Abstract
This study examined the longitudinal associations of maternal and paternal warmth and hostility with child executive function problems. Data were collected for two consecutive years from 333 kindergarten children who resided in Hong Kong, China, as well as their mothers, fathers, and class teachers. At Time 1, the average age of children was 57.73 months, and 56% of them were girls. At Time 1, mothers and fathers rated their own parenting practices with their children. At Times 1 and 2, class teachers rated children’s problems in three aspects of executive functions, including updating/working memory, inhibition, and shifting/cognitive flexibility. As control variables, at Time 1, parents provided information on child and family demographic factors, and children completed verbal ability tasks. Multilevel modeling revealed that controlling for child and family demographic factors, child verbal abilities, and paternal parenting practices, maternal hostility, but not maternal warmth, was linked to increases in child inhibition and shifting/cognitive flexibility problems. Moreover, paternal hostility, but not paternal warmth, was linked to increases in updating/working memory problems. Theoretically, this study highlighted the importance of considering the contributions of both mothers and fathers, and differentiating between positive and negative aspects of parenting, when examining the development of child executive functions. Practically, this study pointed to the utility of targeting maternal and paternal hostility in family intervention and community education in order to reduce child executive function problems.
Highlights
Emerging research indicates that children’s executive functions, or abilities to regulate thoughts and behaviors to achieve desirable goals (Garon et al, 2008; Best and Miller, 2010; Miyake and Friedman, 2012; Diamond, 2013), have important implications for their adjustment
Focusing on the longitudinal associations between parenting and child executive functions, maternal warmth at Time 1 was negatively correlated with child updating/working memory problems at Time 2
Despite increasing understanding of parental influences on child executive functions (Fay-Stammbach et al, 2014), prior research on this topic has rarely controlled for prior levels of child executive functions, included both positive and negative aspects of parenting practices in the same analytic model, and collected data from both mothers and fathers
Summary
Emerging research indicates that children’s executive functions, or abilities to regulate thoughts and behaviors to achieve desirable goals (Garon et al, 2008; Best and Miller, 2010; Miyake and Friedman, 2012; Diamond, 2013), have important implications for their adjustment. In Bernier et al.’s (2010) study, the association between maternal warmth (measured when the child was 18month old) and child executive functions (measured when the child was 26-month old) became nonsignificant, after controlling for child executive functions measured when the child was 18month old Taken together, these findings – all of which were based on children’s overall skills of updating/working memory, inhibition, and shifting/cognitive flexibility – highlighted the need of additional research that examines the unique roles of parental warmth and hostility in understanding changes in child executive functions over time. We further controlled for child gender and age and maternal and paternal education levels, as well as child verbal abilities, as an indicator of child verbal or crystalized intelligence (Norton and Wolf, 2012; Schipolowski et al, 2014), in order to isolate the impact of parenting on child executive functions from those of child and family demographic factors (Diamond, 2013; FayStammbach et al, 2014) and child general cognitive functioning (Bernier et al, 2010; Cuevas et al, 2014; Towe-Goodman et al, 2014)
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