Raising a Difficult Child: Interplay Among Children’s Negative Emotionality Traits, Maternal Parenting, and Children’s Cognitive Development

ABSTRACT

Research Findings: The present study examined (a) whether children’s negative emotionality traits (anger proneness and unsoothability) interactively predict mothers’ authoritarian parenting (AP) and (b) whether children’s negative emotionality moderates the associations between AP and children’s performance on a spatial cognitive task. Eighty mother–child dyads were recruited from Seoul, Korea (children’s age = 45–66 months). The findings were as follows. First, when children were prone to anger and were simultaneously difficult to soothe, mothers were inclined to show more AP. However, when children were relatively low in either of the traits, such as when children were difficult to soothe but not prone to anger, higher levels of unsoothability were associated with less AP. Second, depending on the degree of children’s anger proneness, the associations between children’s spatial intelligence and AP varied. Among children with higher levels of anger proneness, less AP was associated with lower performance on a spatial cognitive task, whereas the opposite pattern was observed among children with lower anger proneness. Practice or Policy: This study implies that the configurations of temperamental traits and the levels of parental control need to be considered in designing teacher and parent education programs, probably in relation to the cultural context.