Elsevier

Early Childhood Research Quarterly

Volume 36, 3rd Quarter 2016, Pages 537-549
Early Childhood Research Quarterly

Sociodemographic risk, parenting, and executive functions in early childhood: The role of ethnicity

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecresq.2016.02.001Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Risk predicts lower maternal sensitivity and higher negative-intrusiveness.

  • Parenting in infancy mediates the effects of risk on toddlerhood parenting.

  • Parenting behaviors fully mediate the effects of risk on executive functions.

  • Among European American families, sensitivity mediates risk’s effects.

  • Among African American families, negative-intrusiveness is the mediator.

Abstract

The current study examined whether parenting behaviors in early childhood mediated the effects of cumulative risk on executive functions at school entry, and whether these effects differed as a function of ethnicity. Risk and parenting were assessed in infancy (3–12 months) and toddlerhood (24–36 months) using parent-report and observational measures; executive functions were assessed at 60 months using a battery of behavioral tasks. A series of structural equation models revealed that while risk predicted lower levels of maternal sensitivity and higher levels of negative intrusiveness in a manner that was consistent across ethnic subsamples, the effects of parenting behaviors on executive functions varied by ethnicity. Higher levels of sensitivity predicted higher levels of executive functions only among European American participants, while higher levels of negative intrusiveness predicted lower levels of executive functions only among African American participants. These findings underscore the importance of incorporating an understanding of parenting behaviors in their cultural context into early-education programs designed to improve executive functions among children at risk.

Introduction

Executive functions are a set of cognitive processes that allow individuals to organize their behavior in pursuit of goals (Brocki and Bohlin, 2004, Friedman et al., 2008, Wiebe et al., 2011). Teachers rate these processes as essential for school readiness (Brock, Rimm-Kaufman, Nathanson, & Grimm, 2009), and thus it is not surprising that higher levels of executive functions predict better academic performance in school (Blair & Razza, 2007; Bull, Espy, & Wiebe, 2008; Clark, Pritchard, & Woodward, 2010; Lan, Legare, Ponitz, Li, & Morrison, 2011). Differences in executive functions between African American students and their European American counterparts at school entry (Nesbitt, Baker-Ward, & Willoughby, 2013) may therefore contribute to the observed gap in academic achievement between these groups in the early school years (Downey, 2008, Fryer and Levitt, 2004). Given this, it is important to understand the contextual factors that influence the emergence of executive functions, particularly during infancy and toddlerhood, when the rapid maturation of the prefrontal cortex lays the foundation for the emergence of higher order cognitive processes.

There is accumulating evidence that poverty and parenting predict executive functions in late toddlerhood and preschool (cf., Blair et al., 2011), but less is known about how cumulative risk – a concept that encompasses both poverty and other risk factors – and parenting may work in tandem to predict executive functions at school entry. Integrating the concept of cumulative risk with the family stress model (e.g., Conger, Ge, Elder, Lorenz, & Simons, 1994; McLoyd, 1990) suggests that the effects of risk on executive functions are transmitted by parenting behaviors, but this account has been empirically evaluated in only a small number of studies (cf., Blair et al., 2011), and none of these examined executive functions at school entry. Moreover, it is possible that the effects of risk on executive functions and the mediating role of parenting behaviors differ by ethnicity. African American families are exposed to higher levels of environmental risk than their European American counterparts (DeNavas-Walt, Proctor, & Smith, 2015; U.S. Census Bureau, 2012, U.S. Census Bureau, 2013), and both the frequency (Ispa et al., 2004, McLoyd and Smith, 2002) and meaning (cf., García Coll & Magnusson, 1999) of certain parenting behaviors differ by ethnicity. Thus, differences in relative levels of risk and parenting behaviors, together with variation in the meaning of these factors by ethnicity, may lead to differences in the relationships among risk, parenting, and executive functions in early childhood.

In this study, we investigate how risk and parenting during two developmental periods in early childhood – infancy and toddlerhood – predict executive functions at school entry. By excluding parenting behaviors from our index of distal risk, we are able to test whether the effects of risk on executive functions are mediated by parenting behaviors, consistent with the family stress model. Moreover, by testing this model in a diverse sample, we are able to examine whether the relationships among risk, parenting and executive functions differ among African American and European American children.

Section snippets

Cumulative risk and executive functions

Though the specific processes counted among executive functions varies (cf., Willoughby, Holochwost, Blanton, & Blair, 2014), those most commonly cited are working memory, behavioral inhibition, and the ability to flexibly shift attention (also referred to as set shifting; Blair, Granger, & Razza, 2005; Blair et al., 2011; Miyake, Friedman, Emerson, Witzki, & Howerter, 2000; Ursache, Blair, & Raver, 2012). Each of these component abilities undergoes rapid development during infancy and

Risk, parenting, and executive functions: a mediation model

A version of the family stress model informed by the concept of cumulative risk suggests that the accumulation of individual risk factors overwhelms the parent and erodes their ability to maintain an optimal caregiving environment (McLoyd, 1998). According to this account, as the number of risk factors in the parent’s environment increased, the frequency of sensitive parenting behaviors would decrease while the frequency of negative parenting behaviors would increase. Both the child’s

The current study

While the studies reviewed above have contributed much to our knowledge of how risk and parenting influence the development of executive functions in early childhood, a number of questions remain unanswered. The current study addressed two of these questions: are the effects of risk in infancy and toddlerhood on executive functions at school entry mediated by parenting behaviors in infancy and, toddlerhood in a manner consistent with the family stress model? And do the relationships among risk,

Participants

The participants were full-term, healthy infants recruited at 3 months for a longitudinal study of child development using fliers and postings at birth and parenting centers or through phone contact via birth records. As has been reported elsewhere (Pungello et al., 2009), participants were recruited according to a stratified sampling plan in an effort to assemble a sample with approximately equal numbers of European American and African American families from low- and middle-income groups. The

Preliminary analyses

Table 2 presents descriptives and bivariate correlations among ethnicity, gender, risk and parenting in both infancy and toddlerhood, and executive functions. While no significant relationship was observed between any variable and gender, European American ethnicity was associated with significantly lower cumulative risk scores in infancy (r (195) = −.41, p < .001) and toddlerhood (r (183) = −.39, p < .001), higher levels of sensitivity in infancy (r (193) = .34, p < .001) and toddlerhood (r (176) = .38, p < 

Discussion

This study tested a model in which parenting during infancy and toddlerhood was hypothesized to mediate the effects of cumulative risk on executive functions at school entry. By testing this model in a diverse sample, it was possible to examine whether the relationships among risk, parenting, and executive functions varied by ethnicity. While higher levels of risk were found to predict parenting behaviors in a manner that was consistent for both African American and European American families,

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    This study was supported by The North Carolina Child Development Research Collaborative which was funded by the National Science Foundation. The authors would like to thank all the parents who participated in the Durham Child Health and Development Study and the research assistants for their valuable help in collecting this data, as well as Kimberly Turner Nesbitt for her comments on a previous draft of the manuscript.

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