Why did we do this study?
- A child’s temperament can influence their environment. For example, children who display negative emotionality, such as anger, are often perceived as more challenging to manage, leading parents to use negative parenting practices with them.
- In turn, negative parenting practices can lead to poor child outcomes (e.g., poor academic performance and mental health).
- This study explored how different parenting approaches influence the connection between a child’s temperament and their academic performance and mental health.
What did we do?
- We used data from 163 families from Wave 2.
- Children’s Temperament:
- Mothers completed questionnaires about their children’s temperament (anger/frustration) using the Early Childhood Behavior Questionnaire (ECBQ) or the Child Behavior Questionnaire (CBQ), depending on the child’s age.
- Parenting Practices:
- Maternal responsivity (i.e., mothers who consider and respond to the knowledge and abilities of their children) was assessed through a 5-minute videotaped interaction where mothers and children engaged in a building task. Trained observers rated the mothers’ behaviours using the Responsive Interactions for Learning (RIFL) measure, where a higher score means higher maternal responsivity.
- Mothers also completed the Parental Cognitions and Conduct Toward the Infant Scale (PACOTIS) to report their hostile-reactive behaviours and overprotection toward their children
- Children’s Academic Performance:
- Children’s receptive vocabulary (i.e., the collection of words that a person can understand and respond to, even if they can’t produce those words) was assessed using the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test Fourth Edition (PPVT-IV)
- Children’s Mental Health:
- Mothers reported on their children’s conduct problems using the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire (SDQ).
- The data were analyzed using structural equation modeling, which allowed us to examine the relationships between the different variables.
What did we find?
- When children were more prone to having an angry temperament, their mothers tended to use harsher or more hostile parenting. This type of parenting was linked to children showing more conduct issues, like acting out or breaking rules. Hostile parenting played a key role in explaining why children with difficult temperaments were more likely to have mental health problems.
- Children whose mothers were more responsive during interactions had higher receptive vocabulary scores, while children of mothers who were more overprotective had lower scores.
What does this mean?
- Parenting beliefs and behaviours play an important role in shaping children’s development, particularly for children with more difficult temperaments.
- Parenting programs should be tailored to address both the child’s temperament and specific parenting practices.
- Interventions that reduce hostile and overprotective parenting while increasing responsiveness could improve children’s academic and mental health outcomes.