School-Age Child Routines: Adaptation and Validation Studies of the Portuguese Version of the Child Routines Questionnaire

Families organize their daily life around a set of routines, which allow their members to carry out daily activities in a structured and efficient way (Fiese et al., 2002). According to Howe (2002), family routines can be described as standardized interactions, which are episodic (their beginning and end are clearly defined), cyclic (with a regular period of recurrence), and occur with an internal regularity (interactions follow a similar pattern whenever the routines are performed). Family routines represent a protective factor for family well-being, as they provide a sense of stability, continuity, and security over time (Migliorini et al., 2011). For children, they represent one of the ideal opportunities to practice and develop their self-regulatory skills, as they carry out daily activities (Brody & Flor, 1997; Ren & Fan, 2019; Ren & Xu, 2019). Through the development of self-regulatory skills, routines also foster children’s social-emotional adjustment (e.g., initiative, self-control, appropriate social behaviors) (Ren & Xu, 2019). In turn, this will be reflected in adaptation to the school environment, as the child will be able to self-regulate, manage behaviors, and engage in learning activities with peers (Ferretti & Bub, 2017; Muñiz et al., 2014). Over the last few decades, some measures to assess routines have been developed, however, in Portugal there is a lack of instruments specifically developed to assess the routines of school-age children. The availability of a valid and reliable tool that can assist in the assessment of child routines is needed.

Child routines are observable and repetitive behaviors that occur in a predictable and orderly manner throughout a child’s day-to-day life. Child routines typically include both the child and an adult caregiver who may assist and/or supervise the child’s activities (Sytsma et al., 2001). Parents, through the implementation of consistent and predictable routines, provide their children with environmental stimuli that promote children’s compliance and ensure that they perform daily tasks, in line with parental expectations (Sytsma et al., 2001; Urcuioli 2005). Furthermore, a stable and peaceful family environment encourages the active participation of children in planning and carrying out daily activities, allowing them to become active agents in their educational process (Spagnola & Fiese, 2007).

School-age child routines essentially comprise tasks related to school (e.g., studying, doing homework), meals (e.g., helping with meal preparation, setting the table), household chores (e.g., helping to tidy up), bedtime (e.g., putting on pajamas), personal hygiene (e.g., taking a shower) and leisure activities (e.g., playing, watching TV, listening to music, playing videogames) (Sytsma et al., 2001; Weisner, 2002). A typical morning routine involves a standardized sequence of behaviors, which include washing the face, brushing teeth, getting dressed, making the bed, having breakfast, and going to school (Sytsma et al., 2001; Wittig, 2005). A bedtime routine can include taking a shower, putting on the pajamas, brushing teeth, saying goodnight to family members, reading a story, and going to bed (Kitsaras et al., 2018; Mindell & Williamson, 2018; Sytsma et al., 2001). According to McCloy et al., (2016), weekday routines tend to be more rigid and predominantly focused on self-care and productivity tasks, while weekend routines are more flexible, and prioritize leisure activities.

There is empirical evidence that interactions between parents and children during the practice of daily routines allow for greater regulation of the child’s behavior and improvement in parents’ perception of their parenting skills (Fiese et al., 2002; Sprunger et al., 1985). In this sense, parents’ involvement in their children’s daily lives allows everyday monitoring and control over children’s behavior, which, consequently, promotes the development of a sense of parental competence (Evans & Rodger, 2008; Fiese et al., 2002; Rania et al., 2018). Research focused on the relationship between family routines and parental competence suggests that a stable and affective environment promotes positive interactions between parents and children (Brody & Flor, 1997; Spagnola & Fiese, 2007). In turn, this leads to the adoption of positive parenting practices and increased levels of parental self-efficacy, satisfaction, and competence, which consequently results in the implementation of structured and consistent family routines (Ferretti & Bub, 2017; Jordanr, 2003).

Despite the recognized importance of routines in the development of young children (e.g., Brody & Flor 1997; Ren & Xu, 2019), in Portugal no instruments were available to assess routines of school age children. Thus, the goal of this study was to translate, adapt and validate the CRQ (Sytsma et al., 2001) for Portuguese school-age children.

An EFA was run to explore the factor structure of the CRQ-PT. Out of the 39 original items, four were previously excluded: three items of the CRQ Defensive Responding scale (Sytsma et al., 2001) and item 33 (“praying before meals”). The removal of items related to religious practices was consistent with the validation procedures of the CRQ-IS (Halldórsdóttir & Óskarsdóttir, 2009) and of the Portuguese version of the CRQ for preschool children (CRQ:P; Cunha et al., 2021). In fact, Coutinho (2019) found that in recent decades there has been a decrease in religious practices in Portuguese families, pointing to increased family education as one of the reasons. Thus, the remaining 35 items were subject to EFA and a four-component solution with 32 items was found to better represent the data, after removing three other items (2, 24 and 32) with low loadings. This solution was consistent with the four-factor factor structure of the original version of the CRQ and the CRQ-IS. For the first subscale, corresponding to Household Responsibilities (eight items), two items of the original version of the CRQ (24 and 33, which were previously removed) are missing and item 31 (“helps put things away after shopping”) was added to this subscale. This inclusion is theoretically justifiable, given that helping to unpack groceries is compatible with the content of other items of this subscale, such as “clean up the room” or “clean up the toys”. It is also consistent with a CFA of the original CRQ, which demonstrated stronger loading of item 31 on the Household Responsibilities component than on the Discipline Routines component (Jordan et al., 2006) and with EFA from the CRQ-IS where this item also loaded on the Household Responsibilities component (Halldórsdóttir & Óskarsdóttir, 2009). Furthermore, helping to unpack reflects a routine more related to household responsibilities than to discipline (as it is assigned in the original version). The second subscale, related to Daily Living Routines, includes nine items, related to child’s activities of daily living (e.g., morning routine, bedtime routine, meals). The Portuguese version included all the items from the original CRQ version, with the exception of items 3 (“takes turns with family members talking about their day”) and 9 (“spends special time talking with parent”), which were both included in the newly labelled Homework Routines and Family Interaction subscale. The third subscale, originally designated Homework Routines, is composed of 10 items in the Portuguese version, and was renamed as Homework Routines and Family Interaction, since it includes a combination of items associated with homework routines and communication, sharing daily events and family life, in line with the CRQ-IS, which has a subscale entitled Family Interaction. As such, this subscale includes all the five items from the original Homework Routines, plus five other items. Two of them (3 and 9) were switched from the original Daily Living Routines subscale, and as they refer to a routine of talking to parents and with other family members about the day, the items are consistent with communication, sharing events and a connection between parents and children, that is, family interaction. Also, item 14 was included in this subscale, due to its emphasis on completing the homework before playtime. Finally, items 26 and 34, related to family time together but originally included in Discipline Routines, were assigned to this subscale given their theoretical content. According to the literature, leisure activities at school age can be characterized as positive experiences that promote family interaction, as they are carried out together by the family members (Hodge et al., 2015). Finally, the fourth and smallest subscale, identified as Discipline Routines, is composed of five of the original items which refer to rules, discipline methods and structured family tasks. Of the remaining six items included in the original version, two were eliminated due to their low factor loadings (items 2 and 32), three are now included in the Homework Routines and Family Interaction subscale (items 14, 26 and 34), and item 31 is allocated to the Household Responsibilities subscale. In contrast with our findings, a CFA of the original school-age CRQ showed that item 34 cross loaded on both the Discipline Routines and Daily Living Routines components, rather than the Homework Routines component. This suggests that additional attention should be given to this item in future studies.

For internal consistency, the coefficient α value of 0.89 for the Total score is very close to the original version (α = 0.90; Sytsma et al., 2001) and higher than the CRQ-IS (α = 0.83; Halldórsdóttir & Óskarsdóttir, 2009). For the subscales, respectable/good to very good reliability levels were achieved, except for the Discipline Routines which remained at an undesirable level according to DeVellis (2016) guidelines. This weaker internal consistency for the Discipline Routines items was expected based on its reduction to less than half the original number of items, as compared to the original version, and the identified issues with three items during CFA. Furthermore, a relatively low internal consistency in the Discipline Routines subscale was also found in the CRQ:P (Cunhar et al., 2021). Inter-correlations between the four CRQ-PT subscales were positive weak to moderate, and moderate to high positive correlations were found between each subscale and the Total score, which highlights that each subscale assesses an independent domain of routines of school-aged children.

A CFA was then undertaken to assess the model fit of the CRQ-PT to the sample from Study 2 based on the factor structure obtained in Study 1. The first CFA revealed that the model did not sufficiently fit to the data. Based on modification indices, covariances were added to improve the model fit, between errors of items 38 and 39 from the Homework and Family Interaction subscale according to their focus on school related tasks, such as “completes homework” and “studies for tests”. The same procedure was used for items 25 and 27 from the Discipline subscale, based on their theoretical content, which have similar and comparable terminologies, such as “is disciplined” and “receives smaller punishments”. The results indicated that most of the global adjustment quality indices had acceptable values. Some concerns probably related to the item content were identified for items 15 (“Receives rewards for good behavior”), 25 (“Is disciplined for misbehavior”) and 27 (“Receives smaller punishment”) of the Discipline subscale. Thus these items might be considered potentially problematic in terms of their construct validity, and may have affected the global model fit.

As expected, the significant association between child routines and a measure of family routines (family dinner time routine) suggests evidence of construct validity. Despite the lower level of reliability achieved in the present study for the FRQ, for which the reduced number of items may have contributed, it is commonly used with Cronbach alpha values around 0.70 (e.g., Friend et al., 2015; Jones et al., 2014). Also, it was the only measure available in Portuguese to assess family routines. As for the Portuguese translation of the CRQ:P (Cunha et al., 2021), positive weak to moderate correlations were obtained between the four CRQ:P subscales and the Total score with the FRQ subscale for dinner time family routines. This lower association, as compared to studies using other family routines tools (e.g., Sytsma et al., 2001) may be explained due to the specific item content of the FRQ subscale (dinner time). In fact, in line with Sytsma et al. (2001), the highest correlation that was found referred to the Daily Living subscale, which includes items related to meals. On the other hand, the association between the Homework and Family Interaction subscale and the Dinner Time subscale of the FRQ may be justified by the fact that dinnertime is considered a time for family interaction, which promotes communication and information sharing and that enables the family members to show concern for each other’s daily lives, thus increasing interpersonal involvement (Fiese et al., 2006).

As expected and consistent with the literature that suggests that higher levels of child routines are associated with higher levels of efficacy and satisfaction derived from the parenting role (e.g., Jordan, 2003), the results showed significant correlations between the CRQ-PT and the PSOC scores. The exception was the Discipline subscale, with non-significant correlations with any of the PSOC subscales, which deserves further attention in future studies, due to its reduced size and previously identified problematic functioning in CFA. This subscale may be less associated with regular family routines and more with the sporadic use of discipline strategies to control or reduce child misbehavior. And these interactions between parents and children may not contribute to increase parental sense of self-efficacy and satisfaction. Contrastingly, both Daily Living and Homework and Family Interaction subscales showed moderate correlations with the PSOC Satisfaction and Efficacy subscales, suggesting that the more children engage in routine practices, the greater the sense of competence of parents and vice-versa. Other studies have shown that the frequent practice of routines allows parents to regulate children’s behavior, which provides an increase in parental feelings of competence (e.g., Migliorini et al., 2016), and that positive routines are associated with positive parental competence (Fiese et al., 2002; Spagnola & Fiese, 2007).

This study has some limitations which should be addressed in future studies. First, a convenience sample was used, which raises questions about its representativeness. Differences between children’s age groups in the two studies (EFA and CFA) should also be noted, since the practice of routines decreases as children get older (Cunha et al., 2021; Malenfant, 2006). Despite being more the rule than the exception, the participants were mostly mothers. In fact, this is a common situation in different countries (e.g., Henderson et al., 2011; Stoppelbein et al., 2016) and similar to studies conducted in the US with the CRQ. Thus, it is recommended the use of larger samples and a greater participation of fathers in future research. It would be important to collect data from both parents to assess the informant agreement, as they are the reference informants regarding child routines. The poorer adjustment and lower internal consistency obtained with the Discipline Routines subscale emphasizes the need of further attention in future studies. The addition of more items to the CRQ-PT that could describe more relevant daily parenting discipline rules and practices may contribute to higher internal consistency and robustness of Discipline Routines construct.

The development of further studies of reliability (e.g., temporal stability) and validity evidence with other measures (e.g., behavior problems, social skills, academic achievement) or special groups (e.g., children with ADHD, ASD) that may reinforce the psychometric properties of the CRQ-PT is also suggested. Some items from the Discipline Routines subscale showed relatively poor functioning in the CFA; as such, in the future it would be relevant to clarify their suitability in the assessment of the constructs measured by the CRQ-PT and its subscales. Also, longitudinal studies could be undertaken to understand the long-term impact of positive and sustained routines in child and adolescent development, as well as in adult adjustment. Finally, and considering the recent pandemic context and all the changes that have occurred in the daily lives of families (e.g., lockdown, telework, e-learning), it might be equally relevant to develop studies that assess the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic in the routines of families with school-age children.

The present study offers relevant contributions to the assessment of the routines of school-age children in the Portuguese context. The factor structure of the CRQ-PT was examined through exploratory and confirmatory studies and overall, the results provided good reliability indices, which reinforces the psychometric properties of the measure. It is now available as an instrument to be used in clinical practice, but also in research with children of school age (6 to 12 years old). Furthermore, having a school-age version of the CRQ allows a continuity in the assessment of child routines, since the preschool version (CRQ:P; Cunha et al., 2021) recently became available in Portugal. Finally, this study contributed to an additional understanding of the relationship between the perception of parental competence and routines practices of school-age children, an area where studies are scarce.