Bioregulatory Functioning and Parenting Quality During Infancy: The Moderating Role of Family-Level Factors

Restricted (Penn State Only)
- Author:
- Bai, Liu
- Graduate Program:
- Human Development and Family Studies
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- May 23, 2023
- Committee Members:
- Charles Geier, Professor in Charge/Director of Graduate Studies
Douglas Teti, Chair & Dissertation Advisor
Heidemarie Laurent, Major Field Member
Lisa Kopp, Major Field Member
Kristin Buss (she/her), Outside Unit & Field Member - Keywords:
- parenting
sleep
cortisol
family stress
parenting
sleep
cortisol
family stress
coparenting - Abstract:
- Parenting can have a significant impact on child adjustment, especially during infancy when children depend heavily on their caregivers for development. Thus, understanding determinants of parenting during infancy can inform research that aims to promote child development. Parenting can be influenced by multilevel factors ranging from within the parent to the broader socio-ecological context, and the overarching goal of this dissertation is to advance the field’s understanding of determinants of parenting quality in infancy by emphasizing the complex interactions between parental bioregulatory functions and family-level moderators. The data of the two studies in the dissertation were drawn from 167 mothers with healthy, full-term infants (53.3% girls) who participated in a longitudinal NIH-funded project with a measurement-burst design. Multilevel modeling (MLM) was applied to simultaneously examine the between- and within-person linkages between maternal bioregulatory functions, family-level factors, and parenting. Study I examined the joint effect of maternal hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis activity and family contextual stress on maternal bedtime parenting (i.e., emotional availability; EA) during the first six months postpartum. On each occasion, maternal HPA-axis activity was indexed using total diurnal cortisol output (i.e., area under the curve with respect to ground) and diurnal cortisol change from afternoon to bedtime. The composite score of family contextual stress was calculated by averaging the standardized score of paternal and maternal educational level (reversed), family income-to-needs ratio (reversed), household chaos, and maternal negative life events. The MLMs showed that greater contextual stress was associated with lower bedtime parenting quality in mothers. In addition, maternal diurnal cortisol interacted with contextual stress to predict parenting over time. At the between-person level, only among mothers with higher contextual stress, mothers with flatter cortisol declines showed greater decreases in parenting quality from one to six months, compared to those with steeper cortisol declines. At the within-person level, for a given mother who experienced high contextual stress, parenting quality decreased on the occasion when her total cortisol output increased. The effects of cortisol indicators on parenting were not significant among mothers from families with low contextual stress. Study II explored the moderating effect of coparenting relationships on linkages between maternal sleep and bedtime EA across the first two years postpartum. Maternal sleep was assessed via actigraphy for seven consecutive days on each occasion. Multiple sleep variables from different sleep dimensions (i.e., quantity, quality, timing, and variability) were considered in the examination of maternal sleep and parenting linkages. At each time point, coparenting relationships were reported by mothers via the Coparenting Relationship Scale. The MLMs detected a significant negative effect of maternal variability in sleep duration on parenting quality at the between-person level. In addition, maternal sleep quality (i.e., sleep fragmentation, wake after sleep onset) and sleep timing (i.e., sleep onset time) interacted with maternal coparenting perceptions in predicting bedtime EA. Poorer sleep quality (i.e., longer wake after sleep onset, higher fragmentation) was predictive of lower bedtime EA at the between-person level, only in mothers with lower coparenting perceptions than others. The combination of earlier sleep onset time and higher coparenting perceptions was predictive of higher bedtime EA at both the within- and between-person levels. Overall, the current dissertation highlighted the complex, dynamic linkages between parental bioregulatory functions, family-level factors, and parenting during infancy. The findings also emphasized the importance of the moderating role of family-level factors in linkages between parental bioregulatory functions and parenting quality over time.