Children's elicitation of changes in parenting during the early childhood years

Abstract

Using a subsample of the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study-Birth Cohort (ECLS-B; n = 1,550), this study identified parents who engaged in more developmentally problematic parenting—in the form of low investment, above average television watching, and use of spanking—when their children were very young (M = 24.41 months, SD = 1.23) but changed their parenting in more positive directions over time. Latent profile analysis and other techniques revealed that parents who demonstrated less optimal parenting behaviors when their children were 2 years old were more likely to be African American, from lower socioeconomic backgrounds, and experiencing greater depressive symptoms. Approximately half of such parents, however, made positive changes in their parenting practices, with 5% in the profile characterized by high investment and low use of spanking by the time that their children were in elementary school. These positive changes in parenting behavior were more likely to occur among parents whose children were already demonstrating early reading skills and less problem behavior. These potential “child effects”, suggesting that children elicited improvements in parenting, were more pronounced among higher income families but did not vary according to parents’ educational attainment. Findings from this study have important implications for intervention programs, suggesting that children's academic and behavioral skills can be leveraged as one means of facilitating positive parenting.

Children's hyperactivity, television viewing, and the potential for child effects

“…Furthermore, considering that our measures of aggressive and hyperactive child behaviors were based on parent report, it is possible that parents who were less tolerant of their children’s misbehavior rated their children as demonstrating higher behavior problems than their actual behavior. Thus, although parents’ report of child behavior is commonplace in the literature on parenting and child development (Ansari & Crosnoe, 2015a; Lee et al, 2015; Radesky et al, 2014), future studies need to incorporate other methods of assessing children’s behavioral difficulties at home (e.g., direct observations) to confirm that our findings are robust to such shared rater variance. Along these same lines, our measure of hyperactivity demonstrated low reliability, which makes it harder to document change in our focal constructs; therefore, future studies with stronger measures are also needed.…”

“…Indeed, the developmental systems perspective (Lerner, 2006), suggests that children’s development is part of a dynamic and reciprocal transaction between them and their parents. Thus, not only do parents influence children, but children also elicit (either actively or passively) new responses from their parents over time (Ansari & Crosnoe, 2015a, 2015b; Bell, 1968; Lee, Alschul, & Gershoff, 2015; Lugo-Gil & Tamis-Lemonda, 2008; Sameroff & MacKenzie, 2003; Yan & Dix, 2013). This notion of child effects — that children may actively and passively influence the ecologies that then shape their future developmental trajectories — has a long-standing history in developmental research but has been slow to develop, especially when compared with the child outcomes of parenting.…”

Parent Involvement in Head Start and Children's Development: Indirect Effects Through Parenting

“…To test this possibility, our first alternative model included direct paths from parent involvement to all child outcomes. Second, there has been a growing recognition that children evoke changes in parenting behavior that in turn support their early achievement (Ansari & Crosnoe, ; Crosnoe, Augustine, & Huston, ). It might be that the behavior of children who enter Head Start high in academic skills or behavior problems drives parents to become more or less involved over the course of the Head Start year; thus, children's early behavior may be a third variable predicting both the parenting and child outcomes.…”

Parenting Gains in Head Start as a Function of Initial Parenting Skill

“…Furthermore, our primary aim in this study was to determine whether the impacts of Head Start for parents varied across a single dimension—parents' initial skills. Parenting, however, is multidimensional (Ansari & Crosnoe, ), and thus the impacts of Head Start might vary at the intersection of multiple dimensions of parenting behavior. Person‐centered analyses, therefore, could provide important insight into who benefits most from Head Start.…”

“…All models controlled for the same full set of parent and child covariates that were originally included in the final report of the Head Start Impact Study (Puma et al, ): child race, child gender, child age, child disability or special‐needs status, maternal education, maternal marital status, two‐parent household at birth, teenage mother status, caregiver age, maternal nativity, home language, week of first parent interview, and number of weeks elapsed between parent interviews. To further adjust for any departures from randomization, we included additional variables that have been found to contribute to parenting behavior (Ansari & Crosnoe, ; Gershoff et al, ; Mistry et al, ), namely, maternal employment, number of children in the household, hours of care per week in the focal arrangement, residential instability, and children's behavior problems (Child Behavior Checklist; Achenbach, ) and literacy skills (Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test; Dunn & Dunn, ) at baseline (fall 2002). Because parents were not (and indeed could not be) randomly assigned to the initial parenting groupings, we utilized this extensive set of covariates to provide greater precision in our models.…”