Dyadic co-regulation as a protective factor among families experiencing homelessness: contributions to the development of infant reactivity and self-regulation

Experiences of family homelessness during early childhood, particularly during the periods of infancy and toddlerhood, can pose significant risks to healthy psychosocial development. Resilience research on early child development emphasizes children’s self-regulatory abilities and the quality of caregiving they receive as important factors in predicting adaptive functioning. The current study examined the experiences of families with infants (from birth to 12 months old) living in emergency family homeless shelters and how certain experiences related to developmental outcomes. This study tested hypotheses linking parent internalizing symptomatology, parent-infant dyadic co-regulation, and infants’ temperamental reactivity and self-regulation. Further, the potential, mediating role of dyadic co-regulation as a protective factor for homeless infants’ developmental outcomes was assessed. In this sample (n = 21), increased maternal internalizing symptomatology was significantly related to greater infant reactivity. However, while both infant reactivity and infant self-regulation were related to one another, maternal internalizing symptomatology did not seem to correlate with infants’ self-regulatory capacities to the same extent. Two independent mediation analyses assessed the mediating role of dyadic co-regulation for both the outcomes of infant reactivity and infant self-regulation and produced null results overall. This research makes a first attempt at filling a current gap in the literature concerning risk and resilience with respect to experiences of homelessness for families with an infant living in emergency housing.M.A.Includes bibliographical reference