Stressful family environments and children’s behavioral control: A multimethod test and replication study with twins.

Abstract

Young children's behavioral control predicts a broad range of developmental outcomes in child- and adulthood. It is therefore important to study how individual differences in behavioral control arise. Previous studies suggest that there are both genetic and environmental influences, which were estimated in the current study using a sample of mono- and dizygotic same-sex twins. Furthermore, we examined the associations between indicators of a stressful family environment like household chaos, parenting daily hassles, and parental depressive symptoms and children's behavioral control in 2 samples. Children of the same twin pair were randomly divided over 2 samples; a test (N = 201, 48.3% boys, M age 46.53 months) and replication sample (N = 201, 49.8% boys, M age 46.06 months). Both parents reported on their children's effortful control via the Child Behavior Questionnaire and children's cheating behavior was observed during a throwing game. We found that AE models fitted the data for effortful control (A = 31%, E = 69%) and cheating (A = 16%, E = 84%) best. Path analyses revealed that children of parents experiencing more parenting daily hassles and depressive symptoms had lower levels of effortful control in the test sample. Furthermore, we found that children growing up in more chaotic households (parent report) had an increased risk of being in the cheating group versus the possible intention to cheat group in the test sample. These results were partially replicated. We suggest that the role of stressful family environments in the development of behavioral control should be considered when setting up prevention and intervention programs targeting children's behavioral control. (PsycINFO Database Record

Neural and behavioral signatures of social evaluation and adaptation in childhood and adolescence: The Leiden consortium on individual development (L-CID)

“…The L-CID studies referred to in this review made use of the classic ACE twin design in two overlapping cohorts of 238 twin pairs (ages 3−9-years) and 256 twin pairs (ages 7−13-years). We found considerable heritability estimates for questionnaire trait phenotypes of prosociality and effort-full control ( van Wijk et al, 2019a ; Vrijhof et al, 2018 ), modest evidence for shared environmental and genetic factors explaining individual differences in (more state-like) behavioral aggression in the SNAT paradigm in 7–9-year-old children ( Achterberg et al, 2018b ) and 7−11-year old children ( Achterberg et al, 2020 ), but limited evidence for genetic contribution to behavioral task performance on the PCG for 7–9-year-old children ( van der Meulen et al, 2018 ). The differences in genetic versus environmental explanations of interindividual variation in prosociality, feelings of rejection and bias to display aggression might be related to the E component of the ACE modeling that represents unique environmental influences (making children within one family more different from each other) as well as measurement error.…”

The relationship between household chaos and child, parent, and family outcomes: a systematic scoping review

“…Outcomes included responses to challenges, social skills/competence, emotion regulation, risky behaviours, attention, aspirations, aggression, conduct problems, and callous-unemotional traits. Overwhelmingly, household chaos was shown to be associated with adverse outcomes in both younger children and adolescents [3, 4, 6, 10, 25, 31-33, 38, 41-44, 49, 55, 57, 62-64, 67, 68, 72, 80, 82, 83]; however, it was not shown to be associated with self-regulation and effortful control [53,83], empathy [64], sexual risk or other violent behaviours in adolescents [44], or occupational aspirations in 7 year olds [47].…”

The Relationship between Household Chaos and Child, Parent, and Family Outcomes: A Systematic Scoping Review

“…Outcomes included responses to challenges, social skills/competence, emotion regulation, risky behaviours, attention, aspirations, aggression, conduct problems, and callous-unemotional traits. Overwhelmingly, household chaos was shown to be associated with adverse outcomes in both younger children and adolescents (3, 4, 6, 10, 26, 32-34, 39, 42-45, 50, 56, 58, 63-65, 68, 69, 73, 81, 83, 84); however, it was not shown to be associated with self-regulation and effortful control (54,84), empathy (65), sexual risk or other violent behaviours in adolescents (45), or occupational aspirations in 7 year olds(48).…”