The impact of parents, child care providers, teachers, and peers on early externalizing trajectories
Section snippets
Relationship risk and protective factors
The complex transactions between children and their environment have been highlighted in the study of child development in general, and the development of externalizing problems in particular (Bronfenbrenner, 1977, Dodge and Pettit, 2003, Hill, 2002). According to these developmental and ecologically-oriented approaches, children encounter a variety of circumstances or conditions in their environments that either promote maladaptation or promote competence, with children's outcomes determined
Person-centered approaches
The current study took a person-centered approach to understanding which relationships may lead to sustained developmental trajectories and which may play a role in developmental patterns that desist or escalate over time. Person-centered research on externalizing trajectories, which has increasingly used methodologies that empirically derive trajectory groups, such as latent growth curve mixture modeling (Muthén, 2004, Muthén and Muthén, 2000, Muthén and Muthén, 2004, Nagin, 2005), has
The current study: specific aims and hypotheses
This study explored the following specific aims and hypotheses. First, this study sought to examine the unique contributions of parents, child care providers, teachers, and peers to distinct developmental patterns of classroom externalizing behavior after the transition to school. Consistent with the literature reviewed above, it was expected that children who experienced negative relationships would be more likely to have trajectories typified by stable or increased levels of maladjustment. In
Participants
The 241 children (girls = 124) in this study are participants in the Wisconsin Study of Families and Work (WSFW), an ongoing longitudinal study of families and child development (Essex, Klein, Cho, & Kraemer, 2003). At its first assessment wave, the WSFW enrolled 560 families from the Madison and Milwaukee areas during women's second trimester of pregnancy through obstetrics clinics, private and university hospital clinics, and a large health maintenance organization. Overall, participant
Descriptive statistics and relationships among variables
Table 1 presents the means and standard deviations for all preschool, kindergarten, first-grade, third-grade, and fifth-grade variables. These data are presented for the sample as a whole and are not reflective of descriptive statistics for the subgroups of children as described later. Children in this sample had generally positive relationships with parents, child care providers, kindergarten teachers, and peers. In addition, most children exhibited generally low levels of externalizing
Discussion
The purpose of this study was twofold. First, this study sought to understand the contribution of parents, child care providers, kindergarten teachers, and peers on the development of distinct patterns of externalizing behavior from kindergarten through fifth grade. Second, it examined the role of child gender on the identification and prediction of externalizing trajectories. The results are discussed below.
Acknowledgements
This research was supported in part by a Ruth L. Kirschstein Predoctoral National Research Service Award granted to the first author (NIMH grant 1F31 MH68959-01A1), NIMH grants MH44340 and MH52354-Project IV (Marilyn J. Essex, Principal Investigator), and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Research Network on Psychopathology and Development (David J. Kupfer, Chair).
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Now at the Early Childhood Clinical Research Center, Bradley/Hasbro Children's Research Center & Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University.