The link between child temperament and low-income mothers’ and fathers’ parenting

Numerous studies have shown that children's temperamental characteristics impact the quality and quantity of parent–child interactions. However, these studies have largely focused on middle-class samples, have not compared multiple domains of parenting across mothers and fathers, and have not considered the possibility of nonlinear associations between temperament and parenting. The present study addresses these gaps by examining the potentially nonlinear role of two temperamental characteristics—negative emotionality and sociability—in predicting the quality and quantity of low-income mothers’ and fathers’ parenting. Data were drawn from the Early Head Start Research and Evaluation Project, a study of low-income children and families. Results indicated that whereas parenting quality was somewhat impaired when children were temperamentally vulnerable (low sociability, high negativity), parents increased parenting quantity with the same vulnerable children. There was some evidence that parents were most reactive to children who scored either very high or very low on negative emotionality and sociability in both parenting domains. Patterns also suggest that mothers were more reactive to sociability, and fathers to negative emotionality.     

What Do North American Babies Hear? A large‐scale cross‐corpus analysis

A range of demographic variables influences how much speech young children hear. However, because studies have used vastly different sampling methods, quantitative comparison of interlocking demographic effects has been nearly impossible, across or within studies. We harnessed a unique collection of existing naturalistic, day‐long recordings from 61 homes across four North American cities to examine language input as a function of age, gender, and maternal education. We analyzed adult speech heard by 3‐ to 20‐month‐olds who wore audio recorders for an entire day. We annotated speaker gender and speech register (child‐directed or adult‐directed) for 10,861 utterances from female and male adults in these recordings. Examining age, gender, and maternal education collectively in this ecologically valid dataset, we find several key results. First, the speaker gender imbalance in the input is striking: children heard 2–3× more speech from females than males. Second, children in higher‐maternal education homes heard more child‐directed speech than those in lower‐maternal education homes. Finally, our analyses revealed a previously unreported effect: the proportion of child‐directed speech in the input increases with age, due to a decrease in adult‐directed speech with age. This large‐scale analysis is an important step forward in collectively examining demographic variables that influence early development, made possible by pooled, comparable, day‐long recordings of children's language environments. The audio recordings, annotations, and annotation software are readily available for reuse and reanalysis by other researchers.     

Early-occurring Maternal Depression and Maternal Negativity in Predicting Young Children’s Emotion Regulation and Socioemotional Difficulties

This longitudinal investigation examined the effects of maternal depression and concomitant negative parenting behaviors on children’s emotion regulation patterns and socioemotional functioning. One hundred fifty-one mothers and their children were assessed when children were approximately 1 1/2-, 3-, 4-, and 5-years of age. Ninety-three of the children had mothers with a history of Major Depressive Disorder (MDD) that had occurred within the first 21 months of the child’s birth, and 58 of the children had mothers without any history of MDD. Early-occurring Initial maternal depression predicted children’s dysregulated emotion patterns at age 4 and decreased perceived competence ratings at age 5. Initial maternal depression also indirectly predicted decreased child social acceptance ratings at age 5 through its association with dysregulated emotion patterns. Furthermore, the relation between maternal depression and children’s decreased social acceptance was more pronounced in those offspring with a history of high versus low maternal negativity exposure. Findings increase understanding of the processes by which maternal depression confers risk on children’s socioemotional adjustment.