Children's emotions and behaviors in response to infants' cries

Infant crying can elicit in others both a range of emotions and contrasting behavioral reactions, such as altruistic caregiving versus aggression. Variations in reactions to young infants' cries were examined in 60 children ranging in age from late preschool to preadolescence. Each child over-heard either a preterm or a full-term tape-recorded cry from an adjacent room. Then a mother, carrying her infant, came looking for her (previously) "crying" infant's bottle. Later each child was interviewed after hearing a tape recording of a preterm and a full-term cry. Children's emotions and behaviors thus were assessed in response to simulated, real distresses and hypothetical representations of distress. Children's self-reports of empathy, their verbalized intentions to help, their actual helping responses, and observers' ratings of negative emotion were common responses to cries at all ages. In addition there were significant increases with age in prosocial, behavioral interventions. Expressions of negative emotion were inversely related to subsequent forms of prosocial behavior that required direct interaction with the infant. The emotions and behaviors of most children were not influenced by whether they heard preterm or full-term cries. They were, however, able to discriminate between such cries and some articulated "theories" about the impact of the cries on the listener.     

Interparental conflict in kindergarten and adolescent adjustment: prospective investigation of emotional security as an explanatory mechanism

Advancing the long‐term prospective study of explanations for the effects of marital conflict on children’s functioning, relations were examined between interparental conflict in kindergarten, children’s emotional insecurity in the early school years, and subsequent adolescent internalizing and externalizing problems. Based on a community sample of 235 mothers, fathers, and children (Ms = 6.00, 8.02, 12.62 years), and multimethod and multireporter assessments, structural equation model tests provided support for emotional insecurity in early childhood as an intervening process related to adolescent internalizing and externalizing problems, even with stringent autoregressive controls over prior levels of functioning for both mediating and outcome variables. Discussion considers implications for understanding pathways between interparental conflict, emotional insecurity, and adjustment in childhood and adolescence.     

Handling Missing Data in the Modeling of Intensive Longitudinal Data

Myriad approaches for handling missing data exist in the literature. However, few studies have investigated the tenability and utility of these approaches when used with intensive longitudinal data. In this study, we compare and illustrate two multiple imputation (MI) approaches for coping with missingness in fitting multivariate time-series models under different missing data mechanisms. They include a full MI approach, in which all dependent variables and covariates are imputed simultaneously, and a partial MI approach, in which missing covariates are imputed with MI, whereas missingness in the dependent variables is handled via full information maximum likelihood estimation. We found that under correctly specified models, partial MI produces the best overall estimation results. We discuss the strengths and limitations of the two MI approaches, and demonstrate their use with an empirical data set in which children’s influences on parental conflicts are modeled as covariates over the course of 15 days (Schermerhorn, Chow, & Cummings, 2010).     

Aggression between peers in early childhood: individual continuity and developmental change

43 children were observed in play with "best available friends" at 2 and again at 5 years of age. An arousing stimulus, an angry interaction between adults, was introduced during play sessions to increase the likelihood of elicitation of aggressive patterns. Dimensions of physical aggression at age 2 (e.g., object-related aggression, bodily aggression) predicted dimensions of children's physical aggression at age 5. However, substantial sex differences in the stability of aggression were found. Among boys, the disposition to engage in physical aggression was highly stable, with correlations ranging as high as r = .76. Certain dimensions of physical aggression at age 2 were also positively associated with verbal aggression at age 5. Fewer and more modest correlations were found among girls. The frequency of aggression, particularly bodily aggression (e.g., hitting, pushing), initiations of aggression, and the average length of aggression episodes, decreased between 2 and 5 years of age. These results indicate that relative aggressiveness tends to remain stable despite declines in the frequency of aggressive behavior between 2 and 5 years of age.     

Parental dysphoria and children's internalizing symptoms: marital conflict styles as mediators of risk

Parents' marital conflict styles were investigated as mediators in the associations between parental dysphoria and children's internalizing symptoms. A community sample of 267 children, ages 8 to 16, participated with their parents. Behavioral observations were made of parents' interactions during marital conflict resolution tasks. Questionnaires assessed parents' dysphoria and children's internalizing problems. Structural equation modeling indicated that marital discord, in particular, depressive conflict styles, mediated the relationship between parental dysphoria and children's internalizing problems. Furthermore, whereas for dysphoric mothers, depressive conflict styles partially mediated the links with children's internalizing, for fathers, depressive conflict styles fully mediated the links. Destructive and constructive marital conflict were associated with parental dysphoria (positively and negatively, respectively) but did not mediate the relations with children's internalizing.     

Identified spouse abuse as a risk factor for child abuse

CONTEXT: There are limited data on the extent to which spouse abuse in a family is a risk factor for child abuse. OBJECTIVE: To estimate the subsequent relative risk of child abuse in families with a report of spouse abuse compared with other families. DESIGN: Cohort study. SETTING: Analysis of a centralized US Army database PARTICIPANTS: Married couples with children with at least one spouse on active duty in the US Army during 1989-95. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES: The US Army Family Advocacy Program's Central Database was used to identify child and spouse abuse. The exposure was an episode of identified spouse abuse and the main outcome was a substantiated episode of subsequent child abuse.RESULTS: During the study period of an estimated 2,019,949 person years, 14,270 incident child abuse cases were substantiated. Families with an incident case of spouse abuse identified during the study period were twice as likely to have a substantiated report of child abuse compaired with other military families, rate ratio, 2.0, (95% confidence interval [CI] 1.9-2.1). Young parental age had the highest rate ratio, 4.9 (95% CI 4.5-5.3) in the subgroup analysis controlling for rank. Identified spouse abuse was associated with physical abuse of a child, rate ratio 2.4 (95% CI 2.2-2.5), and with sexual abuse of a child, rate ratio 1.5 (95% CI 1.3-1.7). Identified spouse abuse was not associated with child neglect or maltreatment, rate ratio, 1.0 95% CI 0.9-1.1) CONCLUSION: An identified episode of spouse abuse in a family appears to be associated with an increased risk of subsequent child abuse and serves as an independent risk factor. Therefore. care providers should consider the potential risk to children when dealing with spouse abuse.     

Editors'' rejoinder

This chapter critically reviews alternative funding and control strategies and examines some of their policy implications. The early sections of the chapter address the nature and origin of some proposals for alternative strategies and reflect on their theoretical underpinnings. The next section summarizes the empirical findings from both historical and other comparative studies. The final section presents the policy implications of the different patterns of educational funding and control in a variety of contexts.