Elsevier

Children and Youth Services Review

Volume 61, February 2016, Pages 90-100
Children and Youth Services Review

Children's resilience in the presence of mothers' depressive symptoms: Examining regulatory processes related to active agency

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.childyouth.2015.12.008Get rights and content

Highlights

  • The underlying processes of resilience were examined.

  • Active agency promoted children's resilience when mothers are high in depression.

  • Agentic processes were driven by a set of individual and environmental factors.

  • These agentic processes promoted resilience via additive main effects instead of interactive effects.

Abstract

The current study examined the proposal that children's processes related to their active and controlled engagement with the environment, their active agency, are critical in promoting their resilience at first grade in the presence of mothers' cumulative depressive symptoms. Using a large sample from the NICHD Study of Early Child Care, the current study demonstrated that: (1) previously found associations between children's individual (i.e., intelligence, low difficult temperament) and environmental (i.e., maternal sensitivity, child care quality) characteristics and their resilience in the presence of mothers' depressive symptoms are partially attributed to their competent functioning in effortful control, self-assertion, and mastery motivation. Effortful control was the most consistent independent predictor of resilience across four developmental outcomes. (2) These agentic processes promoted these children's resilience via additive main effects rather than interactive effects. Findings from both the mediating and moderating analytic approaches converged in terms of underscoring the importance of the agentic system in promoting child resilience in the presence of mothers' depressive symptoms.

Introduction

Despite a plethora of developmental problems among children whose mothers have depressive symptoms (Cummings and Davies, 1994, Downey and Coyne, 1990, Goodman and Gotlib, 1999, Goodman et al., 2011), some of these children appear to develop normally (Compas et al., 2002, Hammen, 2003, Radke-Yarrow and Sherman, 1990). Such resilience seems to be due to individual and environmental characteristics that include children's intelligence, low-irritable temperament, and high quality caregiving environments (Campbell et al., 2004, Garber and Little, 1999, Mezulis et al., 2004, Radke-Yarrow and Brown, 1993, Silk et al., 2006). Yet why these variables predict resilience and what regulatory processes in children mediate their impact is largely unknown. Based on an agentic approach to development (Bandura, 1989), the present study examined the proposal that processes related to children's active and controlled engagement with the environment, their active agency, are critical. Three agentic processes – self-assertion, effortful control, and mastery motivation – were evaluated as potential mechanisms responsible for the impact of individual and environmental characteristics on children's resilience in the presence of mothers' depressive symptoms.

Given the expected developmental risks children face when their mothers are high in depressive symptoms (Goodman et al., 2011, National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (N), why do some children still manifest competence without developing psychological problems or psychopathology (Compas et al., 2002, Hammen, 1991, Luthar, 2003)? Research examining resilience among those children have demonstrated several child individual and environmental characteristics as promising predictors of their resilience in the presence of mothers' depressive symptoms.

Individual characteristics are thought to promote competence among children who are at developmental risks due to their mothers' depressive symptoms because these characteristics promote their resourceful adaptation to stressful environment (Hammen, 1991). Two such characteristics have been identified. The first is children's temperament. Compared with non-resilient children, resilient children are characterized as less shy, less easily embarrassed, and more socially engaging in temperament (Radke-Yarrow and Brown, 1993, Radke-Yarrow and Sherman, 1990). When children are low in difficult temperament, mothers' depressive symptoms are less likely to be associated with children's behavioral problems, low social competence, unresponsive behavior, and separation distress (Dix & Yan, 2013). The second is child intelligence. Among 5-, 6-, and 10-year-old children of depressed mothers, resilient children have higher IQs than non-resilient children (Radke-Yarrow and Brown, 1993, Radke-Yarrow and Sherman, 1990). Children's problem solving skills, one important facet of intelligence, have also been shown to facilitate children's coping with maternal depression (Compas et al., 2002).

One prominent resilient factor in the family environment is effective parenting. It has been associated with children's resilience in the presence of mothers' depressive symptoms. Compared with non-resilient children, resilient children receive more sensitive parenting from their depressed mothers (Radke-Yarrow & Brown, 1993). When mothers are high in depressive symptoms, maternal warmth, supportiveness, low intrusiveness, and low negativity minimizes the detrimental impact of their depressive symptoms on children (Campbell et al., 2004, Goodman et al., 1994, Goodman et al., 2011, Masten et al., 1999, Wang and Dix, 2013).

Another promising extra-familial environment that may promote children's resilience in the presence of mothers' depressive symptoms is high-quality childcare. High-quality childcare features high sensitivity to children's individual needs, positive affect while interacting with children, and a warm classroom atmosphere (Howes, 2000, Phillips et al., 1987, Burchinal et al., 2000). Although to our knowledge no studies have examined explicitly whether childcare center or school environments ameliorate the negative impact of maternal depression, there is evidence from studies of children living in high contextual risk families that supports this proposal. High quality schooling and school-based supportive ties have been shown to buffer the child from the risks of problematic family environments and close the developmental gap between at-risk children and their low-risk peers (Dubois et al., 1992, Hamre and Pianta, 2005).

The evidence above suggests that children's resilience in the presence of mothers' depressive symptoms may be dependent on a variety of influences from children's individual and environmental characteristics. Yet to date, much of the research has been descriptive in laying out individual and environmental factors, leaving the proximal regulatory processes unspecified. The notion of regulatory processes as the underlying mechanisms of resilience is in line with prior attempts to address the role of the “fundamental adaptive processes” in human resilience (Cicchetti and Rogosch, 1997, Masten, 2007, Masten and Tellegen, 2012, Radke-Yarrow and Brown, 1993). There has been consensus that competent development is robust in the presence of adversity as long as children's fundamental adaptive processes are maintained (Masten, 2011, Masten, 2007, Masten and Coatsworth, 1998). However, even though the importance of fundamental adaptation processes has been proposed repeatedly in resilience research, what specific proximal – motivational, cognitive, and emotional – processes regulate resilience have not been well examined empirically. The current study endeavored to fill this gap and specifically focused on children's agentic regulatory processes.

Processes related to children's active and controlled engagement with the environment, their active agency, may promote children's resilience in the presence of mothers' depressive symptoms. This proposal is drawn from the agentic theory of human development (Bandura, 1989, Bandura, 2006) and self-determination theory (Deci and Ryan, 1985, Deci and Ryan, 2002, Ryan, 1993). Both theories assume that individuals are active agents and they are concerned with the degree to which individuals' behaviors are self-motivated or self-determined. Attributes pertinent to these agentic processes might be crucial, counteracting the negative impact of aversive environments (Cicchetti and Rogosch, 1997, Radke-Yarrow and Brown, 1993). In the current study, three aspects of agentic processes – autonomy/self-assertion, effortful control, and mastery motivation – were examined.

Autonomy is fundamental to growth, development, and personal well-being (Deci and Ryan, 1985, Deci and Ryan, 1995, Deci and Ryan, 2002, Ryan, 1993). Self-assertion is the form of autonomy examined in the current study. Autonomy or self-assertion is low among children of depressed mothers. Mothers' depressive symptoms create harsh, intrusive, and unresponsive parenting environments (Lovejoy, Graczyk, O'Hare, & Neuman, 2000) in which children cannot control the outcomes they receive or elicit support for their needs. In turn, they inhibit active and assertive social engagement with their depressed mothers (Dix & Buck, 2011), display low self-assertion (i.e., low active resistance) and none of the age-related increase in self-assertion that occur for other children (Dix, Stewart, Gershoff, & Day, 2007). However, when children develop autonomy and self-assertion despite mothers' depressive symptoms, they have relatively positive perceptions of themselves, tend to reach out to others, and draw out support from their depressed parents (Radke-Yarrow & Brown, 1993).

Effortful control refers to individual's efficiency of executive attention, including the ability to inhibit a dominant response to perform a subdominant response to plan and detect errors (Eisenberg et al., 2010, Liew, 2012, Rothbart and Bates, 2006). For children at risks for developing mood disorders, such as children of depressed mothers (Goodman and Gotlib, 1999, Goodman et al., 2011), effortful control and self-regulation might be critical in reducing internalizing problems or mood disorders (Eisenberg et al., 2009, Luthar et al., 2000). When stress is high, children high in effortful control are able to shift their attention as needed, use cognitive distraction as a coping strategy, regulate the tendency to react negatively to stressful stimuli, and use focused attention to assist their planning behaviors (Eisenberg et al., 2009). For children of depressed mothers, given that their effortful control (or self-regulation in a broad sense) might be undermined (Gartstein and Fagot, 2003, Goodman and Gotlib, 1999, Lengua et al., 2007), the development or maintenance of effortful control may promote their resilience in the presence of adversities other than mothers' depressive symptoms (Eisenberg et al., 2003, Eisenberg et al., 2004).

Mastery motivation is a critical component of children's emerging agency and competence (Bandura, 1989, Masten and Coatsworth, 1998, Ryan and Deci, 2000). It is children's experience of interest, enjoyment, focused attention, and persistence in manipulating and engaging tasks even in the face of challenge (MacTurk and Morgan, 1995, Messer, 1993). Research on child resilience has documented that constructs related to mastery motivation (e.g., achievement motivation, mastery-oriented behaviors, and intrinsic motivation) promote children's resilience (Langrock et al., 2002, Radke-Yarrow and Brown, 1993). When coping with the stressful environment, mastery-related motivation and behaviors are more stable predictors of resilience than are other predictors (e.g., agreeableness, being lovable). This is thought to occur because children high in mastery motivation can shift their attention from the daily stress in the family environment to engaging in problem-solving strategies and solutions, mastery-related activities, and achieving mastery goals (Langrock et al., 2002, Radke-Yarrow and Brown, 1993). In the current study, the relations between children's mastery motivation and their resilience in the presence of mothers' depressive symptoms were examined.

The three agentic processes have been demonstrated to be predicted by a set of children's individual and environmental characteristics. First, child positive temperament has been associated with children's high mastery motivation (MacTurk and Morgan, 1995, Morrow and Camp, 1996) and effortful control (Eisenberg et al., 2005a, Eisenberg et al., 2005b, Rothbart et al., 2003). Moreover, children's low difficult temperament elicits less negative parenting from mothers high in depressive symptoms (Dix & Yan, 2013), which, in turn, might also promote mastery motivation (MacTurk & Morgan, 1995), autonomy (Grolnick, Gurland, Decourcey, & Jacob, 2002) and effortful control (Eisenberg et al., 2005a, Eisenberg et al., 2005b). Second, children's intelligence could lead to successful experiences in mastery activities and thereby promote their motivation to engage in academic activities (Radke-Yarrow & Brown, 1993); one indicator of fluid intelligence – working memory – is associated with high attention focusing and control (Engle, Kane, & Tuholski, 1999), a major component in effortful control. Third, evidence shows that supportive, low intrusive, and autonomy-granting parenting predicts children's effortful control (Eisenberg et al., 2005a, Eisenberg et al., 2005b, Kochanska et al., 2000, Lengua et al., 2007), autonomy (Crockenberg and Litman, 1990, Grolnick et al., 2002), and mastery motivation (Kelley et al., 2000, MacTurk and Morgan, 1995, Messer, 1993). Fourth, teachers' provision of autonomy support, well-structured classroom instruction, and a warm and supportive classroom climate predict children's achievement motivation (Skinner & Belmont, 1993), effortful control related self-regulation (Boekaerts & Corno, 2005), and independent and autonomous behaviors (Niemiec and Ryan, 2009, Stefanou et al., 2004). Despite the abundance of evidence on the link between children's individual and environmental characteristics and their agentic processes, these agentic processes have never been examined as the mediating processes to explain why those characteristics would promote children's resilience in the presence of mothers' depressive symptoms. The current study examined this proposal.

Prior research on resilience has suggested that protective factors may operate in either simple additive ways or in interactive models (Luthar and Cicchetti, 2000, Masten, 2005). In line with this theoretical proposals, the current study employed two statistical approaches – mediating and moderating approaches – to yield a comprehensive understanding of how children develop resilience in the presence of their mothers' depressive symptoms. In the mediating approach, consistent with the view that adaptation can occur through trajectories that defy normative expectations (Cicchetti, 2010), resilience was modeled as residual scores – the portion of children's developmental outcomes not explained by mothers' depressive symptoms. With resilience being modeled as a continuous endogenous variable, this allowed for the examination of the mediating effects of agentic processes in linking child individual and environmental factors to their resilience outcomes. In the moderating approach, the detection of children's resilience relies on whether their agentic processes moderate the link between their mothers' depressive symptoms and their development. This informs us whether agentic processes contribute to children's resilience by simply adding their beneficial effects to development outcomes to offset the negative influence from mothers' depressive symptoms (i.e., additive effects) or by ameliorating the negative influences from mothers' depressive symptoms themselves (i.e., interactive effects). The integration of these two approaches addresses two different aspects about how agentic processes function to promote children's resilience in the presence of mothers' depressive symptoms: The mediating approach informs us the critical role of agentic processes in linking individual and environmental factors to resilience; the moderating approach informs us whether agentic processes function to fight against the detrimental effects of maternal depression or serve additive instrumental effects to promote resilience.

Section snippets

The current study

Using a large national sample followed from infancy to first grade, the current study examined the mechanisms through which children's individual and environmental characteristics contribute to their academic, social, and behavioral resilience at first grade when mothers' cumulative depressive symptoms are high. First, the study examined the mediation hypothesis that child individual and environmental characteristics (i.e., high intelligence, low negative emotionality, sensitive parenting, and

Participants

Recruited from 10 sites across the United States, participants were families from the NICHD Study of Early Child Care. Initially, they were contacted in the hospital shortly after the birth of the targeted child. Families were excluded if the birth had medical complications or if the mother was under 18, not fluent in English, known to abuse drugs, or lived outside of the catchment area. The final NICHD sample consisted of 1364 families. The sample characteristics are displayed in Table 1. The

Results

Descriptive statistics of the major variables are displayed in Table 2. The bivariate correlations among hypothesized manifest variables (see Table 3) provided preliminary support for testing hypothesized measurement models. With the latent variables verified, bivariate correlations between those factors scores and other major variables were conducted. The results are displayed in Table 3 (for additional details, see the section below).

Discussion

The current study demonstrates how children may function to reduce the adverse effects of mothers' depressive symptoms: they become active, assertive, engaged, and skilled at self-regulation. Results from the mediating model suggest that, in both cognitive and socioemotional domains, children's active agency accounted in part for why those with high intelligence, low-irritable temperament, and high quality caregiving were resilient in face of mothers' depressive symptoms. Results from the

Limitations

Several factors limit the conclusions that can be drawn from this study. First, based on a non-clinical population, the findings may not generalize to clinical populations. Second, children's agentic system and resilient outcomes were assessed at only one point in time. Multiple assessments across time are needed to determine whether changes in agency predict subsequent changes in children's resilience. This would provide a more stringent demonstration that the agentic system is essential for

Conclusions and implications

The current study examined a framework for research on children's resilience in the presence of mothers' depressive symptoms. Children's agentic processes were demonstrated to be one mechanism through which their resilience in the presence of maternal depression could be promoted by their high intelligence, low difficult temperament, and high quality caregiving environment. If children's agentic processes play a key role in promoting resilience when mothers' depressive symptoms are high,

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    The author acknowledge the support of grants from the Research Fund for the Doctoral Program of Higher Education of China (SWU2120121851, PI: Ni Yan). Opinions reflect those of the authors and not necessarily the opinions of the granting agencies.

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