Maternal Worry Socialization and Toddler Inhibited Temperament: Transactional Associations and Stability across Time

Abstract

influence their children's behaviors, socioemotional competencies, and psychological adjustment. Increasingly, however, theory (Dadds & Roth, 2001;Sameroff, 2010) and research (Yan et al., 2018) alike have pointed to the variety of ways in which children, in turn, impact the caregiving environment that they receive. Much of this recent research has focused on child temperament as a source of influence. The current study builds upon this foundation and provides an innovative contribution to the child anxiety risk literature by testing a novel model of transactional relations between anxiety-relevant child temperament indices (mother-perceived and laboratory-observed) and maternal worry socialization responses in a sample of mother-toddler dyads across time.

Annual Research Review: Developmental pathways linking early behavioral inhibition to later anxiety

“…However, there was no support for the opposite relation: low parental encouragement at age 2 did not predict the parental perception of child shyness at age 4. Expanding on these findings, Price and Kiel (2022) found that toddlers' dysregulated fear in low‐threat laboratory tasks at age 2 predicted mothers' perception of children's inhibited temperament at age 3, which in turn predicted mothers' non‐supportive responses (i.e. punitive behaviors, minimizing and distress reactions) at age 4.…”

“…Importantly, there is evidence for both child‐to‐parent and parent‐to‐child effects; however, these effects are often not direct but are mediated by other processes, such as parental perception of child behavior (e.g. Price & Kiel, 2022) and/or a specific parenting behavior (e.g. Kiel et al., 2021).…”