Academic implications of insensitive parenting: A mediating path through children's relational representations

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Highlights

  • Insensitive parenting predicts decreases in child academic achievement.

  • Representational and relational processes mediate the parenting-achievement path.

  • Harsh maternal representations predict increases in teacher-child conflict.

  • Teacher-child conflict predicts decreases in child academic achievement.

Abstract

Despite evidence that insensitive parenting is associated with later academic achievement, few studies have evaluated mechanisms that may account for these effects. This study utilized a diverse sample of child-caregiver dyads (N = 245, 50.2% male, 46.5% Latinx) to evaluate a sequential mediation model from observations of female caregivers' insensitive parenting behaviors at age 4 to children's maternal representations at age 6, to teachers' reports of conflict in the teacher-child relationship at age 7 and, ultimately, to children's academic achievement at age 8. Even when holding prior levels of each study construct constant, analyses revealed a significant sequential mediation such that insensitive parenting contributed to increases in children's harsh maternal representations, which, in turn, predicted increases in teacher-child conflict at school and, ultimately, decreases in children's reading and math achievement. These findings highlight parenting and teacher-child relationship qualities as promising targets for interventions to promote children's academic achievement.

Introduction

Children's academic achievement is a central concern for parents, educators, researchers and policymakers. Despite concerted efforts to understand and promote children's educational success, however, average achievement scores among the Nation's fourth graders have plateaued below a “proficient” level (National Assessment of Educational Progress, 2017). Legislative efforts to promote student learning outcomes, such as No Child Left Behind (2002) and its successor, Every Student Succeeds (2015), have yielded mixed results with some studies finding no improvements in reading or math (Lee & Orfield, 2006), and others showing modest improvements in math, but not in reading (Dee & Jacob, 2011). Therefore, the current investigation sought to elucidate potentially modifiable and heretofore underappreciated influences on children's school success by testing a sequential mediation model wherein insensitive parenting practices during the preschool years were expected to hinder children's later academic achievement by undermining their internalized beliefs and expectations about the caregiving relationship and, by extension, the quality of children's relationships with teachers in the elementary school setting.

Guided by the tenets of attachment and organizational theories of development (Bowlby, 1958; Sroufe, 1990), this study focused on children's transition to formal schooling as a period of heightened sensitivity to parental influences on early learning, and of significance for initiating pathways to later academic achievement and educational attainment. Attachment theory holds that caregiving quality influences children's relational beliefs and expectations (i.e., representations), which are expressed behaviorally in early development, but become internalized as information processing heuristics that guide children's behavior in new relationships during the preschool period (Bowlby, 1969/1982; Bretherton, Ridgeway, & Cassidy, 1993; Main, Kaplan, & Cassidy,1985; Sroufe, Egeland, & Carlson, 1999). In this way, children's relational representations may influence the quality of teacher-child relationships and, ultimately, academic achievement. Given the robust impact of teacher-child relationship quality on children's achievement (Cadima, Verschueren, Leal, & Guedes, 2016; Collins, O'Connor, Supplee, & Shaw, 2017; Hartz, Williford, & Koomen, 2017), as well as on children's reputation in the school (and with future teachers) more generally (Jerome, Hamre, & Pianta, 2009), early caregiving experiences may initiate relational and educational pathways that become increasingly entrenched over time (Maldonado-Carreño & Votruba-Drzal, 2011; Yeo & Clarke, 2006).

Although multiple systems across many levels of influence impact children's academic achievement (e.g., economic factors, Jones, Wilson, Clark, & Dunham, 2018; curricular factors, Maxwell, Reynolds, Lee, Subasic, & Bromhead, 2017), research consistently points to the promotive influence of parental school involvement, such as participating in parent-teacher conferences, providing homework assistance, and attending school functions, on children's academic achievement (Fan & Chen, 2001; Jeynes, 2003; Wilder, 2014). That said, a recent meta-analysis of studies examining parental involvement and academic achievement by Castro et al. (2015) revealed an important, yet often overlooked, distinction between the quality and quantity of parental involvement. For example, in a recent study of sixth graders, children who self-reported more supportive, as opposed to intrusive, parental involvement also earned significantly higher reading and language achievement scores (Moroni, Dumont, Trautwein, Niggli, & Baeriswyl, 2015). However, in this same sample, the quantity of parental involvement (i.e., higher frequency of homework help) was negatively related to achievement.

In light of these findings, researchers seeking to promote children's early learning and achievement have begun to shift their focus from the quantity of parents' school involvement toward the overall quality or sensitivity of parents' non-academic parenting behaviors. For example, although the majority of extant research on parenting and child achievement has emphasized the quantity of parental reading activities and school involvement (Goldfield & Snow, 1984; Justice & Kaderavek, 2002; Lonigan, Anthony, Bloomfield, Dyer, & Samwel, 1999), a growing number of studies have considered the implications of parents' sensitive and supportive caregiving beyond school-specific settings for understanding children's educational success (e.g., Vasquez, Patall, Fong, Corrigan, & Pine, 2016). Indeed, building on attachment studies demonstrating that sensitive and responsive parenting supports healthy emotional development in early childhood (Ainsworth, 1969; Sroufe, 1983), researchers have documented clear and convincing relations between early caregiving sensitivity (e.g., exchanges characterized by high warmth and support, and low intrusiveness and hostility) and young children's adjustment in preschool (Bono, Sy, & Kopp, 2016; Bornstein et al., 2020; Harmeyer, Ispa, Palermo, & Carlo, 2016; Zvara, Keim, Boone, & Anderson, 2019). Extending beyond the preschool period, some data point to significant relations between insensitive parenting and children's compromised academic achievement (Monti, Pomerantz, & Roisman, 2014), but there is a need for further research, particularly to evaluate theoretically-specified mechanisms thought to underlie such relations.

Insensitive parenting is a broad construct that encompasses varied practices characterized by low support, high intrusiveness and/or hostility (Baker, 2018; Thijssen et al., 2017). Supportive parenting practices fall on a continuum, such that a supportive parent engages in positive behaviors that establish the parent as a secure base and as a source of positive regard and emotional support for the child (e.g., providing age-appropriate guidance and praise), whereas a parent who evidences low support for the child may be passive, detached, unavailable, or unwilling to meet the child's needs for security and support (Gunderson et al., 2018; Mesman & Emmen, 2013; Raby et al., 2015). Intrusive parenting is characterized by the presence of verbal and/or physical behaviors that undermine the child's autonomy, such as when the parent takes over a task that the child is capable of doing independently (Wood, 2006). Finally, hostile parenting occurs when a parent engages in behavioral displays of anger, ridicule, or rejection toward the child (Rhoades et al., 2012). Individually and in tandem, insensitive parenting practices characterized by low support (e.g., Bindman, Pomerantz, & Roisman, 2015), high intrusiveness (e.g., Wong, Zhuang, & Ng, 2019), and/or hostility (e.g., Lam, Chung, & Li, 2018) have been linked with negative learning outcomes, though comparatively fewer studies have evaluated mechanisms underlying these effects.

Relative to the extensive literature on parenting and child adaptation (Pinquart & Gerke, 2019), and despite extensive theory addressing parenting effects in development (Ainsworth, 1969; Baumrind, 1991; Belsky, 1984), few studies have evaluated theoretically-specified mediators of predicted parenting effects on children's academic achievement. Prior research on motivational mediating mechanisms points to children's desire to gain their parents' approval (Cheung & Pomerantz, 2012), student attitudes and behaviors (e.g., truancy; McNeal, 2014), and student engagement and perseverance (Waters, Loton, & Jach, 2019) as important mechanisms underlying relations between parenting quality and children's academic achievement. However, attachment theory illuminates an additional pathway from parenting to achievement via children's relational representations.

According to attachment theory, early caregiving experiences shape children's expectations of others, the self, and the self-in-relation to others (Bowlby, 1969/1982; Bretherton et al., 1993; Main et al.,1985; Kobak & Sceery, 1988; Sroufe, Carlson, Levy, & Egeland, 1999). In turn, these representations function as information processing heuristics or models that guide children's interpersonal relationships within and beyond the family milieu (Bowlby, 1969/1982; Bretherton et al., 1993; Main et al., 1985). If the primary caregiver functions as a secure base and provides a safe haven for the child, the child will develop generally positive relational representations wherein the parent is viewed as trustworthy and caring. In contrast, insensitive parental behaviors characterized by low support, high intrusiveness, and/or hostility can lead children to form a negative representation of the parent as unreliable and/or threatening. Over time, children may generalize from negative representations of the parent figure to other adult figures, including classroom teachers. Thus, although children's representations of their primary caregiver may not impact academic achievement directly, they are expected to influence other processes (e.g., the quality of the child's relationship with teachers) that, in turn, affect academic achievement.

A robust literature connects sensitive parenting to secure attachment (Karavasilis, Doyle, & Markiewicz, 2003; van der Voort, Juffer, & Bakermans-Kranenburg, 2014), and, by extension, to positive caregiver representations (e.g., Main et al., 1985; Steele, Hodges, Kaniuk, & Steele, 2009). Moreover, extant theory and research demonstrate that young children's attachment and caregiver representations carry over to relationships with other adults (Page & Bretheron, 2001; Sroufe et al., 1999; Vu, 2015). Indeed, prior research has shown that children's representations of their caregivers are associated with, and even predictive of, the quality of their relationships with teachers (O'Connor & McCartney, 2006). For example, compared to children who conveyed secure representations of their caregivers as responsive and supportive in a narrative task at age five, children who conveyed avoidant representations characterized by caregiver indifference and unavailability experienced more conflict and less closeness with their teacher at age six (Rydell, Bohlin, & Thorell, 2005).

The influence of teacher-child relationship qualities on later child outcomes has been well-characterized in prior studies of teacher-child conflict and closeness (Cadima et al., 2016; Collins et al., 2017; Hartz et al., 2017; Heatly & Votruba-Drzal, 2017; Pianta, Steinberg, & Rollins, 1995). A sizeable portion of this literature focuses on child behavioral outcomes and ultimately suggests that higher levels of teacher-child conflict and/or lower levels of closeness are related to increases in internalizing and externalizing behavior problems (e.g., Collins et al., 2017; Whittaker & Harden, 2010). In contrast, the literature examining academic outcomes is less consistent with evidence that (1) both teacher-child conflict and closeness predict academic achievement (e.g., Pianta & Stuhlman, 2004), (2) teacher-child closeness, but not conflict, relates to achievement (e.g., Valiente, Parker, Swanson, Bradley, & Groh, 2019), and (3) teacher-child conflict, but not closeness, predicts children's academic achievement (e.g., Varghese, Vernon-Feagans, & Bratsch-Hines, 2019). Despite these inconsistencies, several longitudinal studies suggest that teacher-child conflict is especially salient for children's academic achievement, even after controlling for other factors, such as prior teacher-child relationship quality and academic achievement (McCormick, O'Connor, Cappella, & McClowry, 2013; Mercer & DeRosier, 2008).

The current study drew on a large and diverse sample of children to evaluate hypothesized relations between (a) observations of female caregivers' insensitive parenting behaviors (i.e., low support, high intrusiveness, high hostility) during a series of video-recorded teaching tasks at age 4 and changes in children's maternal representations from ages 4 to 6, (b) children's maternal representations at age 6 and changes in teachers' reports of conflict in the teacher-child relationship from ages 6 to 7, and (c) teacher-child conflict at age 7 and changes in children's academic achievement in reading and math from ages 6 to 8. We hypothesized that children's relational representations of their primary caregiver would account for expected relations between insensitive parenting and poor academic outcomes in reading and math because they influence the quality of the teacher-child relationship. We focused on reading and math achievement because these domains are widely recognized as core areas of academic emphasis during the elementary school years, and they have significant and enduring implications for educational achievement in and beyond these domains (e.g., science and foreign language learning) in later school years (Ehm, Lindberg, & Hasselhorn, 2014). To support directional inferences, all analyses controlled for children's prior maternal representations, prior conflict in the teacher-child relationship, and prior academic achievement. In addition, covariates with documented relations to children's academic achievement were held constant, including child gender (Endendijk, Groeneveld, Bakermans-Kranenburg, & Mesman, 2016), child ethnicity-race (Battle & Lewis, 2002), family socioeconomic status (SES; Sirin, 2005), and child intelligence (Gagné & St Père, 2001).

Section snippets

Participants

The sample was drawn from an ongoing, longitudinal study of development among 250 caregiver-child dyads. The current analyses were based on a subsample of 245 dyads; five dyads were excluded due to caregiver changes between the time of the parenting observation at age 4 and the follow-up assessment of the child's maternal representation at age 6. The current participants were diverse with regard to child gender (50.2% male) and ethnicity-race (46.5% Latinx, 17.6% Black/African American, 11%

Descriptive and bivariate analyses

Descriptive statistics and bivariate correlations are shown in Table 1. A MANOVA revealed significant differences across study variables by child gender (Wilks' λ = 0.757, p = 0.030), ethnicity-race (Wilks' λ = 0.371, p < 0.001), and their interaction (Wilks' λ = 0.539, p = 0.035). Regarding gender, teachers of boys reported higher levels of teacher-child conflict at both time points (Mage 6 = 1.931; Mage 7 = 1.842) as compared to girls (Mage 6 = 1.633; Mage 7 = 1.391). Regarding

Discussion

Evidence supporting specific pathways by which insensitive parenting may eventuate in negative educational outcomes as a function of children's relational representations and teacher-child conflict represents an important advance in ongoing efforts to understand how parenting behaviors may influence children's academic achievement. The current analyses revealed a significant indirect effect of insensitive parenting on children's achievement via both representational and relational processes.

Acknowledgements

Funding for this project was provided by the National Science Foundation Developmental and Learning Sciences DLS-0951775 to the second author. Preliminary findings were presented at the 2019 Society for Research in Child Development Meeting. We express our gratitude to the families and teachers who participated in this research.

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