Developmental Psychology Longitudinal Relations Among Household Chaos
Developmental Psychology Longitudinal Relations Among Household Chaos, SES, and Effortful Control in the Prediction of Language Skills in Early Childhood Bridget M. Lecheile, Tracy L. Spinrad, Xiaoye Xu, Jamie Lopez, and Nancy Eisenberg Online First Publication, January 30, 2020. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/dev0000896
CITATION Lecheile, B. M., Spinrad, T. L., Xu, X., Lopez, J., & Eisenberg, N. (2020, January 30). Longitudinal Relations Among Household Chaos, SES, and Effortful Control in the Prediction of Language Skills in Early Childhood. Developmental Psychology. Advance online publication. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/dev0000896
Longitudinal Relations Among Household Chaos, SES, and Effortful Control in the Prediction of Language Skills in Early Childhood
Bridget M. Lecheile Washington Association for Infant Mental Health,
Seattle, Washington
Tracy L. Spinrad, Xiaoye Xu, Jamie Lopez, and Nancy Eisenberg Arizona State University
Previous research has shown that home environment plays an important role in children’s early language skills. Yet, few researchers have examined the unique role of family-level factors (socioeconomic status [SES], household chaos) on children’s learning or focused on the longitudinal processes that might explain their relations to children’s early language skills. The goal of this study was to investigate the longitudinal relations from family SES, household chaos, and children’s effortful control (EC) to children’s language skills during early childhood, controlling for stability of the constructs. At Time (T1 i.e., 30 months), mothers reported family SES and children’s vocabulary, and their own linguistic input was assessed during a free-play session with their child. At T1, T2 (i.e., 42 months), and T3 (i.e., 54 months), household chaos was reported by mothers, and children’s EC was rated by mothers and nonparental caregivers and observed during a gift-delay task. At T3, children’s expressive and receptive language skills were measured with a standard assessment. Path analyses indicated that higher SES predicted higher levels of EC at T2 and language skills at T3, and greater levels of household chaos at T2 predicted poorer EC and language skills a year later, even when controlling for stability of the constructs. Results indicated that T2 EC partially mediated the relations between SES and T3 language skills. Findings from this study can be used to identify key factors for early learning and perhaps inform programs designed to support families and young children.
Keywords: household chaos, socioeconomic status, effortful control, language skills
There is wide variation in the mastery of basic cognitive and socioemotional competencies at school entry; children who lack fun- damental school readiness skills generally struggle early on with learning and achievement, and their problems often persist throughout the school years (Zauche, Thul, Mahoney, & Stapel-Wax, 2016). Language is a critical foundation that contributes to school readiness because the abilities to understand and communicate with language support transactions within the social and physical environments that promote learning. In fact, early linguistic skills predicted improve- ments in reading ability and other domains of academic achievement during the early and later elementary years (Nelson, Welsh, Trup, & Greenberg, 2011). Therefore, it is important to identify predictors of
language development during early childhood, including mediators of predictors, to support successful transitions and performance in the first years of school and beyond.
Broad measures of socioeconomic risk have been consistently negatively related to early language development and other school readiness skills (Evans & Rosenbaum, 2008; Fernald, Marchman, & Weisleder, 2013; Hoff, 2003), but examination of more specific aspects of children’s environments is warranted. To this end, researchers have demonstrated that environmental chaos—includ- ing noise and disorganization within the home—is a consistent predictor of diminished language and literacy skills in children (Maxwell & Evans, 2000; Vernon-Feagans, Garrett-Peters, Wil- loughby, & Mills-Koonce, 2012).
A cornerstone of developmental research is the aim not only to describe developmental phenomena, but to understand the pro- cesses through which they emerge, including the specific pathways from risk to children’s outcomes (Bailey, Duncan, Watts, Clements, & Sarama, 2018). Effortful control (EC) has increasingly emerged as an important contributor to the development of children’s cognitive, socioemotional, and behavioral competencies (Eisenberg, Valiente, & Eggum, 2010; Kopystynska, Spinrad, Seay, & Eisenberg, 2016; Nigg, 2017), including language and literacy abilities (Lonigan, Allan, & Phillips, 2017; McClelland et al., 2007). Moreover, children’s EC (or the broader construct of self-regulation) has been shown to account for some of the relations between family risk factors and child outcomes (Bernier, Beauchamp, Carlson, & Lalonde, 2015; Evans & Rosenbaum, 2008; Garrett-Peter, Mokrova, Carr, & Vernon-Feagans,
Editor’s Note. Jennifer E. Lansford served as the action editor for this article.—EFD
Bridget M. Lecheile, Washington Association for Infant Mental Health, Seattle, Washington; X Tracy L. Spinrad, Xiaoye Xu, and Jamie Lopez, T. Denny Sanford School of Social and Family Dynamics, Arizona State University; Nancy Eisenberg, Department of Psychology, Arizona State University.
Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Tracy L. Spinrad, T. Denny Sanford School of Social and Family Dynamics, Ari- zona State University, P.O. Box 3701, Tempe, AZ 85287-3701. E-mail: tspinrad@asu.edu
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Developmental Psychology © 2020 American Psychological Association 2020, Vol. 2, No. 999, 000 ISSN: 0012-1649 http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/dev0000896
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https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4637-668X
mailto:tspinrad@asu.edu
http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/dev0000896
2019; Ispa, Su-Russell, Palermo, & Carlo, 2017). Thus, the purpose of this study was to explore the longitudinal and unique relations of two family-level characteristics—namely, household chaos and socioeco- nomic status (SES)—to early language skills, as well as to examine the potential role of children’s EC in mediating these relations across early childhood. Few researchers have examined the unique role of these constructs in understanding children’s language skills, particularly using panel models in which the stability of the constructs is controlled. Moreover, researchers have not sys- tematically examined these processes in early childhood, when children’s EC and language skills are rapidly developing.
Household Chaos, SES, and Language
Researchers have measured many aspects of environmental chaos in children’s lives, including community noise, residential crowding, and household disorganization. Household chaos, as conceptualized in this and other studies, refers to aspects of the environment that represent temporal and structural disorganiza- tion, commotion, and disorder within the home (Bronfenbrenner & Evans, 2000). Some of these characteristics are captured by a lack of regularity in household routines and schedules, high levels of ambient noise and other background stimuli, high levels of traffic within the home, an unkempt physical environment, and/or a general sense of disorganization in daily experiences (Bronfen- brenner & Evans, 2000; Vernon-Feagans et al., 2012; Whitesell, Teti, Crosby, & Kim, 2015). Families reporting their households to be chaotic often perceive them to be “hectic, unstructured, unpre- dictable, and, at times, simply out of control” (Evans, Gonnella, Marcynyszyn, Gentile, & Salpekar, 2005, p. 560). Despite the variety of indices of chaos examined, converging evidence sug- gests that individuals exposed to chronic environmental chaos exhibit a number of maladaptive outcomes across social– emotional, cognitive, and physical domains (Bradley, 2015; Evans & Wachs, 2010).
One of the most robust research findings is that exposure to aspects of chaos relates to deficits in children’s learning. In both laboratory and naturalistic studies, noise exposure has been asso- ciated with deficits in language, preliteracy and literacy skills, speech perception, attention, and memory (Maxwell & Evans, 2000). A number of studies have found chaos in particular to relate to language development even when considering other risk factors (Johnson, Martin, Brooks-Gunn, & Petrill, 2008; Pike, Iervolino, Eley, Price, & Plomin, 2006; Vernon-Feagans et al., 2012). Household chaos also has been related to broader academic outcomes, such that children who experience more household chaos have lower academic competencies (Garrett-Peters et al., 2016) and more disengagement from school (Garrett-Peters et al., 2019).
It has been argued that in the presence of chaos, developmen- tally facilitative transactions between the child and their social and physical microcontexts may be disrupted or attenuated due to lack of duration, regularity, or intensity (Bronfenbrenner & Evans, 2000; Evans et al., 2005). In line with research on elevated physiological stress responses and “cognitive overload” in adults and children exposed to environmental stress (Saegert, 1981), it has been suggested that children cope with excessive noise and other stimulation (i.e., social, visual, temporal movement) by fil- tering out unwanted stimuli. With chronic exposure, they may
begin to overgeneralize and apply this strategy indiscriminately, screening out developmentally relevant cues and information along with that which is irrelevant or excessive (Maxwell & Evans, 2000). Thus, chaotic home…
