Emerging effortful control in infancy and toddlerhood and maternal support: A child driven or parent driven model?

Temperament, mothers' reactions to children's emotional experiences, and emotion understanding predicting adjustment in preschool children

“…Firstly, mothers' non‐supportive reactions to children's emotional experiences and children's temperament did not predict each other, suggesting that, in this sample, mothers' self‐reported responses to children's emotions neither shaped nor were shaped by their children's fear or frustration reactivity or executive control. This result was unexpected, given the support for bidirectional relations among other parenting behaviors and temperament, as well as prior research demonstrating longitudinal associations between children's executive control and maternal supportive reactions (Li et al, ).…”

“…Thus, different methods may be capturing varying aspects of children's temperament resulting in disparate results. Li et al () also measured supportive reactions to children's expression of negative emotions, in contrast to this study, which measured non‐supportive reactions. It is possible that mothers vary, or are more accurate, in reporting on their supportive reactions compared with non‐supportive reactions, as the mean in this study was relatively low ( M = 0.92, SD = 0.43 at T1 and M = 0.95, SD = 0.45 at T2; possible range = 0–4; actual range = 0.00–2.59 at T1 and 0.00–2.45 at T2), possibly reflecting a floor effect.…”

“…The lack of association in the current sample may stem from differences in measurement methods across studies. The current study assessed children's temperament using observed measures, as opposed to more frequently used mother‐reported temperament, as in Li et al (). Observation of children's behavior during a laboratory task may capture individual differences across children within the same, controlled context, but may fail to reflect more typical behavior.…”

“…It may be that mothers are more accurate at reporting their supportive behaviors, and may have more difficulty noticing and reporting their non‐supportive reactions. As Li et al () assessed these relations in younger children, it is also possible that bidirectional effects between emotion socialization and children's temperament may be more salient during different developmental periods. In particular, as child executive control is developing rapidly in the preschool period, its relation to maternal emotion socialization may vary throughout the early childhood period.…”

“…Toddlers with greater effortful control (similar to executive control) had mothers who reported they were more responsive to their children's negative emotions (Li, Pawan, & Stansbury, ). This may occur because children who are well‐regulated may be more receptive to supportive emotion socialization, thus engendering more supportive responses from their mothers.…”