Children’s Temperament and Maternal Behavioral Control: Origins of Heterogeneity in Developmental Trajectories of Committed Compliance from Infancy to Age 3

Abstract

Temperament and parental control are two important factors that influence the early development of children's committed compliance. However, there is a need to comprehensively depict the developmental profiles of committed compliance across the first 3 years and further examine the impacts of these two factors on the profiles. Thus, the current study examined how 92 participants (39 boys) differed in their trajectories of committed compliance throughout toddlerhood and how these individual variances were underpinning of their temperament fearfulness and distractibility in infancy and maternal behavioral control from infancy to toddlerhood. According to children's committed compliance observed in the clean-up task from 14 to 38 months, three groups with different developmental trajectories were identified: the high-level group, the low-level group, and the developmental group. Compared with the high-level group, the mothers reported that the low-level group displayed higher distractibility and lower fearfulness at 6 months. Maternal behavioral control was coded from two 5min mother-child free plays at each age of 10, 14, 25 and 38 months. Results indicated that though the initial level of committed compliance of the two groups were similar at 14 months, the developmental group mothers had a lower mean intercept of behavioral control than the low-level group mothers at 10 months. Moreover, the developmental group mothers tended to decrease their use of behavioral control more slowly than the high-level group mothers. Limitations and implication for future research were discussed.

Don’t touch: Developmental trajectories of toddlers’ behavioral regulation related to older siblings’ behaviors and parental discipline

“…Finally, 12% of toddlers showed a stable low pattern of touching, possibly reflecting the early development of behavioral control. This pattern is comparable to results of Dong et al, () using a cleanup task with mothers, who found a group of children who were stably high on committed compliance during the first 3 years.…”

“…Based on the extant literature on early self-regulation (Bridgett et al, 2015;Dong et al, 2018;Friedman et al, 2011;Kochanska et al, 2001), we expected several potential trajectory patterns for toddler behavioral regulation across 18 to 36 months. First, we expected most children would show a pattern of stable improvement (linear decline in touching over time) in their behavioral regulation from 18 to 36 months.…”

“…The first aim of the current study was to examine toddlers’ behavioral regulation trajectories between 18, 24, and 36 months based on their ability to inhibit touching in a modified gift‐delay task involving their older siblings. Although most young children eventually learn to inhibit their responses, the pathways by which this is accomplished may differ (Dong, Wang, Lu, Liang, & Xing, ; Friedman, Miyake, Robinson, & Hewitt, ; Kochanska et al, ). The development of self‐regulation may not always follow a linear pattern, and, as a result, the ability to inhibit behavior may actually be a developmental process during which children are able to inhibit behavior in some situations, but not others, resulting in inconsistent responding across time before performance is consolidated into a stable pattern.…”

“…A final pattern might reveal a steady linear increase in touching (noncompliance) from 18 to 36 months similar to chronic patterns noted in the development of externalizing behavior from 2 to 5 years of age (Hill, Degnan, Calkins, & Keane, ). Because most children improve in behavioral regulation across this period (Dong et al, ; Friedman et al, ), we expected few toddlers to show this last pattern, but should such a group emerge, they would be worth investigating further given the problematic nature of increased noncompliance. Because this is the first study to examine different trajectories of children's early behavioral regulation in a sibling gift‐delay task, an exploratory descriptive approach was used in which we created a priori groups of toddlers in line with these hypothesized trajectories based on the frequency of toddler touching at each of the three times (described in greater detail later).…”

Autonomy as Core of Creativity and Compliance: Moderated Moderation Model of Maternal Parenting Behaviors

“…All the participants participating in a 7-wave longitudinal study were recruited from the urban areas of Beijing, China. The previous study primarily focused on the development of children's committed compliance in toddlerhood from Wave 3 to Wave 5 (Dong, Wang, Lu, Liang, & Xing, 2018), whereas data from 82 participants (32 boys) on Wave 5 (W5) and Wave 6 (W6) assessments are reported in this study. Twenty-eight percent of the total sample was omitted due to attrition (56%; e.g.…”