The prospective relationship between child personality and perceived parenting: Mediation by parental sense of competence

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Highlights

  • We examine child personality as a determinant of perceived parenting.

  • We include three dimensions: parental warmth, overreactivity, psychological control.

  • Child personality relates to all three parenting dimensions in adolescence.

  • For conscientiousness, parental sense of competence mediates this relationship.

Abstract

This study examined the prospective relationship between childhood Big Five personality characteristics and perceived parenting in adolescence. In addition, we investigated whether this relationship was mediated by parental sense of competence, and whether associations were different for mothers and fathers. For 274 children, teachers reported on children’s Big Five personality characteristics at Time 1, mothers and fathers reported on their sense of competence at Time 2, and the children (who had now become adolescents) rated their parents’ warmth, overreactivity and psychological control at Time 3. Mediation analysis revealed both direct and indirect effects. No differences in associations were found for perceived parenting of mothers and fathers. This study demonstrates that child personality in late childhood is significantly related to perceived parental warmth, overreactivity and psychological control in adolescence. In addition, parental sense of competence mediates the relationship between child conscientiousness and perceived parental warmth, overreactivity and psychological control.

Introduction

The role of parenting in the socialization process of children has been widely studied (Collins, Maccoby, Steinberger, Hetherington, & Bornstein, 2000). Although much is known about the importance of parenting in this process, less attention has been paid to factors that might determine how parents come to rely on particular parenting behaviors; the determinants of parenting (Belsky, 1984, Belsky and Jaffee, 2006). This study aims to increase knowledge on these determinants by examining the relationship between child personality characteristics and perceived parenting behaviors. Moreover, in an attempt to explain this relationship, we examine to what extent parental competence mediates this relationship.

In his parenting process model, Belsky (1984) proposed that parenting is influenced by three general sources: parents’ personal psychological resources, children’s characteristics, and contextual sources of stress and support. Ample empirical evidence has provided support for this model (for an overview, see Belsky & Jaffee, 2006). The present study focuses on specific parts of children’s characteristics and parents’ psychological resources which, to our knowledge, have not yet been examined in the same study: child personality and parental sense of competence.

Personality can be described along five dimensions, which have traditionally been labeled as extraversion, agreeableness (labeled benevolence in children), conscientiousness, emotional stability and openness to experience (labeled imagination in children) (Shiner & Caspi, 2003). With regard to parenting behaviors, three global, relatively independent dimensions can be distinguished; support (responsiveness and connectedness to the child), behavioral control (regulation of the child’s behavior through firm and consistent discipline) and psychological control (control of the child’s behavior through psychological means such as love withdrawal and guilt induction) (Prinzie, Stams, Deković, Reijntjes, & Belsky, 2009). Although determinants of these parenting behaviors have been studied (e.g., de Haan, Prinzie, & Deković, 2012), there is a very limited body of research examining determinants of all three parenting behaviors in the same study. Of these three dimensions, psychological control has been mostly neglected (Barber, 1996).

Child Big Five characteristics have been related to parental warmth and overreactivity in previous studies. For example, benevolence has been related to more parental warmth and less overreactive parenting (de Haan et al., 2012), and harsh discipline (O’Connor and Dvorak, 2001, Prinzie et al., 2004). Compared to these studies on parental warmth and overreactivity, research on predictors of parental psychological control is limited to behavior problems (Laird, 2011). Given that psychological control has negative consequences for children, such as internalizing problems (Barber, 1996), it is important to investigate determinants of this parenting behavior. This study aims to increase knowledge on determinants of parenting by examining its long-term associations with children’s Big Five personality characteristics, using a comprehensive assessment of parenting, including warmth, overreactivity and psychological control.

Although some studies have indicated links between child personality and parenting behavior, these studies do not make clear why child personality is related to parenting (de Haan et al., 2012). In the present study we propose that parental sense of competence is a mechanism that can explain this relationship. Grounded in Bandura’s (1997) social cognitive theory, parental sense of competence is the belief of parents that they can effectively manage parenting tasks (Coleman & Karraker, 1998). Similar to parenting behavior, predictors of parental sense of competence remain understudied (Jones & Prinz, 2005). In the few studies that have examined determinants of parental sense of competence, the focus has mainly been on parental characteristics, such as parent personality (de Haan, Prinzie, & Deković, 2009) or parental depression (Gross, Sambrook, & Fogg, 1999). Rather than examining factors within the parent that relate to parental sense of competence, this study investigates how child personality determines parental sense of competence. Dependent on their personality, some children may be easier to handle than others. For instance, children who are less benevolent and conscientious may be noncompliant, and demand more from parents in terms of skills to effectively deal with their behavior. This may in turn result in a lower sense of competence for these parents than for parents of very agreeable and conscientious children. To our knowledge, there are no studies that focus specifically on how child Big Five personality is related to parental sense of competence. However, several studies have examined other child characteristics. For example, mothers of school-aged children, who perceived their children to be less emotional and more sociable, reported higher parental sense of competence (Coleman & Karraker, 2000). Related to personality, evidence suggests that parents of more temperamentally “difficult” infants and toddlers generally have a lower parental sense of competence (e.g., Troutman, Moran, Arndt, Johnson, & Chmielewski, 2012). However, research concerning personality characteristics of older children is lacking.

In addition to being determined by child characteristics, parental sense of competence has in turn emerged as a critical determinant of parenting behavior (Coleman & Karraker, 1998). Some evidence indicates that higher parental sense of competence is associated with parents expressing warmth towards their children (Bogenschneider, Small, & Tsay, 1997), whereas lower parental sense of competence has been associated with the use of overreactive discipline (Gross et al., 1999) and psychological control (Bogenschneider et al., 1997). However, much of the research on this topic involves cross-sectional designs (Jones & Prinz, 2005). As a result, there is little evidence on prospective relationships with parenting.

We examined the prospective relationship between child personality and perceived parenting five years later. In addition, we investigated whether parental sense of competence mediated this relationship. Specifically, we hypothesized positive prospective associations of children’s extraversion, benevolence, conscientiousness, and imagination, with warm parenting five years later (de Haan et al., 2012) whereas higher extraversion, and lower benevolence and conscientiousness were expected to relate to more perceived overreactive parenting (de Haan et al., 2012, O’Connor and Dvorak, 2001). Because of inconsistent findings, no specific hypotheses regarding emotional stability and psychological control were formulated. Additionally, we hypothesized that higher scores on benevolence, conscientiousness and emotional stability would be associated with higher parental sense of competence two years later (Jones & Prinz, 2005), and that parental sense of competence would in turn be associated with more warmth and less overreactive parenting and psychological control two years later (e.g., Bogenschneider et al., 1997). Finally, the moderating effect of parental gender was explored. Analyses concerning the moderating role of parental gender were exploratory, due to a lack of research on father’s sense of competence.

Section snippets

Participants

The study is part of a larger project: “The Flemish Study on Parenting, Personality, and Development” (FSPPD), in which a proportional stratified sample of elementary-school-aged children was randomly selected. To answer our questions, we used data from the fourth (2004; T1), fifth (2007; T2), and sixth (2009; T3) wave, as in those waves the data on the measures of interest were available. To avoid the problem of shared method variance, teachers rated children’s personality at T1, both parents

Results

Descriptives and intercorrelations of the measures are presented in Table 1. SES was not related to any of the variables under study and was not included in further analyses. Child age however, had a significant negative association with paternal sense of competence and was therefore included as a covariate in further analyses.

To investigate the mediating effects of parental sense of competence in the relation between child personality and parenting, a mediation model was fitted including the

Discussion

In this study, significant direct effects were found from child personality and parental sense of competence to perceived parenting, as well as significant indirect effects of child conscientiousness to perceived parenting through parental sense of competence. Finding these relationships is especially relevant when taking into account that they exist above and beyond the impact of other personality characteristics, across a 5-year time span and that these effects cannot be explained by rater

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