Abstract
Executive functioning (EF) is associated with various aspects of school achievement and cognitive development in children and adolescents. There has been substantial research investigating associations between EF and other factors in young children, such as support processes and parenting, but less research has been conducted about external factors relating to EF in older children and adolescents. Therefore, the present study investigates one possible factor that could correlate with EF in school-age children and adolescents: parenting behavior. The cross-sectional study design gathered data from 169 children in primary schools, middle-schools, and Gymnasien, and their corresponding parents. All children underwent a standardized task to measure EF, the computer-based Erikson Flanker task, which evaluates EF as a function of error rates and response time. A self-report questionnaire was used to assess parenting behavior. Multilevel analysis was implemented to test the effects of parenting behavior on EF in school-age children. The results show significant associations between various parenting behaviors and children's EF: High scores on parental involvement or parental responsibility are associated with low error rates on the Erikson Flanker task, whereas high parental scores on inconsistent discipline are associated with high error rates. These correlations between parenting behavior and EF remained significant despite controlling for child age, maternal education, family income, and baseline performance (i.e., congruent trials on the Erikson Flanker task). No associations were found between parental behavior and reaction time on the Erikson Flanker task. These results indicate the important association between parenting behaviors and EF skills in school-age children, and foster the necessity to inform parents about ways in which they can optimally support their children's cognitive development.
Highlights
It has been hypothesized that higher Executive functions (EF) skills allow children to meet classroom demands quicker— i.e., those children have better attention capacities, memory of classroom rules, and are more capable to engage in academic content—which may enable them to benefit more from the academic environment that they are in Fuhs et al (2015) demonstrated that teachers’ ratings as well as measurements of EF were directly correlated with academic achievement in prekindergarten children
In order to account for this gap in knowledge, we investigated the associations between seven dimensions of parenting—i.e., positive involvement, supervision, and monitoring, positive discipline, consistency with discipline, use of corporal punishment, responsible parenting, and authoritarian parenting—and EF skills in children and adolescents between 9 and 14
Building onto previous studies, which demonstrated that parenting might play an important role in the development of EF in infants and small children (e.g., Bernier et al, 2010; Blair et al, 2011; Hammond et al, 2012), we implemented a multilevel-hierarchical analytical model to test various ways in which seven aspects of the quality of parental care—involvement, positive parenting, poor monitoring, inconsistent discipline, corporal punishment, responsible parenting, and authoritarian parenting—might be associated with the development of EF in school-age children between the ages 9 and 14, to account for a gap in research within this specific population
Summary
Executive functions (EF), called cognitive control skills, are part of self-regulatory mechanisms that include various cognitive processes of higher order that are involved in goaldirected behavior (Luria, 1966, 1976; Vygotsky, 1980; Stuss and Benson, 1986), such as attention-shifting, problem solving, planning, working memory, and inhibition (Pennington and Ozonoff, 1996; Stuss and Levine, 2002; Fuster, 2008; Garon et al, 2008; Diamond, 2013). The same study showed that teachers reported higher academic and behavioral difficulties in students with weaker EF skills
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