Linking Daily Parental PACEs to Parenting and Preschoolers' Self-Regulation Growth: A Burst-Design Longitudinal Study

Parental adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) can impact the next generation’s self-regulation (SR) development via disrupted parental stress response and decreased parenting quality. The intergenerational and cumulative adverse and resilient experiences (ICARE) model emphasizes that ACEs can transmit intergenerationally, and development is a neurobiological adaptation to both stress and protective and compensatory experiences (PACEs). Accordingly, the protective effects of PACEs against ACEs should be seen as a dynamic interplay between contexts and development. Existing literature on PACEs, stress, parenting, and child SR development relies primarily on between-person comparisons, assuming PACEs, parenting, and child SR as relatively static constructs. Emerging empirical evidence captured short-term changes in PACEs, parenting, and SR, indicating the way parental PACEs are linked to child SR is a dynamic within-person process. No previous studies have examined the within-person dynamic relation between daily PACEs, parental stress, parenting, and long-term child SR development. The proposed study will examine the dynamic daily interplay among parental PACEs, stress, parenting, and child SR and examine the link between dynamic interplay and long-term SR growth. A sub-sample of the study will examine whether parents and their preschoolers’ heart rate variability captured by wrist wearables corresponds with parent-report parental stress and child SR. The proposed study combines intensive longitudinal design and traditional longitudinal design, which allows researchers to account for heterogeneity in the dynamic process from PACEs to SR as well as the long-term outcomes. The proposed project will also examine whether parental daily PACEs are associated with elevated daily stress and decreased parental intrusiveness and elevated parental sensitivity, which in turn, is related to better preschoolers’ daily SR and bigger one-year growth in SR. This study can provide data supporting larger-scale studies that examine within-family mechanisms from PACEs to child SR among parents with different histories of ACEs. Understanding the within-person dynamic pathway from PACEs to long-term child SR growth allows future intervention scientists to stop the intergenerational transmission of ACEs through real-time promotion of parenting quality and child SR.