Relationships among Negative Emotionality, Responsive Parenting and Early Socio‐cognitive Development in Korean Children

Abstract

The present study examined the interplay among negative emotionality, responsive parenting and socio‐cognitive developmental outcomes (i.e., communication, personal‐social and problem‐solving outcomes) in about 1620 Korean children using three waves of longitudinal data spanning the first 2 years of their life. Results from the Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) demonstrated that there were moderate to low degrees of stability in negative emotionality, responsive parenting and socio‐cognitive developmental outcomes from infancy to toddlerhood. Evidence for reciprocity in the parent–child relationship was found; responsive parenting predicted higher levels of subsequent child communication (in infancy and toddlerhood), and infants' higher problem‐solving ability predicted higher responsive parenting in toddlerhood. Overall, the cross‐age associations among the variables were similar between boys and girls, but some different patterns were observed: when controlling for family contextual factors and the within‐time correlations, negative emotionality at an earlier point significantly predicted lower responsive parenting at a later point and vice versa only in girls during infancy, but neither in boys nor in toddlerhood. The implications of these findings are discussed. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Transactional associations between infant negative emotionality and maternal sensitivity: Maternal emotion dysregulation as a moderator.

“…We found that maternal sensitivity was stable, but only during later infancy. This is likely due to the disentanglement of between- and within-person effects, given that our preliminary correlations would suggest that maternal sensitivity is stable across infancy, which would be consistent with other research that has examined parenting behaviors over time (Cha, 2017; Perry et al, 2014, 2018). Compared to other studies that have examined stability in temperament (e.g., Bornstein et al, 2015; Perry et al, 2018), our stability coefficients were lower likely due to the analytic technique extrapolating between-person and within-person effects and differences in the measurement of infant negative emotionality (e.g., mother-report only in previous work vs. our use of multiple assessments).…”

“…Overall, there have been mixed findings in these studies, with some demonstrating there are no significant cross-lag effects from mothers or children (e.g., Verhage et al, 2015; Wittig & Rodriguez, 2019). Other studies only find support for mother-driven effects (i.e., parenting affecting later infant negative emotionality; Cha, 2017; Klein et al, 2018), with such effects being somewhat more prominent during early infancy (Perry et al, 2018; Scaramella et al, 2008). In contrast, studies beginning later in infancy have demonstrated child-driven effects, specifically, higher negative emotionality predicted increases in parent overreactivity from 10 months to 27 months (Lipscomb et al, 2011).…”

Transactional Relationships among Children’s Negative Emotionality, Mothers’ Depression, and Parenting Behavior

“…All measurement variables of the research variables, the error terms of the measurement variables, and the covariance coefficients between errors and residuals are omitted. (Cha, 2017;Yan & Dix, 2014) . ,…”

Responsive Caregiving and Opportunities for Early Learning Associated With Infant Development: Results From a Prospective Birth Cohort in China

“…Furthermore, a recent study revealed that maternal sensitivity at 10 months was beneficial to the development of hot and cold executive function at 48 months of age ( 39 ). Another study that was similar in design to the present study and also entailed a cross-lagged model to analyze the relationship between ASQ development and responsive caregiving in Korean children at 2 years of age, found that responsive caregiving exerted a sustained positive effect on the development of communication regions in infants and young children ( 40 ). A small number of studies showed the impact of child development on family rearing.…”

“…For example, a Japanese study confirmed that a child’s problem behavior at 7.5 years old predicted the caregiver’s overreacting parenting style at 9 years ( 41 ). Investigators in a study in South Korea ascertained that the development domain of problem-solving in infants at 4 months positively predicted responsive caregiving at 13 months ( 40 ). Only a few groups found that there was an interaction between family rearing and child development.…”