Parent-child co-regulation of affect in early childhood pathways to children's externalizing behavior problem

Affective synchrony in early parent-infant interaction is essential to the development of children's emotion regulation. However, we know less about parent and child co-regulation of affect in early childhood and its relationship to individual differences in children's behavioral and regulatory difficulties. The present study examined affect co-regulation in early parent-child interactions and its effect on children's externalizing problems across the transition to school. Child gender, child temperament (effortful control), and parental risk (problem drinking) were also incorporated as developmental risk factors for externalizing behavior problems. Participants (N = 235) were part of a longitudinal study of children at risk for conduct problems. Mother-child and father-child dyads were assessed for affect co-regulation via a videotaped, challenging block design task completed at home when children were 3 years old. Using a new method designed for simple affect coding systems, co-regulation was operationalized as trends of concurrent and time-lagged relations between parent and child affect (positive and negative) across the interaction. Externalizing problems were assessed via mothers', fathers', and teachers' CBCL reports. Effortful control was a composite of laboratory assessment and maternal report. Mixed modeling, hierarchical linear modeling, and linear regression were used to examine between-dyad differences in affect co-regulation and their effects on children's concurrent (3 years) and later (6 years) externalizing behavior problems. Co-regulation predicted later externalizing problems beyond the effects of effortful control and baseline externalizing, which were robust. When parents' positive affect was typically followed by a greater increase in children's positive affect, children showed greater declines in externalizing overtime. Conversely, a response of increased negativity to a partner's negative affect predicted lesser declines in externalizing over time, but this effect differed by parent: the mother's negative response to the child and the child's negative response to the father were associated with higher risk. There were no effects of child gender or parental problem drinking. Findings suggest that the study of structure in early parent-child dyadic interaction, in this case the co-regulation of positive and negative affect, may inform the etiology of individual differences in developmental psychopathology in early childhood.