Strength-based steeling effects in cascades of parenting adversity, children's emotion processing, and psychological...

Guided by steeling and hormesis models, this paper examined parenting adversity as a quadratic predictor of children's emotion knowledge and effortful control and, in turn, their internalizing and externalizing symptoms. Participants were 238 mothers, partners, and their preschool children (M_age = 4.38 years; 52% female). Multiple methods (i.e., observations, interviews, surveys, q-sorts) and informants (i.e., trained observers, experimenters, mothers, children, teachers) were used in a longitudinal design with three annual measurement occasions. Supporting the first link in the mediational cascade, lagged, autoregressive analyses indicated that a quadratic composite of parenting adversity derived from trained observer ratings of parenting at Wave 1 was a significant predictor of children's emotion knowledge and effortful control at Wave 2. In the second part of the proposed cascade, children's Wave 2 emotion knowledge predicted lower levels of their Wave 3 internalizing symptoms, while their Wave 2 effortful control predicted lower levels of their Wave 3 externalizing symptoms. Consistent with steeling effects, curvilinear findings in the first part of the cascade indicated that moderate levels of exposure to parenting adversity predicted the highest levels of children's subsequent emotion knowledge and effortful control. Children also exhibited substantially diminished emotion knowledge and effortful control as their exposure to family adversity increased from moderate to high levels.