Maternal emotional support but not cognitive support during problem-solving predicts increases in cognitive flexibility in early childhood

Abstract

Cognitive flexibility is a sophisticated form of executive functions that predicts a range of adaptive outcomes; however, little is known about which caregiving behaviors predict the rapid improvements in children’s cognitive flexibility during early childhood. This study examined whether ordinary variations in mothers’ provision of emotional and cognitive support during problem-solving predict children’s cognitive flexibility and tested whether children’s cognitive flexibility predicts caregiving behaviors across time. Two hundred and seventy-eight children and their caregivers (96% mothers) participated in laboratory visits when children were in preschool, kindergarten, and first grade. At each visit, cognitive flexibility was measured via a computerized version of the Dimensional Change Card Sort task and mothers’ behaviors were observed during a semi-structured problem-solving board game task. Results from autoregressive cross-lagged structural regression analyses indicated that mothers’ emotional support predicted greater child cognitive flexibility from preschool to kindergarten, and from kindergarten to first grade, after accounting for the stability in these constructs over time and controlling for the influence of maternal education, and child age and minority status. Mothers’ cognitive support did not predict child cognitive flexibility over time. Child cognitive flexibility did not lead to changes in caregiving behaviors over time. Findings suggest that mothers’ provision of emotional support during problem-solving may be an important proximal mechanism that contributes to children’s cognitive flexibility across early childhood.

On the importance of being flexible: early interrelations between affective flexibility, executive functions and anxiety symptoms in preschoolers

“…Regarding the contribution of maternal education, a longitudinal study by Zeytinoglu, Calkins, and Leerkes (2019) found that maternal education was moderately related to cognitive flexibility in school age children, but strongly related to maternal emotional support. We can infer that such maternal emotional support can be particularly useful for the development of affective flexibility and might explain the stronger predictive role of maternal education for this emotional dimension of flexibility, possibly as a result of increased maternal emotional support associated with a higher educational level.…”

Maternal behavior predicts neural underpinnings of inhibitory control in preschoolers

“…ICCs ranged from r = 0.76 to 0.91, all p < 0.01. Based on our previous work (Zeytinoglu et al, ,), these three dimensions of maternal behavior were used as indicators to construct a latent factor of maternal emotional support.…”

“…This work has demonstrated that maternal behavior in these contexts predicts child performance on tasks measuring EF abilities like IC (e.g., Blair et al, ; Conway & Stifter, ; Cuevas et al, ; Leerkes, Blankson, O'Brien, Calkins, & Marcovitch, ; Rochette & Bernier, ; Rogoff, ; Zeytinoglu et al, ). In particular, maternal use of emotional support, defined as encouraging autonomy, providing positivity, encouragement, and praise when needed, and helping the child to manage frustration and negativity, has been shown to uniquely relate to these, even when other aspects of parenting behavior like cognitive support and general emotional responsiveness were also measured (Leerkes et al, ; Valcan et al, ; Zeytinoglu, Calkins, & Leerkes, ).…”

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