RELATIONSHIPS AND ENGAGEMENT ACROSS ELEMENTARY SCHOOL: MEDIATING AND INTERACTIVE ASSOCIATIONS WITH PARENTS & TEACHERS

There is growing recognition that affective relationships are associated with children’s engagement and motivation. Yet despite continued calls to consider interconnections between home and school contexts, the extent to which relationships with both parents and teachers are collectively associated with engagement and motivation in elementary school remains relatively unexplored. In addition, few investigations address how children elicit these relational responses from parents or teachers. Accordingly, this project uses the NICHD Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development (NICHD-SECCYD) (n=1364) to investigate the direct, indirect, transactional, and interactive processes by which parent- and teacher-child relationships are associated with engagement and motivation in elementary school. Three studies conducted across three key developmental periods consider these associations. The first considers how relationships with parents and teachers prepare children for engagement during the transition to elementary school. The second study examines how relationships are associated with engagement as children progress from 1st through 5th grade. Finally, the third examines how concurrent and longitudinal relationships promote both engagement and motivational patterns in 5th grade, just prior to the transition to middle-school. Results across studies showed four consistent patterns. First, conflictual relationships with teachers were a more potent and consistent predictor of young children’s engagement and motivation than were exposures to positive supports from parents or teachers. Second, warm and sensitive parent-child relationships were supportive of children’s engagement, but only when youth were faced with conflictual teacher-child relationships, and only in the first few years of elementary school. Third, findings indicate that children elicit relational responses from both parents and teachers, and partially drive relational patterns with engagement. Finally, results suggest that engagement is largely context-dependent, and that children’s engagement is most strongly related to the relationships that are most temporally proximal to the child. Findings across the three developmental periods also demonstrate notable patterns, which are discussed in the context of prior literature. Implications for understanding how relationships are collectively associated with engagement and motivation across elementary school and implications for intervention and future research are also discussed