About this session

Friday, 11:30 AM - 1:00 PM

Exploring the "Chicken or the Egg" Question: Testing Bidirectional Influences in Parent-Child Interactions

Do parenting behaviors drive child outcomes or vice versa? Understanding the bidirectional nature of parent-child interactions is important for advancing theories in developmental science, and for informing intervention targets. However, until recently, methods for rigorously testing bidirectional effects over repeated time points have not been available. A methodological advance - the Random-Intercept Cross-Lagged Panel Model (RI-CLPM; Hamaker, 2015), allows for a clearer examination of the "chicken or the egg" question.

This symposium, which features research from international scholars and diverse prospective cohorts, highlights studies utilizing RI-CLPMs. Each presentation shares an objective to explore the bidirectional associations between parent and child behaviors and/or psychological symptoms.
The first paper investigates the bidirectional association between maternal depression and child ADHD during pre-adolescence and reveals transactional associations wherein heightened child hyperactivity predicts later parental depression which in turn predicts child hyperactivity. The second paper focuses on maternal and child depression in middle childhood, demonstrating that heightened child depression predicts later maternal depression, but not the obverse. The third paper explores emotion dysregulation and parent-child conflict in families with adolescents, with findings varying between ADHD and non-ADHD samples. The final paper examines the longitudinal bidirectional associations between parent-child conflict and externalizing symptoms from preschool through adolescence and finds that early externalizing behaviors predict later parent-child conflict, but not the obverse (until the direction of associations reverses in adolescence).

These studies provide a novel approach to testing the "chicken or the egg" question and underscore the importance of testing bidirectional models in parent-child relationship research.

Paper #1
Title	Transactional Associations between Maternal Depressive Symptoms and Children’s Inattentive and Hyperactive Symptoms
Presenting author	Dr. Joanne Park, Mount Royal University, Canada

Paper #2
Title	Testing Bidirectional Effects between Maternal and Child Depression During Middle Childhood
Presenting author	Jackson Hewitt, University of Calgary, Canada

Paper #3
Title	Transactional Relations Between Parent-Adolescent Emotion Dysregulation and Conflict in Families with and without ADHD Adolescents
Presenting author	Stephanie N. Pham, Virginia Tech, United States

Paper #4
Title	Bidirectional Associations Between Parent-Child Conflict and Child and Adolescent Mental Health
Presenting author	Dr. Ross D. Neville, University College Dublin, Ireland

View all paper details

Session chairs
Dr. Sheri Madigan, Ph.D., University of Calgary, Canada; Dr. Joanne Park, , Canada

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