Child differential sensitivity to parental self-efficacy improvement

Abstract

This study investigates the hypothesis of a child differential sensitivity to parenting improvement. One hundred and fourteen parents of preschoolers participated in two parenting micro-trials aiming to increase parental self-efficacy in view of improving child behavior. The first micro-trial took place in a short-term laboratory experiment; the other was an eight-week parenting group intervention, both focusing on altering parental cognition. Differential effects of parental self-efficacy improvement on child’s positive and negative behaviors, depending on child temperament, were compared at post-test between control and experimental groups. Both observation and questionnaires were used to measure child behavior as well as regression and Regions of Significance analyses. Child differential sensitivity was found both in the laboratory experiment and in the parenting intervention for the temperamental trait of negative emotionality but not for the temperamental trait of activity. However, this sensitivity was in an unexpected direction. Highly emotional children benefited less from this parental cognitive improvement than children low on emotionality. These results may be explained by the specific cognitive nature of these two parenting micro-trials.

Intervention-induced temperament changes in children: Evidence from a randomized controlled trial of the Incredible Years parent program.

“…Even though several correlational studies find a moderating effect of temperament between parenting and disruptive behavior (Pluess & Belsky, 2013; Roisman et al, 2012; van Aken et al, 2007), experimental studies that find the same results are scarce. Those who did find some effects (Mouton et al, 2018; Scott & O’Connor, 2012; Slagt et al, 2017) did not include RCT data of parenting interventions, aimed at decreasing CDB, or did not look at all three temperament dimensions (e.g., negative emotionality, effortful control, and surgency), and thus are limited in providing evidence for the moderating effect of temperament on the link between parenting and CDB. While we measured whether a parenting intervention (of which we know it led to changes in parenting; see Weeland et al, 2017) decreased CDB, we did not find the expected moderating effect.…”

Teachers matter in early childhood: The relation between teacher behaviours and executive function development in toddlerhood

“…Because our study was not designed to investigate cultural differences, we refrain from speculating about underlying mechanisms, but we consider this an important avenue for future research. Finally, micro‐trial studies (Mouton et al, 2018; Staff et al, 2021) may give the opportunity to investigate which specific teacher behaviours are important for EF development in early childhood. For example, more specific behavioural measures of constructs that are conceptually more closely related to EF, such as teachers' EF‐related behaviours in the classrooms can be investigated in the context of child EF development (Bardack & Obradović, 2019).…”

Parents’ differential susceptibility to a “micro” parenting intervention: Rationale and study protocol for a randomized controlled microtrial

“…Based on previous work that demonstrated medium effects ( d ) of the “micro” parenting intervention [ 10 , 11 , 29 , 30 ] and a priori power analyses for investigating our hypotheses in a two-sided test at α = .05 and power (1-β) = .80 [ 31 ], data will be collected from 120 four-to-six-year-old children and their parents—recruited via flyers, social networks and letters distributed by elementary schools in The Netherlands ( Fig 1 ). Exclusion criteria for the children will be (a) psychiatric/neurological disorder (as reported by the parent), (b) mental retardation (IQ < 70), (c) not mastering the Dutch language, and (d) that their child is not living in another household during the weekdays.…”