title: The Reciprocal Relationship Between Conduct Problems, Callous Unemotional Traits, and Parenting Behaviour
Creators: name: Frost, Aaron Desmond James
Publisher: name: Griffith University
Year: 2006
Subjects: subject: Behavioural problems in children
subject: antisocial behaviour in adults
subject: parenting styles
subject: Bronfenbrenner's ecological model

description: Callous and Unemotional (CU) traits are a relatively recent addition to the existing body of research examining the development of severe behavioural problems in children, and antisocial behaviour in adults. Children who are high in CU traits display shallow emotions, manipulate other children, lie easily, and demonstrate very little remorse or guilt. Additionally, they are more likely to engage in more severe forms of antisocial behaviour, more often, and from a younger age than their peers. Research has found that CU traits moderate the well-established relationship between parenting and conduct problems. That is, children who are high in CU traits seem to display levels of behaviour problems that are unrelated to the quality or type of parenting they receive. This has serious implications when one considers that the most effective psychosocial treatments available for behavioural disorders are based upon improving parenting, and would therefore require significant modification for children high in CU traits. In addition, the research exploring the moderating role of CU traits in the relationship between parenting and conduct problems has not taken a developmental perspective and considered different ages of children. Finally, existing research has not considered the reciprocal relationship that CU traits have upon parenting behaviour, or the direct relationship between parenting and CU traits. The present study has addressed these limitations by utilizing an accelerated longitudinal methodology. The present study recruited 449 grades one, three and five children from six public primary schools. Questionnaires assessing conduct problems, CU traits, and parenting styles were administered to their parents for completion. Additionally, teacher report was also sought on a number of key variables to ensure validity. One year later, all of these children and their families were re-approached to assess the extent to which each of these variables had changed over time. One year later 233 (51.89%) of the original sample completed the same measures allowing examination of the change in these variables over time. Given the relatively short time period, it was expected that one of the best predictors of any of the key variables at time 2, would be baseline scores measured at time 1. For this reason, hierarchical regression was used to control for temporal stability, as well as demographic factors. Additionally, the hypothesis that a different pattern of relationships would emerge for children of different ages was tested by examining the moderating effect of age upon all predictive relationships. This was done by entering the product of age and the predictor variable(s) as the final step of the regression analyses, and then conducting simple slopes analysis on all significant predictive interactions. Three distinct findings emerged from these analyses. Firstly, age moderates the effect of CU traits on the relationship between parenting styles and conduct problems. Behaviour problems in younger children are better predicted by parenting behaviours and by CU traits than in older children. Secondly, both CU traits and conduct problems were predictive of worsening parental behaviour. Once again, this was particularly evident in younger children. Finally, inconsistent parenting, and corporal punishment were found to be predictive of CU traits. These findings are discussed from a developmental perspective in the context of Bronfenbrenner's (1979) ecological model.