Supportive Maternal and Paternal Caregiving and the Children's Emerging Effortful Control Abilities

Supportive maternal and paternal caregiving have been found to be associated with children's effortful control abilities. However, many studies did not assess both maternal and paternal parenting in the same analytic model, making it difficult to parse out the unique contributions of mothers versus fathers. Thus, we aimed to simultaneously assess the role of parent gender in associations between observations of supportive caregiving in the preschool years and observations of children's effortful control abilities in the early school-age years. At approximately age 3, children (N = 113) participated in videotaped father-child and mother-child interactions, as well as a battery of effortful control tasks. At approximately age 6, children participated in another battery of effortful control tasks. Covariates included parental education, child age, child preschool-age effortful control, and child gender. Structural equation modeling revealed that maternal and paternal supportive caregiving behaviors in the preschool years were independently associated with children's school-age effortful control abilities. In sum, we found that supportive caregiving in the preschool years was associated with children's early school-age effortful control abilities, regardless of parent gender. Findings have implications for the development of interventions aimed at improving children's effortful control abilities through improvements in both paternal and maternal parenting.