Maternal Responsiveness and Children's Hot and Cold Executive Functions

Thesis (Ph.D.), Human Development, Washington State UniversityStudies of mother-child interactions in free-play or teaching settings have shown that maternal responsiveness is positively associated with the development of children’s executive functioning. However, because most of these studies used global ratings of maternal responsiveness, less is known about the specific aspects of responsiveness that are associated with children’s executive functions during the preschool years. Given that responsiveness is not global in its efficacy, determining which aspects of responsiveness are associated with later individual differences in preschoolers’ behaviors is key for moving the field forward. Due to this, the present study used molecular coding to explore the impact of maternal responsiveness during a mother-busy task on preschoolers’ hot and cold executive functions at two times in development. In this study, executive functions at age six were predicted from maternal responsiveness at age four, controlling for executive functions at the first time point. One hundred and thirty eight low-income, Latina mothers of preschool children participated. When the children were 4-years-old, mothers were observed in a “mother-busy” situation where children had to wait to open a present while their mothers completed a questionnaire. All child verbal and nonverbal bids to elicit maternal attention were coded. Mother responses to child bids were coded into six categories, three that showed sufficiently high frequency for analysis: high turning toward (responses that encouraged further interaction), low turning toward (responses that acknowledged the bid, but did not encourage further interaction), and turning away (ignoring the child). After 18 months, mothers and their children returned to the laboratory to complete hot and cold executive functions measures Multiple regressions predicting changes in hot executive functioning showed that high turning toward responses to verbal attention bids were positively associated with changes in hot executive functioning over time, whereas low turning toward responses to verbal bids and turning away responses to nonverbal bids were negatively associated with changes in executive functioning. No other relationships between parenting and children’s executive functioning were significant. Implications of these findings for understanding maternal influences on the development of executive functioning in early childhood are considered.Washington State University, Human Developmen