Short-Term Transactional Relation Between Parenting Behavior and Preschoolers’ Aggression: Disentangling the Between-Person and Within-Person Effects

This short-term longitudinal study aimed to investigate the transactional relation between parenting behaviors and physical aggression in early childhood, employing both cross-lagged panel model (CLPM) and random intercept cross-lagged panel model (RI-CLPM).

Using a stratified sampling strategy, parents of young children from 341 families (mean age _mother = 33.64 years; mean age _father = 35.69 years) were recruited from three kindergartens in Guangzhou, China. Data were collected in October 2019 (Time 1), February 2020 (Time 2), and June 2020 (Time 3). At each time point, parents completed a survey reporting their own parenting behavior and their child’s aggression.

The results of CLPM identified a mother-to-child transactional pattern: maternal authoritarian parenting at Time 1 predicted more child aggression at Time 2, which in turn predicted less maternal authoritative parenting behavior at Time 3. The transactional relation was not evident in the paternal data. The results of RI-CLPM indicated that at the between-person level, both maternal and paternal authoritative parenting behaviors exhibited negative correlations with child aggression, whereas authoritarian parenting behaviors were positively correlated with it. At the within-person level, maternal authoritarian parenting at Time 1 was positively associated with child aggression at Time 2, while child aggression at Time 1 was negatively related to paternal authoritarian parenting at Time 2.

The findings contribute to our understanding of the nuanced between- and within-person associations, and the variance between mothers and fathers, in the relation between parenting behavior and child aggression. Interventions aimed at reducing child aggression should provide individualized parenting guidance and take into account differences between families.