Children's self-regulation development: Continuity, change, and parenting daily hassles

Self-regulation is a foundational marker that supports children's adaptation across cognitive, social, and emotional domains. The bidirectional psychobiological model conceptualizes self-regulation as comprising interrelated top-down processes (e.g., attentional focusing, inhibitory control) and bottom-up processes (e.g., impulsivity) that jointly shape children's ability to modulate attention, behavior, and emotion. Early caregiving environments, including parents' experiences of daily hassles, could play a critical role in shaping self-regulation development. However, few longitudinal studies have examined the continuity and change of these distinct domains from toddlerhood to early adolescence and recognized how early parenting daily hassles influence such development. The present study used data from the Arizona Twin Project (N = 1325 twins, 665 families; 49.1% female) to examine developmental patterns of attentional focusing, inhibitory control, and impulsivity from toddlerhood through early adolescence. Autoregressive simplex models characterized stability as carryover from one wave to the next, whereas common factor models characterized continuity as a stable latent disposition shared across waves, with age-specific deviations captured separately. Results indicated that attentional focusing and inhibitory control demonstrated moderate stability in early childhood that strengthened across middle childhood and early adolescence. Impulsivity showed moderate stability from toddlerhood to early childhood, followed by strong continuity from middle childhood through early adolescence. Parental daily hassles in toddlerhood predicted lower attentional focusing and inhibitory control and higher impulsivity. Findings reflect both trait-like continuity and state-like change in self-regulation domains, underscoring how self-regulatory capacities consolidate over time while remaining sensitive to early contextual stress.