Predicting self-regulation and vocabulary and academic skills at kindergarten entry: The roles of maternal parenting stress and mother-child closeness

Highlights

• We examined longitudinal implications of maternal parenting stress for children.

• Parenting stress was inversely related to mother-child closeness and self-regulation.

• Parenting stress was inversely related to kindergarten entry vocabulary and academic skills.

• Mother-child closeness and self-regulation skills predicted vocabulary and academic skills.

• Mother-child closeness and self-regulation skills were mediators.

Abstract

We examined the indirect relations between maternal parenting stress when children were 15months of age and children’s vocabulary and academic skills when they were about to enter kindergarten, testing for potential mediation by mother-child closeness and children’s self-regulation skills. Participants had been involved in the Early Head Start Research and Evaluation Project and included 1760 European American, African American, and Hispanic low-income mother-child dyads. Structural equation modeling revealed that mothers’ parenting stress when children were 15 months old was inversely related to children’s vocabulary and academic skills just prior to kindergarten, and that mother-child closeness at 25 months and children’s pre-kindergarten self-regulation skills consecutively mediated these associations in a three-path mediation model. The findings highlight the benefits of mother-child closeness in toddlerhood, and negative implications of maternal parenting stress. The discussion focuses on how maternal parenting stress is related to later maternal behavior, ultimately shaping child outcomes.

Introduction

Researchers have found that parenting stress, or parents’ subjective experience of distress regarding the parenting role (Abidin, 1992), can hinder children’s early academic skills, including vocabulary and approaches to learning, in part via diminished parental cognitive stimulation (Ayoub, Vallotton, & Mastergeorge, 2011; Chazan-Cohen et al., 2009; Noel, Peterson, & Jesso, 2008). Importantly, the contributions of parental stress to children’s early academic skills are likely to operate indirectly via intervening factors, such as parent-child relationship qualities and children’s socioemotional adjustment. However, research that examines these indirect processes in early childhood is limited. The goal of the present study was to investigate how low-income mothers’ parenting stress may indirectly impact vocabulary and early academic skills of children just before kindergarten entry via mother-child closeness and children’s self-regulation skills.

For children to succeed when they reach kindergarten, they must be ready for the demands of a school day, such as following directions, paying attention, and understanding basic academic terms (Rimm-Kaufman, Pianta, & Cox, 2000). Children who enter school with strong early academic and social skills are likely to adjust well to school and to complete high school (Ensminger & Slusarcick, 1992). Unfortunately, kindergarten teachers seem to be in wide agreement that many of their students are not ready to succeed academically, with a nationally representative sample of kindergarten teachers reporting that just 26% of first-time kindergarten students demonstrated positive approaches to learning “very often.” Supporting the validity of teachers’ views, fall approaches to learning scores were positively associated with mathematics, reading, and science scores in kindergarten and first grade (Kena et al., 2015). School readiness is an especially serious problem for children in low-income families (Duncan & Magnuson, 2013). Thus, it is important to identify the factors that affect children’s academic skills, particularly for children growing up in poverty.

Research identifying the skills most important for children’s readiness to start school commonly focuses on aspects of socioemotional functioning, early numeracy, and language skills. One key aspect of socioemotional functioning is self-regulation, or the ability to focus attention and exercise inhibitory control – that is, control automatic responses by restraining irrelevant responses while initiating nondominant adaptive solutions (Duncan et al., 2007; Son, Lee, & Sung, 2013). Self- regulation skills are critical for school success because children who are strong self-regulators are able to focus attention and engage in classroom content (Blair & Razza, 2007; McClelland, Cameron, Wanless, & Murray, 2007). Additionally, researchers have found that children’s self-regulation skills predict math and reading scores concurrently and longitudinally (Guimard, Hubert, Crusson-Pondeville, & Nocus, 2012; McClelland, Acock, & Morrison, 2006).

Unfortunately, much research suggests that poverty hinders the development of these skills and that low-income children are more likely than middle-income children to experience negative outcomes in school, in part due to regulatory deficits (Blair et al., 2011; Brock, Rimm-Kaufman, Nathanson, & Grimm, 2009; Evans & English, 2002). For example, Duncan and Murnane (2014) found that at the start of the school year, kindergarten teachers rate higher-income students ahead of children from low-income families on measures of attention, engagement in schoolwork, and early math and literacy skills, and these gaps had not decreased at 5th grade. The individual and relational mechanisms through which poverty affects families likely underlie such deficits (Yoshikawa, Aber, & Beardslee, 2012).

Rates of depression and general stress are high among low-income mothers with young children. For example, among mothers participating in the Early Head Start Research and Evaluation Project (EHSREP), almost half (48%) suffered from a moderate to severe number of depressive symptoms at the study’s outset. At this time, a quarter of the mothers were pregnant; the rest had infants younger than 12 months of age. Pregnant women were especially likely to be at risk of depression; 68% reported clinically significant levels of depressive symptoms. When children were 1 year old, and two years later when children were age 3, 33% of mothers scored above a clinical cutoff for depressive symptoms. For 12% of the mothers, depression was chronic as reflected by high scores at both time-points (Administration for Children and Families, 2006). A recent study of low-income mothers in Maryland uncovered the same pattern; over half reported feeling depressed, hopeless, or sad (Goldhagen, Harbin, & Forry, 2013).

Families living in poverty contend with many more stress-inducing circumstances than more advantaged families, including higher probabilities of family instability, food insecurity, substandard housing, inadequate transportation, low-status work with little job security, mismatch between work hours and the hours of most child care establishments, and neighborhood violence (Evans, Chen, Miller, & Seeman, 2012; Heberle, Thomas, Wagmiller, & Briggs-Gowan, 2014; Ispa, Thornburg, & Fine, 2006). Such contextual barriers contribute to difficulties coping with the psychological demands of parenting (Conger, Ge, Elder, Lorenz, & Simons, 1994; Garbarino, Vorrasi, & Kostelny, 2002; Magnuson & Duncan, 2002). Moreover, low life satisfaction, greater general psychological distress, and parenting stress tend to co-occur (Crnic & Greenberg, 1990; Thompson, Merritt, Keith, Bennett, & Johndrow, 1993). This problem is compounded by very limited access to affordable mental health treatment (Ayoub, Bartlett, Chazan-Cohen, & Raikes, 2014).

Parenting stress differs from general depression in that general depression is typically defined in broader terms and as involving feelings of malaise or sadness in regards to many aspects of daily living, whereas parenting stress involves negative feelings stemming specifically from the parenting role. For example, in addition to tapping general distress, the subscales of the widely used Parenting Stress Index assess the degree to which parents find parenting overly restrictive and emotionally burdensome, and the extent to which they feel that their children have less desirable qualities than other children (Abidin, 1990).

We focus on parenting stress in toddlerhood because this developmental period is challenging for many parents due to heightened negativity and oppositionality as children strive for autonomy (Keenan & Wakschlag, 2000; Williford, Calkins, & Keane, 2007). In fact, Ayoub et al. (2011) found that in the EHSREP sample, children’s self-regulation scores dipped at 24 months as compared to their scores at 14 and 36 months. Moreover, parenting stress during children’s first years may have implications for future developmental outcomes. For instance, Benzies, Harrison, and Magill-Evans (2004) found that parenting stress during infancy predicts behavior problems in later childhood. Given the positive association between depressive symptomatology and parenting stress (Whiteside-Mansell et al., 2007), studies indicating that maternal depression during infancy is more strongly linked to long-term adjustment than maternal depression when children are older underscore the importance of examining the longitudinal implications of early parenting stress (Bureau, Easterbrooks, & Lyons-Ruth, 2009; Murray, Cooper, & Hipwell, 2003).

Belsky (1984) asserted that parents’ psychological well-being is a key factor in parenting and children’s development because it affects parents’ functioning in the childrearing role, and because parents who are psychologically healthy are better able to enlist valuable outside support. In support of this idea, others have found that parenting stress, an indicator of psychological well-being, predicts low child-directed nurturance and positivity, low dyadic pleasure, and the use of inconsistent, strict, and power-assertive disciplinary practices (Anthony et al., 2005; Crnic, Gaze, & Hoffman, 2005; Crnic and Greenberg, 1987, Deater-Deckard, 2004, Deater-Deckard and Scarr, 1996). Further, multiple studies show negative linkages among various measures of maternal stress and children’s pre-academic skills, including receptive and expressive language skills and approaches to learning (Ayoub et al., 2011; Chazan-Cohen et al., 2009; Noel, Peterson, & Jesso, 2008).

Attachment theory (Ainsworth, Blehar, Waters, & Wall, 1978; Bowlby, 1969) complements the process model of parenting in highlighting parent-child closeness as central in children’s development. A large body of research supports this premise, suggesting that maternal sensitivity and positive regard, behaviors that promote mother-child closeness, predict a range of concurrent and future positive child outcomes, including verbal and math ability (Downer & Pianta, 2006; Harris, Sideris, Sipwell, Burchinal, & Pickett, 2014). Maternal sensitivity and positive regard also predict children’s scores on tests of language development, math skills, and general cognitive development, perhaps in part because self-regulation is compromised when mothers are less sensitive (Connell and Prinz, 2002, Downer and Pianta, 2006, Harris et al., 2014; Pungello, Iruka, Dotterer, Mills-Koonce, & Reznick, 2009; Tamis-LeMonda, Shannon, Cabrera, & Lamb, 2004).

Early caregiving is a central mechanism influencing self-regulation; it is through interactions with caregivers that children are exposed to regulatory strategies and given the chance to develop their own self-regulation skills (Kopp, 1989). Some hypothesize that exposure to parenting stress directly impacts children’s self-regulation in part because parents who are stressed may model ineffective coping strategies (Halberstadt, Crisp, & Eaton, 1999). This may be one reason why high parenting stress is directly linked to deficits in children’s self-regulation skills and behavior problems (Ayoub et al., 2011, Burkhardt, 2014, Deater-Deckard and Scarr, 1996, Mathis and Bierman, 2015). It may also be that parenting stress indirectly impacts child regulatory skills because it compromises parents’ ability to respond to children in warm and sensitive ways (Anthony et al., 2005). Indeed, research indicates that mothers’ sensitive parenting links to children’s abilities to regulate their emotions and control their attention in both early and middle childhood (Ayoub et al., 2011, Blair and Razza, 2007, Bradley and Corwyn, 2007; Kochanska, Aksan, Prisco, & Adams, 2008; Kochanska, Coy, & Murray, 2001; Kopp, 1989, Perry et al., 2013, Thompson, 1998; von Suchodoletz, Trommsdorff, & Heikamp, 2011). Conversely, others have found that low nurturance and highly directive parenting typified by negativity link to child non-compliance, externalizing behavior, and other indicators of regulatory deficits (Bates, Petit, Dodge, & Ridge, 1998; O’Leary, Slep, & Reid, 1999; Olson, Bates, Sandy, & Schilling, 2002; von Suchodoletz, Trommsdorff, & Heikamp, 2011).

It would seem to follow from an integration of these literatures that parenting stress exerts its influence on children’s early vocabulary and academic skills indirectly, in part by threatening the establishment of parent-child closeness, and thereby compromising children’s regulatory capabilities. However, the few studies that test this hypothesis have yielded mixed results. In a study demonstrating an important benefit of participation in Early Head Start, Ayoub et al. (2011) found that maternal parenting behavior mediated the relation between parenting stress and child vocabulary at 24 months, but only for families in the comparison group. Also only in the comparison group, parenting stress had direct effects on children’s later self-regulatory skills; however, this effect was not mediated by parenting quality. The researchers explained the absence of any mediation effects in the intervention group as likely due to program efforts to promote positive parent-child interactional qualities; interventionists’ efforts appear to have protected parenting by helping mothers engage in supportive childrearing behaviors even when they were feeling stressed. In other studies, Anthony et al. (2005), Crnic et al. (2005), and Mathis and Bierman (2015) similarly found direct relations between parenting stress and preschoolers’ social competence and self-regulation, but parenting quality did not explain the connections.

Despite these mixed findings, strong conceptual support for the mediating roles of parent-child relationship quality and children’s self-regulation skills in explaining relations between maternal parenting stress and children’s early vocabulary and academic skills motivated us to examine this hypothesis anew. We used longitudinal data collected from low-income families and a set of measures not previously employed in investigations testing these relations. Specifically, we examined the extent to which maternal parenting stress when children were 15 months old predicted mother-child closeness when children were 25 months old and children’s self-regulation and vocabulary and academic skills just before kindergarten entry (see Fig. 1). Based on prior research, we hypothesized that maternal parenting stress would be negatively related to mother-child closeness. We expected diminished mother-child closeness, in turn, to have negative implications for children’s self-regulation skills, which were expected to positively relate to children’s vocabulary and academic skill levels.

We also tested a three-path mediational model to examine relations among maternal parenting stress at 15 months, mother-child closeness at 25 months, self-regulation skills just before kindergarten entry, and vocabulary and academic skills just before kindergarten entry. Three-path mediational models involve a series of consecutive mediators, with the first predicting the second – in this case, mother-child closeness and child self-regulation mediating the relations between maternal parenting stress and kindergarten entry vocabulary and academic skills, consecutively. We predicted that maternal parenting stress would be inversely related to children’s vocabulary and academic skills just before kindergarten entry, and that mother-child closeness and self-regulation skills would consecutively mediate this relation.