The additive and interactive effects of parenting and children's personality on externalizing behaviour

By P. Prinzie, Patrick Onghena, W. Hellinckx, Hans Grietens, Pol Ghesquière, H. Colpin. 2003

181 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Parenting practices have been previously linked to childhood externalizing behaviour. However, little attention has been given to the potential effect of individual personality differences among children on this relation. The current study assesses the additive effects of children's personality characteristics and explores the moderating effects of children's personality on relations between parenting practices and childhood externalizing behaviour using a proportional stratified sample of 599 nonclinical elementary‐school‐aged children. Multiple regression analyses reveal that in the mother data as well as in the father data, dysfunctional parenting and the children's personality characteristics Benevolence, Conscientiousness, and Extraversion were directly related to outcomes consistent with an additive model of their effects. Significant interactions indicate that children with low scores on Benevolence who were exposed to overreactive discipline practices exhibited higher levels of externalizing behaviour. Children characterized by low scores on Conscientiousness who were exposed to coercive parenting behaviour showed elevated levels of externalizing behaviour. These results suggest that integrating children's personality characteristics within parenting models can improve the understanding of the aetiology of childhood externalizing problem behaviour. The implications of such integrations for intervention are discussed. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Subfields: Clinical Psychology, Demography, Social Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/8866056860625877c1445851adf69a2307312626

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Clinical Psychology

1. Dillon Browne
2. I. Roskam
3. Jean-Christophe Meunier
4. Hans Grietens
5. Patrick Onghena
6. H. Colpin

In Demography

1. Pol Ghesquière
2. Hans Grietens
3. P. Prinzie
4. W. Hellinckx
5. Patrick Onghena
6. H. Colpin

In Social Psychology

1. Dillon Browne
2. I. Roskam
3. Jean-Christophe Meunier
4. Patrick Onghena

Citations in the corpus

• Parent and child personality characteristics as predictors of negative discipline and externalizing problem behaviour in children (2004, background): “Prinzie et al. (2003) reported that that children with low scores on Benevolence who were exposed to overreactive discipline practices exhibited higher levels of externalizing behaviour.”
• Relations between parenting and child behavior: Exploring the child’s personality and parental self-efficacy as third variables (2011, methodology): “…which have been recognized as pertinent third variables: child personality has been shown to moderate the effect of parental behavior on child EB (Prinzie et al., 2003), and parental self-efficacy to mediate the effect of child EB on parental behavior (Day, Factor, & Szkiba-Day, 1994).”