneity in behavioral regulation during toddlerhood and the early preschool years (18 to 36 months) and relations with older siblings' control and behavioral regulation while taking into account parental discipline...

The cultural value of respeto (respect) is central to Latine parenting. Yet, how respeto manifests in the interactions of Latine parents and their young children remains unexamined. Low-income Mexican immigrant Spanish-speaking mothers and their 2.5-year-old toddlers ( N = 128) were video-recorded during play ( M age = 30.2 months, SD = 0.52), and two culturally informed items of respeto were coded: parent calm authority and child affiliative obedience. Respeto related to standard ratings of mother and child interactions (e...

This study examined early adolescent autonomy and relatedness during disagreements with friends as key social competencies likely to predict academic achievement during the transition to high school and academic attainment into early adulthood. A sample of 184 adolescents was followed through age 29 to assess predictions to academic success from observed autonomy and relatedness during a disagreement task with a close friend. Observed autonomy and relatedness at age 13 predicted relative increases in grade point average (GPA) from 13 to 15, and greater academic attainment by age 29, after accounting for baseline GPA...

Adaptive emotion regulation (ER) in parents has been linked to better parenting quality and social-emotional adjustment in children from middle-income families. In particular, early childhood may represent a sensitive period in which parenting behaviors and functioning have large effects on child social-emotional adjustment. However, little is known about how parent ER and parenting are related to child adjustment in high-risk families. In the context of adversity, parents may struggle to maintain positive parenting behaviors and adaptive self-regulation strategies which could jeopardize their children's adjustment...

The idea that language skills support school readiness, predicting later self-regulation and academic success, is widely accepted. Although vocabulary is often emphasized in the developmental literature, the ability to use language appropriately in the classroom, or social communication skills , may also be critical. This paper examined longitudinal contributions of children's vocabulary and social communication skills, from preschool to kindergarten, to kindergarten academic achievement (reading and math) and self-regulation (executive functions and learning behaviors)...

The current study examined the interplay between children's dispositional anger and susceptibility to peers' influence in increasing children's risk-taking behaviors. Participants in the current study were children from a larger study of temperament and social-emotional development who were followed across 9, 24, 36, 48, and 60 months. Dispositional anger was measured using mothers' reports across 9 and 48 months. At 60 months, children played a risk-taking computer game in presence of an unfamiliar peer who watched the child play...

Adolescents' effortful control is subject to numerous maternal influences. Specifically, a mother's own effortful control is associated with her child's effortful control. However, maternal substance use, psychopathology, and stress within the parenting role may also lead to poor effortful control for their child. Poor effortful control during adolescence can subsequently contribute to a variety of negative outcomes, including externalizing behaviors. A sample of 460 adolescents (47% female, 59.3% Non-Hispanic Caucasian) was selected from a longitudinal, multigenerational study...

The present research proposed that one social-cognitive root of adolescents' willingness to use relational aggression to maintain social status in high school is an entity theory of personality , which is the belief that people's social status-relevant traits are fixed and cannot change. Aggregated data from three studies ( N =882) showed that first-year high school adolescents in the U.S. who endorsed more of an entity theory were more likely to show cognitive and motivational vigilance to social status, in terms of judgments on a novel social categorization task and reports of goals related to demonstrating social status to peers...

Children's psychological and physiological responses to interparental conflict have received considerable attention due to their implications for later adjustment, yet limited research has investigated the interplay between these two response systems. This study investigates patterns of association between children's psychological responses (e.g., emotional distress) and cortisol reactivity to interparental conflict, including possible moderations by negative caregiving environment. Participants included 193 families (mother, father, and child)...

The current project explores maternal inter-parental (IP) romantic partner satisfaction in relation to mother-child conflict and later peer and teacher relations from early to middle childhood among a sample of low-income, ethnically diverse mothers ( N = 271) who were part of a longitudinal study testing the effectiveness of the Family Check-Up intervention. We hypothesized spillover effects from IP dissatisfaction during early childhood to mother-child conflict two years later. Greater mother-child conflict in turn was expected to lead to poorer peer relations and greater conflict with teachers in middle childhood...

Although it is well established that features of maternal speech are associated with children's social understanding in the preschool years, few studies explore this relationship in middle childhood. Within the context of a prospective longitudinal study of a representative community sample of families (subsample n =  207, mean age = 82.88 months), we investigated concurrent associations between mothers' internal state language and aspects of 7-year-olds' social understanding, including children's understanding of belief and spontaneous references to internal states during free play...

This daily diary study investigated the interplay of perceived friend and parent support in adolescents' everyday lives. Specifically, we tested the interactive effects of friend and parent support on adolescent well-being at both the intra- and inter-individual level. A diverse sample of 119 adolescents ( M age =15.36) completed diary reports for two weeks. Multivariate multilevel models demonstrated that on days adolescents felt more supported by their friends or parents, they experienced increases in their happiness and social connectedness...

Parenting is a critical factor in adolescent social-emotional development, with maladaptive parenting leading to risk for the development of psychopathology. However, the emotion-related brain mechanisms underlying the influence of parenting on psychopathology symptoms are unknown. The present study utilized functional magnetic resonance imaging and laboratory measures to examine sex-differentiated associations among parenting, adolescent emotion-related brain function, and substance use and psychopathology symptoms in 66 12-14 year olds...

The effect of parental depression on children's adjustment has been well documented, with exposure during early childhood particularly detrimental. Most studies that examine links between parental depression and child behavior are confounded methodologically because they focus on parents raising children who are genetically related to them. Another limitation of most prior research is a tendency to focus only on the effects of maternal depression while ignoring the influence of fathers' depression. The purpose of this study was to examine whether infants' exposure to both parents' depressive symptoms, and inherited risk from birth mother internalizing symptoms, was related to school age children's externalizing and internalizing problems...

The goal of this study was to examine child and parent predictors of children's hostile attribution bias (HAB) with a particular focus on exploring the associations between parents' early attribution of child misbehavior and children's HAB in the transition to school-age. Participants were 241 children (118 girls) of middle-income families who were at risk for school-age conduct problems. Multi-method, multi-informant data were collected on maternal attributions of child misbehavior, parental use of corporal punishment, and child attributes (i...

The goal of this study was to disentangle the common and unique genetic and environmental influences on social-emotional competence, problem behavior, physiological dysregulation, and negative emotionality (NE) in toddlers. The sample consisted of 243 twin pairs (mean age = 31.94 months) rated by primary caregivers (>95% mothers) on the Children's Behavior Questionnaire and the Infant-Toddler Social and Emotional Assessment. A multivariate Cholesky Decomposition revealed three shared environmental factors, with one set of environmental influences common to competence, problem behavior, and physiological dysregulation, a second common to problem behavior and physiological dysregulation, and a third common to physiological dysregulation and NE...