Cognitive control moderates parenting stress effects on children's diurnal cortisol.

Laurel Raffington,Yee Lee Shing,Christine Heim,Florian Schmiedek

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0191215

Abstract

This study investigated associations between parenting stress in parents and self-reported stress in children with children's diurnal cortisol secretion and whether these associations are moderated by known stress-regulating capacities, namely child cognitive control. Salivary cortisol concentrations were assessed from awakening to evening on two weekend days from 53 6-to-7-year-old children. Children completed a cognitive control task and a self-report stress questionnaire with an experimenter, while parents completed a parenting stress inventory. Hierarchical, linear mixed effects models revealed that higher parenting stress was associated with overall reduced cortisol secretion in children, and this effect was moderated by cognitive control. Specifically, parenting stress was associated with reduced diurnal cortisol levels in children with lower cognitive control ability and not in children with higher cognitive control ability. There were no effects of self-reported stress in children on their cortisol secretion, presumably because 6-to-7-year-old children cannot yet self-report on stress experiences. Our results suggest that higher cognitive control skills may buffer the effects of parenting stress in parents on their children’s stress regulation in middle childhood. This could indicate that training cognitive control skills in early life could be a target to prevent stress-related disorders.

Highlights

In middle childhood, parent-reported stress related to their parenting [1,2,3] and children’s self-reported impact of negative life events [4,5,6] have been shown to be viable indicators of children’s stress experiences
We investigated whether parenting stress and self-reported stress are associated with children’s diurnal cortisol secretion and whether this relationship is moderated by cognitive control capacity in middle childhood
For children with lower cognitive control, higher parenting stress was related to reduced diurnal cortisol level (Simple slope at Z = -1: -2.19, t(50) = 3.61, p < 0.05), whereas for children with higher cognitive control, parenting stress was not related to cortisol level (Simple slope at Z = 1: -0.08, t(50) = 0.11, p = 0.91)

Summary

Introduction

Parent-reported stress related to their parenting [1,2,3] and children’s self-reported impact of negative life events [4,5,6] have been shown to be viable indicators of children’s stress experiences. We hypothesize that cognitive control may act as a moderator of the effects of stress exposure on HPA axis activity This may partly explain mixed results associating cortisol levels with executive function that have found both higher [4,20,26,56,70] and lower cortisol levels [71,72,73] associated with outcomes of poorer executive functions. To test this hypothesis, we investigated whether parenting stress and self-reported stress are associated with children’s diurnal cortisol secretion and whether this relationship is moderated by cognitive control capacity in middle childhood. We expected higher cognitive control to buffer the negative effects of stress on diurnal cortisol secretion

Participants

Procedure

Results

Discussion