Early Childhood Self-Regulation in Context: Parental and Familial Environmental Influences

ABSTRACTThe development of self-regulation in children has been mainly studied from an individual perspective. The main objective of this article is to review existing data on the development of self-regulatory abilities of the child in the familial/parenting context, from a bidirectional perspective. We looked at self-regulation construct from a temperamental, respectively a cognitive stance, the ones most widely used in the studies reviewed. Our review mainly focused on studies that analyzed the progression of child self-regulatory abilities in conjunction with parental characteristics (like parental self-regulation, parental temperament and mental health status), parent-child relationship, parenting variables, as well as family structure or home environment. We choose to focus our review on these data, given that a critical factor in the development of self regulation in early childhood is the social impact of others, especially parents. As this literature review shows, the development of self-regulatory abilities is an interplay between child traits and parental/environmental influences. These influences seem to be bidirectional ones, which imply developmental plasticity.KEYWORDS: self-regulation, temperament, parent-child interaction, parentingINTRODUCTIONSelf-regulation is one of the most important psychological constructs that has been studied in the last decades within a large area of research domains. It is generally defined as "the primarily volitional cognitive and behavioral process through which an individual maintains levels of emotional, motivational, and cognitive arousal that are conducive to positive adjustment and adaptation" (Blair & Diamond, 2008). However, at a finer grained analysis, this multidimensional umbrella concept covers a broad range of processes, such as physiological regulation, emotion regulation, effortful control, self-control, inhibitory control, executive ability, or volitional control (Calkins & Fox, 2002; Eisenberg & Spinrad, 2004; Kim & Kochanska, 2012). Consequently, many studies measure self-regulation in terms of temperament and attention - more specifically as effortful control (Valiente, Lemery-Chalfant, Swanson, & Reiser, 2008; Ursache, Blair, & Raver, 2012), while others consider self-regulation in terms of social-emotional well-being and positive social relationships with teachers and peers (Denham, 2006; Mashbrun & Pianta, 2006; Ursache et al., 2012). Other approaches examine self-regulation in terms of the ability to persist and to delay gratification (Mischel, Shoda, & Rodriguez, 1989; Ursache, Blair, & Raver, 2012), or from a different perspective, measure executive functions, and in particular the ability to organize information and engage in rule-based and goal-directed tasks (Blair & Razza, 2007; McClelland et al., 2007; Ursache et al., 2012). Facing the diversity in conceptualizations of self-regulation, in this paper we start by delineating two perspectives on the construct: the temperamental and the cognitive one, respectively. The main reason for our focused, non-exhaustive approach comes from the fact that most studies reviewed in the following sections used these two operational definitions for the construct of self-regulation.In temperamental investigations, where the psychobiological theoretical approach to temperament, elaborated by Rothbart and Derryberry (1981) has become central, temperament is defined as constitutionally based individual differences in reactivity and self-regulation, influenced by heredity, maturation, and experience. This theory, as described by Rothbart and colleagues sustains the existence of two major temperamental systems: the reactive and the regulatory ones.The reactive system is responsible for responding to changes in the environment (both external and internal), covers diverse reactions (negative affect, fear, approach, motor activity and cardiac activity) and is assumed to be already present at birth, having a genetical basis and maintaining a certain stability throughout development (Rothbart, 1981; Rothbart & Derryberry, 1981; Casalin, Luyten, Vliegen, & Meurs, 2012). …