![[ Visit Client Website ]](images/banner.gif)
Children’s social behaviors are a well-established predictor of their educational and emotional outcomes. Youth with poor social behaviors are at higher risk for difficulties later in life, including dropping out of school, juvenile delinquency and adult criminal legal system involvement. Parental engagement, referring to parents’ direct interactions with the child through caretaking and shared activities, is recognized as a positive factor for children’s socioemotional development. Empirical studies have identified a strong association between the time new parents spent engaging in developmentally appropriate and positive activities with their infants and children’s social-emotional competence during toddlerhood, but little research had examined the longer-term effects of parental engagement. Our study investigates how mothers’ engagement with children in early childhood may affect their adaptive social behaviors in adolescence.
Methods
We use three waves of follow-up data (when children are 1, 5, and 15 years old) from the Future of Families and Child Wellbeing Study, a longitudinal population-based study of nearly 5,000 children born in urban areas in the US between 1998 and 2000. Analyses are based on 3,132 observations of child-mother dyads. Adolescents’ adaptive social behaviors are measured by the Adaptive Social Behavior Inventory at age 15 reported by the child. Mothers’ engagement activities are operationalized as the number of days in a week they engaged in 8 different activities with their children measured at age 5. Taking advantage of longitudinal data, analyses include controls for a rich set of child, parent, and family characteristics and use Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) and linear probability model (LPM) regressions to examine both the continuous and binary measure of the outcome. Sensitivity analyses explore different cutoffs of the frequency of mothers’ engagement to understand at which point in the distribution associations are apparent, and testing differences by child sex.
Results
Results from multivariate models indicate that mothers’ engagement in activities with the child at five years old is positively associated with the adolescents’ adaptive social behaviors at 15 years old. The interaction model indicates no significant interaction effect by child sex; however, models stratified by child sex indicate that the association is stronger for boys than girls, consistent with some prior research.
Conclusions and Implications
These results indicate that mothers’ engagement in age-appropriate activities with children at a young age is important for their longer-term socioemotional development into adolescence. Analyses will be extended to examine the timing and cumulative measures of mothers’ engagement (at ages 1, 3, 5, and 9), exploring possible mechanisms through which this association may be operating, and considering the role of fathers’ involvement in these associations.