Stability and Change in Self-Control during the Transition to Parenthood

Abstract

Self-control is associated with a variety of positive life outcomes, including relationship satisfaction, health, educational achievement, and avoiding criminal behavior. A largely unanswered question concerns the extent to which self-control changes across the lifespan and in response to major life events. The present research used prospective 4-wave data from 539 Dutch individuals to examine the self-control trajectory of first-time parents (n = 246) as compared to individuals who did not have children during the research period (n = 293). New parents (especially mothers) reported higher levels of self-control before birth (i.e., during pregnancy), as compared to nonparents. New mothers showed significant nonlinear decreases in self-control, which were especially strong from pregnancy until six months after childbirth. New fathers’ self-control remained largely stable. Furthermore, pregnancy-related stress was associated with lower self-control levels during pregnancy in both first-time mothers and fathers. Higher levels of work-family conflict and family-related stress were associated with lower self-control after childbirth in new fathers, but not in new mothers. These results indicate that major life transitions may be linked to changes in adult self-control. Discussion focuses on the implications of the results for theory and research on the development of self-control in adulthood.

Longitudinal Experience–Wide Association Studies—A Framework for Studying Personality Change

“…Bleidorn et al, 2018). Indeed, evidence for the role of major life events, such as marriage, divorce, unemployment, or retirement, is more mixed than one would expect given the apparent emotional and behavioural relevance of these events (Asendorpf & Wilpers, 1998; Bleidorn & Schwaba, 2018; Denissen et al, 2019; Schwaba & Bleidorn, 2019; Specht et al, 2011; van Scheppingen, Denissen, Chung, Tambs, & Bleidorn, 2018; van Scheppingen, Denissen, & Bleidorn, 2018; for a review, see Bleidorn et al, 2018). The inconclusive nature of the current state of evidence may be partly explained by the scope and quality of previous studies, many of which were not explicitly designed to examine the links between life events and personality change.…”

Stability and change in major life goals during the transition to parenthood

“…Here, we used data only data from the first (6 weeks before the expected birth date; later referred to as T1) and the third occasion (12 months after child birth; later referred to as T2), where the importance of life goals was assessed. The dataset has been used in past research (Lenhausen et al, 2021;Lenhausen et al, 2020;van Scheppingen et al, 2018). However, none of the studies focused on life goals and the first author of the present article had no access to the data prior to preregistering this study.…”

Does having children increase environmental concern? Testing parenthood effects with longitudinal data from the New Zealand Attitudes and Values Study

“…The anticipatory controls were not pre-registered but suggested by the reviewers of the manuscript. A number of pre-birth anticipatory effects have been reported in the literature, such as changes in health-related behaviours [26] and selfcontrol [27]. Scholars recommend considering anticipatory effects when examining life-event changes as ignoring them may bias the results [24].…”

“…Major life events that are planned or at least can be anticipated may produce effects in preparation for the event. Indeed, childbirth has been associated with a number of anticipatory psychological and behavioural effects [24,26,27,38]. Anticipatory effects may bias the findings and can be missed with an insufficient number of pre-event measurements.…”

“…A propensity score matching approach [44] can be used to match prospective parents with non-parents that have similar baseline characteristics. Balancing characteristics that determine the propensity to experience a specific event or an intervention has become widespread in life transition research to avoid biased treatment effects [5,24,27,45,46]. It would be necessary to explore propensity effects with further moderation analyses and to increase confidence in the evidence so far that there are no changes in environmental attitudes and behaviour following childbirth.…”