Parenting Antecedents of Young Children's Emotion Regulation

Presented by: Beth Russell, Courtney Lincoln, Alicia Leland

Results from 3 samples describe how contextual inputs from the caregiving system shape preschoolers' ability to wait, specifically describing parents' strategies for supporting their children's self-control. Parents with more coherent self-control narratives reported better self-control in their children and more focus or effort into teaching self-control strategy and, consequently, report more consistent self-control skill in their children. Parents who taught their children to distract their attention onto an unrelated object or mental task (e.g., reciting nursery rhymes) were more likely to report consistent self-control than those that offered no strategy.

Twin Families: When Parental Control Relates to Positive Child Outcomes

Presented by: Kayla Anderson, Martha Rueter, Jennifer Connor

Twins tend to have more optimum adjustment in middle childhood than singleton children, but no studies have examined the explanatory mechanisms for these findings. This study tests an adaptation of family stress theory to explain how the family resource parental control moderates the direct association between twin status and parent-child relationship satisfaction, and the indirect association between twin status and child adjustment. Using a sample of 124 twins and 176 singletons conceived using assisted reproductive technologies, results suggest twins whose parents use higher levels of control have more positive outcomes than those whose parents report using less control.

Parental School Involvement as a Protective Factor of School Success

Presented by: Jose-Michael Gonzalez, Henry Gonzalez, Melissa Barnett

Drawing on a bioecological framework, this study examined how parental school involvement interacts with two child (sex and IQ) and one family (maternal education) risk factors in the prediction of three domains of school success (academic self-efficacy, school belonging, and achievement) among families with nine year-olds participating in the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study. We hypothesized that parental school involvement would buffer associations between each risk factor and school success. Results indicated that boys experienced lower levels of all three indicators of school success in comparison to girls, however, parental school involvement moderated this association for school belonging.

Parent-Child Connectedness & Positive Youth Development: Longitudinal Links

Presented by: Carmen Irving, Rhonda Richardson

Using data from Waves I and II of the Add Health dataset the present study sought to empirically validate the constructs that contribute to parent-child connectedness, as well as examine the role parent-child connectedness has in predicting aspects of positive youth development two years later. Pearson correlations and multiple regression analyses indicated that time together and climate of trust are positively associated with parent-child connectedness in early adolescence. Furthermore, both parent-child connectedness and its requisite contributors are statistically significant and longitudinal predictors of character, confidence, and connection in early adolescence.