Transactions between Family Psychosocial Stressors and Externalizing Symptoms from Infancy to Adolescence: Interactions with Gender and Self- regulation.

Abstract

Family psychosocial stressors are key risk factors for children’s externalizing symptoms, yet we understand relatively little of their transactional interplay or their interaction with children’s individual characteristics. Recent evidence has indicated that children’s externalizing problems exacerbate family risk factors, and that children with poor self-regulation and boys are more vulnerable to stressors that contribute to externalizing problems. My research aims to clarify the etiology and development of externalizing symptoms by examining their transactions and interactions with family psychosocial risk factors. Three longitudinal studies collectively spanning across infancy to young adulthood examined transactional models of externalizing symptoms and family stressors and tested whether self-regulation and gender moderated their relations. Study 1 examined whether infants’ functional self-regulation moderated transactions of externalizing behavior and maternal depressive symptoms in toddlerhood. Study 2 investigated whether children’s effortful control moderated transactions of maternal depressive symptoms and externalizing behavior from the preschool years to middle childhood. Study 3 examined whether adolescents’ active coping moderated bidirectional effects of their violent behavior and family conflict during high school. Structural equation modeling results demonstrated evidence of transactional processes involving family psychosocial stressors and youths’ externalizing symptoms that were moderated by self-regulatory processes and gender. Findings across the studies indicated increasingly advanced self-regulatory responses to stress that contributed to individual differences in risk, as well as elevated periods of vulnerability in early childhood. I discuss the transactional nature of maladjustment in families and individual characteristics that moderate effects of risk factors and alter vulnerability to stress. I conclude with an integrative discussion and address implications for prevention and intervention of externalizing symptoms.