Difficult temperament moderates links between maternal responsiveness and children's compliance and behavior problems in low-income families.

Disruptive, externalizing behavior problems in children and youths are important early markers of risk of future antisocial trajectories, leading to serious and widespread burdens for individuals, families, and societies. By contrast, children’s compliance, and particularly its committed, self-regulated form, has been broadly associated with positive, prosocial socioemotional outcomes. Several large bodies of research have led to a consensus that early biologically-founded temperamental characteristics and the qualities of early parent-child relationships both play important causal roles in emerging antisocial trajectories (e.g., Deater–Deckard, Dodge, Bates, & Pettit, 1998; Dodge, Coie, & Lynam, 2006; Gilliom & Shaw, 2004; Kiff, Lengua, & Zalewski, 2011; Lahey et al., 2008; Nigg, 2006; Frick & Morris, 2004; Shaw, Owens, Vondra, Keenan, & Winslow, 1996), as well as prosocial trajectories (e.g., Feldman, Greenbaum, & Yirmiya, 1999; Kim & Kochanska, 2012; Kochanska, 1995; Stifter, Spinrad, & Braungart-Rieker, 1999). Children’s difficult temperament (anger proneness, negative emotionality, poor effortful control) is often seen as a biologically-based risk factor, a vulnerability, or diathesis that increases the probability of poor socioemotional outcomes (Bates, 1980; Eisenberg et al., 2000; 2009; Kim & Deater-Deckard, 2011; Kochanska, Barry, Jimenez, Hollatz, & Woodard, 2009; Lengua & Wachs, in press; Rothbart & Bates, 2006; Sanson, Hemphill, & Smart, 2004). But we have also increasingly come to appreciate that child difficult temperament that encompasses high negative emotionality and poor self-regulation (Lengua & Wachs, in press) should be considered in interplay with early relationships with the caregivers. When exposed to negative, rejecting, unresponsive, harsh parenting, difficult children are at a considerable risk for a broad range of behavior problems: diminished compliance, oppositional defiant disorder, conduct disorder, or aggression. However, warm, responsive, authoritative parenting can effectively offset those risks (e.g., Bradley & Corwyn, 2008; Bates & Pettit, 2007; Bates, Pettit, Dodge, & Ridge, 1998; Belsky, Hsieh, & Crnic, 1998; Giliom & Shaw, 2004; Kim & Kochanska, 2012; Lerner, Nitz, Talwar, & Lerner, 1989; Messman et al., 2009; Rothbart & Bates, 2006; Stright, Gallagher, & Kelley, 2008; Thomas & Chess, 1977). Belsky and colleagues (Belsky, 1997; Belsky & Pluess, 2009 a,b; Belsky, Bakermans-Kranenburg, & van IJzendoorn, 2007), as well as Boyce and Ellis (2005) and Ellis, Boyce, Belsky, Bakermans-Kranenburg, and van Ijzendoorn (2011) have argued that such diathesis-stress approach does not adequately describe another important form of temperament-parenting interactions – differential susceptibility. They proposed that certain traits, including difficult temperament, should be seen as plasticity or malleability traits rather than risk factors. When subjected to adverse, sub-optimal parenting, temperamentally difficult children do have worse outcomes than easy children. But when raised by warm, responsive, authoritative parents, they can indeed do better than easy children. The differential susceptibility model encompasses the traditional diathesis-stress effect, where difficult children who experience adverse parenting have worse outcomes than their easy peers and a plasticity effect, where difficult children who receive beneficial parenting may have better outcomes than their easy peers. Additionally, differential susceptibility model poses that easy children are less affected by a range of parenting qualities, adverse or beneficial, than difficult children. A growing literature has supported the presence of both types of interactions in predicting a broad range of developmental outcomes (Belsky & Pluess, 2009a, b; Ellis et al., 2011; Fowles & Kochanska, 2000; Kim & Kochanska, 2012; Kochanska, Kim, Barry, & Philibert, 2011). Belsky and Pluess (2009) called for including both negative and positive outcomes in analyses of such effects, and they indicated that differential susceptibility may be more easily revealed for the latter. This study addresses their recommendation. In addition to examining children’s externalizing behavior problems, we also include their committed compliance. Committed compliance is a wholehearted, eager, willing, enthusiastic form of compliance that appears to flow from “inside” and that does not require sustained parental control. Multiple studies have documented that committed compliance is a robust positive developmental hallmark (Kim & Kochanska, 2012; Kochanska, Aksan, & Koenig, 1995; Kochanska, Coy, & Murray, 2001). We expand our past work on interactions between temperament and parenting, conducted with low-risk community families, to a population of low-income mothers and toddlers. Because economic disadvantage in itself is considered a risk factor for externalizing problems (Bornstein & Bradley, 2003; Duncan, Brooks-Gunn, & Klebanow, 1994; McLoyd, 1998), the understanding of risks, protective factors, vulnerability, and resilience in low-income families is particularly critical. Perhaps more important, very few, if any, studies to date have examined the issues of diathesis-stress versus differential susceptibility in an exclusively low-income sample. Ellis and colleagues (Ellis et al., 2011) specifically argued for studying such issues in broadly-ranging family ecologies. Economically disadvantaged families experience high levels of pervasive adversity and stress that may impact the form of interactions between vulnerability (or plasticity) factors, such as difficult temperament, and parenting in unknown ways. We examine the interactions of children’s difficult temperament with maternal responsiveness, often considered as a key parenting dimension that can serve as a powerful protective factor (Pasalich et al., 2011; Pettit, Bates, & Dodge, 1997; Shaw, 2003; van den Boom, 1994). To assure robust, multi-method measurement, we employ lengthy behavioral observations of parenting in a variety of naturalistic contexts. Furthermore, we assess both children’s temperament and socioemotional outcomes using observational and mother-reported measures. We focus on mothers and toddlers, because large bodies of literature have shown that both committed compliance and externalizing problems at toddler age are significant predictors of future developmental trajectories and adjustment (Kochanska et al., 1995; Shaw et al., 1996; Wakschlag, Tolan, & Leventhal, 2010). Throughout the analyses, we control for children’s gender, given the well-established gender differences in committed compliance and externalizing behavior problems (e.g., Crick & Zahn–Waxler, 2003; Kochanska et al., 2005).