Relationships Between Maternal Emotion Regulation, Parenting, and Children’s Executive Functioning in Families Exposed to Intimate Partner Violence

Abstract

Recently researchers have begun to explore the extent to which children's cognitive development is influenced by experiences in the family environment. Assessing mother-child dyads exposed to intimate partner violence (IPV), a population at risk for emotional and neurocognitive problems, we examined relationships between maternal emotional regulation, parenting, and children's executive functioning (including working memory, inhibitory control, cognitve flexibility and set shifting, and planning). Positive parenting practices, as reported by the children, were correlated with children's planning and problem solving performance. Controlling for children's own emotion regulation and gender, mothers' self-reported emotion regulation abilities predicted children's performance on a task of cognitive flexibility. Girls exhibited superior emotion regulation and executive functioning performance compared to boys, and mothers of girls reported better emotion regulation abilities compared to mothers of boys. These findings add to a nascent literature suggesting that parenting and parental emotional functioning may play important roles in children's neurocognitive functioning. In addition, they help to explain the mechanisms by which children exposed to IPV experience executive functioning deficits.