Maternal executive function, harsh parenting, and child conduct problems

Angry, hostile parenting behavior and child conduct problems (e.g., anger, opposition, aggression) covary, and are more prevalent in stressful circumstances (Belsky & Barends, 2002; Chang, Schwartz, Dodge, & McBride-Chang, 2003; Goodnow, 2002; Patterson, 1997). There is a need for research that addresses contextual influences on parents’ regulation of harsh parenting, in order to advance understanding of the processes underlying harsh parenting that put families and children at risk for a host of poor outcomes. Our goal in the current study was to examine the interplay of maternal executive function (i.e., regulation of attention, inhibitory control, and working memory) and household chaos involved in the connection between harsh parenting and child conduct problems. Executive Function and Harsh Parenting Child behavior that is angry and oppositional is challenging to manage. When faced with these behaviors, a parent must evaluate situations and potential responses in order to regulate her or his own thoughts and emotions in an effort to respond effectively and reduce the child’s problematic behavior (Lorber, O’Leary, & Kendziora, 2003). If high levels of negative affect (e.g., anger, hostility) become part of a stable pattern of harsh parenting, it increases the risk of child maltreatment and the likelihood that child conduct problems will escalate (Deater-Deckard, 2004; Dodge, Bates, & Pettit, 1990; Patterson, 1997). Maternal executive function (i.e., regulation of attention, inhibitory control and working memory; Friedman et al., 2008) may be the key to avoiding harsh parenting. Executive attention and memory processes could support management of frustration and anger in the parent-child relationship, particularly when faced by challenging child behavior (Barrett & Fleming, 2011; Wahler & Dumas, 1989). This is because executive function promotes regulation of thoughts and emotions through reflection and consideration of potential responses to a challenging situation, as opposed to merely reacting in anger (Baddeley, 1998; Barrett, Tugade, & Engel, 2004; Ochsner & Gross, 2008). Accordingly, executive function could be a critical aspect of emotion and behavior regulation for parents, within the context of child behavior that is oppositional and emotionally aversive to the parent. When child behavior is challenging, the parent must regulate feelings of frustration and anger to prevent reacting in anger to the child’s behavior. Recent research has shown that mothers with poorer working memory are more emotionally reactive to child conduct or behavioral problems (Deater-Deckard, Sewell, Petrill, & Thompson, 2010). The current study extends this line of research by examining maternal executive function using a comprehensive battery of executive function tasks spanning attention, inhibitory control and working memory in a socioeconomically diverse sample of families. Our first hypothesis was that there would be a stronger link between child conduct problems and harsh parenting among mothers with poorer executive function. Regulation in Chaos Regulation of harsh parenting also depends in part on aspects of the broader family context. The degree of household “chaos” (i.e., noise, crowding, lack of routines) may be particularly important, because it probably taxes parents’ capacities for regulating their emotions in challenging situations. The wide variation in chaos between households is stable over time, and is related to a host of parental, family and child factors ranging from poverty to harsh parenting to child IQ and behavioral disorders (Deater-Deckard et al., 2009; Evans & Wachs, 2009; Pike, Iervolino, Eley, Price, & Plomin, 2006). Household chaos exerts its influence on children’s developmental outcomes in part through its impact on parenting behaviors and parent-child interactions (Coldwell, Pike, & Dunn, 2006; Evans, Lepore, Shejwal, & Palsane, 1998). Furthermore, chronic chaos impairs cognitive capacities and contributes to chronic stress at emotional, behavioral, and physiological levels (Erickson, Drevets, & Schulkin, 2003; Evans, Hygge, & Bullinger, 1995), interferes with executive regulation of emotion and behavior (Blair et al., 2007), and has been associated with problems in parental regulation of attention (Mokrova, O’Brien, Calkins, & Keane, 2010). To our knowledge, there is no prior research regarding whether and how chaos constrains executive function’s potential role in the regulation of harsh parenting. Therefore, our second hypothesis was that the regulatory role of maternal executive function identified in hypothesis 1 would itself depend on (i.e., statistically interact with) the level of chaos in the home in predicting variance in harsh parenting. However, this anticipated statistical interaction could reflect one of two competing processes. Executive function may support regulation of harshness only in more chaotic homes. Accordingly, the potential benefits of strong executive function when caring for a child with challenging conduct problems might be particularly important when the broader family context lacks structure and predictability. In contrast, executive function may support regulation of harshness only in calmer homes. Accordingly, the regulatory effects of executive function on harsh parenting in the face of challenging child behavior may be overridden by the prevailing chaos of the household environment. We explored which of these two competing predicted effects best fit the data.