Exploring Pathways between Parenting Quality and Child Self-Regulation

The present thesis describes the results of two investigations of the association between parenting and children’s self-regulation abilities. The first paper is a systematic review and meta-analysis of the relationship between parenting quality and children’s physiological reactivity to stress. Thirty-four studies associating parenting with children’s cortisol reactivity to acute stressors were identified, in which an overall negative relationship between sensitive parenting and cortisol reactivity was observed. However, the literature was very heterogeneous, suggesting that there are important moderators to this relationship; few of which were identified by the analyses. In the second paper, I present the results of a longitudinal structural equation modelling (SEM) study which explores the inter-relationships between maternal sensitivity, children’s peer relationships, and a cognitive aspect of self-regulation: attentional control. The analysis is based on data collected as part of the NICHD Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development. Significant reciprocal relationships were found between maternal sensitivity and child attentional control throughout the elementary school years, and there was some evidence of reciprocal relationships between children’s popularity with peers and maternal sensitivity, which were partially mediated by attentional control. Part three is a critical appraisal of the process of carrying out the SEM study described in the second paper. It considers the advantages and disadvantages of secondary data analysis, difficulties encountered with defining complex constructs like self-regulation, and the broad clinical implications of the work