Research investigating the association between parents' physiological reactivity and their ability to self‐regulate in parenting contexts typically examines the average physiological response across the duration of a dyadic task, conflating reactivity across a multitude of parent and child behaviors. The present study utilized a moving‐window analytical technique to generate a continuous, second × second time series of mothers' high‐frequency heart rate variability (HF‐HRV) to conduct an event‐based analysis of maternal reactivity in the 10 s following an aversive child event. Analyses examined whether maternal reactivity related to parenting behaviors similarly among maltreating (n = 48) and non‐maltreating (n = 29) mother‐preschooler dyads. Results indicate that maternal behavior was not associated with average HF‐HRV reactivity, but mothers who demonstrated an increase in HF‐HRV immediately following a negative child event were more likely to engage in behaviors to return the dyad to a positive state. Findings were specific to incidents of negative child behavior, and results were not moderated by maltreatment status. These results highlight the value of using an event‐based design to isolate reactivity in response to targeted events to understand how physiological reactivity supports parenting.
Enabling children born into poverty to transcend the circumstances of their birth requires ensuring that they develop the cognitive, intellectual, and behavioral skills needed to succeed at school, and eventually the workplace. Research in developmental neuroscience highlights how brain systems that support these skills are already influenced by risk factors associated with poverty during prenatal development, indicating the potential value of programs targeted at this developmental stage. Such interventions could include programs that support maternal physical and psychological health, as well as efforts to eliminate known neurotoxins from the environment, all of which are disproportionately represented among low-income families. Maternal stress, environmental nicotine, and lead exposure all represent risk factors that not only directly impact child development, but cascade to translate risk into subsequent generations.
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