Sociodemographic risk, parenting, and executive functions in early childhood: The role of ethnicity☆
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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2020, Developmental ReviewCitation Excerpt :While there is no single answer to such a complex question, an integration of ecological (Bronfenbrenner & Morris, 1998) and transactional (McLoyd, 1998) theories suggests that poverty – an aspect of the child’s distal environment – affects development through its influence on more proximal systems. For the young child, relationships with parental caregivers are a particularly salient aspect of the proximal environment, and thus the tendency for poverty to erode parental caregivers’ capacity to engage in positive behaviors while increasing the likelihood that they will engage in negative behaviors (Holochwost et al., 2016; Popp, Spinrad, & Smith, 2008), may, in part, explain how poverty influences HPA-axis activity (Institute of Medicine & National Research Council, 2015). And yet this account is incomplete, given that the social conditioning of HPA-axis activity occurs through interactions with caregivers other than children’s parents (Flinn, 2006; Gunnar & Quevedo, 2007; Hostinar, Sullivan, & Gunnar, 2014) and that many young children spend a considerable amount of their time with non-parental caregivers in early care and education settings (Capizzano & Main, 2005; Corcoran & Steinley, 2017).
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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.