Assessing Biobehavioural Self-Regulation and Coregulation in Early Childhood: The Parent-Child Challenge Task.

Researchers have argued for more dynamic and contextually relevant measures of regulatory processes in interpersonal interactions. In response, we introduce and examine the effectiveness of a new task, the Parent-Child Challenge Task, designed to assess the self-regulation and coregulation of affect, goal-directed behavior, and physiology in parents and their preschoolers in response to an experimental perturbation. Concurrent and predictive validity was examined via relations with children's externalizing behaviors.

Breaking Down the Coercive Cycle: How Parent and Child Risk Factors Influence Real-Time Variability in Parental Responses to Child Misbehavior.

Objective: Parent-child coercive cycles have been associated with both rigidity and inconsistency in parenting behavior. To explain these mixed findings, we examined real-time variability in maternal responses to children's off-task behavior to determine whether this common trigger of the coercive cycle (responding to child misbehavior) is associated with rigidity or inconsistency in parenting. We also examined the effects of risk factors for coercion (maternal hostility, maternal depressive symptoms, child externalizing problems, and dyadic negativity) on patterns of parenting.

Can We Fix This? Parent-Child Repair Processes and Preschoolers' Regulatory Skills.

The repair of difficult parent-child interactions is a marker of healthy functioning in infancy, but less is known about repair processes during early childhood. We used dynamic systems methods to investigate dyadic repair in mothers and their 3-year-old children ( = 96) and its prediction of children's emotion regulation and behavior problems at a four-month follow-up. Mothers and children completed free play and challenging puzzle tasks.

Dyadic Flexibility in Early Parent-Child Interactions: Relations with Maternal Depressive Symptoms and Child Negativity and Behaviour Problems.

Lower levels of parent-child affective flexibility indicate risk for children's problem outcomes. This short-term longitudinal study examined whether maternal depressive symptoms were related to lower levels of dyadic affective flexibility and positive affective content in mother-child problem-solving interactions at age 3.5 years (=100) and whether these maternal and dyadic factors predicted child emotional negativity and behaviour problems at a 4-month follow-up.

Contingencies in Mother-Child Teaching Interactions and Behavior Regulation and Dysregulation in Early Childhood.

Predictable patterns in early parent-child interactions may help lay the foundation for how children learn to self-regulate. The present study examined contingencies between maternal teaching and directives and child compliance in mother-child problem-solving interactions at age 3.5 and whether they predicted children's behavioral regulation and dysregulation (inhibitory control and externalizing behaviors) as rated by mothers, fathers, and teachers at a 4-month follow-up ( = 100).