UC Davis

Parenting stress (PS) refers to psychosocial challenges experienced in a parenting role, particularly within parent-child interactions (Abidin, 2012), and has strong ties to children’s cognitive self-regulatory abilities (e.g., executive function and effortful control). Although the link between cognitive and physiological facets of self-regulation is theoretically and empirically supported (Blair & Ku, 2022), there has been a notable lack of research on children’s parasympathetic regulation with this conceptualization of PS. Additionally, few studies have examined changes in children’s parasympathetic regulation across individual and dyadic (i.e., parent–child) settings. Thus, the present study examined whether children’s parasympathetic activity, as indexed by respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA), is predicted by an interaction between their effortful control (EC) and their parent’s self-reported stress. Given the inconsistent interrelations between EC measures, the present study tested whether interactions were specific to the type of EC measurement approach (i.e., parent-reported vs. task-assessed) and the context of children’s physiology assessment (i.e., dyadic vs. independent). Parents (N = 70, M = 37.97 years, 88.6% mothers) and preschoolers (N = 70, M = 51.41 months, 48.6% girls) provided data during a 2-hour lab visit. A similar pattern emerged, specific to the type of EC measure and physiological context, where an increase in PS predicted higher RSA for children with better EC and lower RSA for those with worse EC. The similarities and differences among the parent-reported EC and task-assessed EC moderation effects are discussed with reference to ecological affinity and whether a similar adaptive process may be unfolding.