Evidence for Reduced Monitoring of Children's Laboratory Task Performance by Punitive Parents: An ERP Study

Differential monitoring of children’s behavior appears to be an important factor underlying associations between parenting styles and children’s socioemotional outcomes. Limited work has investigated parental monitoring of children’s behavior in an online manner, using non-report based (e.g., neural response) measures. The current study assessed brain potential responses of parents observing their children’s performance on a laboratory task and tested for relations of parenting style with neural reactivity to children’s correct responses versus mistakes. Parents characterized by an authoritarian parenting style and physically coercive behavior demonstrated reduced tracking of their children’s successes, as evidenced by diminished early neural reactivity to their children’s correct responses, and reduced recognition of their children’s mistakes in terms of later neural reactivity following errors. These findings have implications for understanding the impact of authoritarian and punitive parenting on children’s socioemotional development and academic achievement, and highlight possibilities for employing neural indicators of positive, proactive parental monitoring in evaluations of parenting interventions.