Reciprocal Relationships Among Household Chaos, Parenting Stress, and Children's Behavioral Self-Regulation From Early to Middle Childhood

Abstract

Household chaos has been shown to be negatively associated with children's behavioral functioning and relational processes. Behavioral self-regulation, the ability to manage emotions, behaviors, and attention in response to contextual demands, could be particularly vulnerable to chaotic home environments. Parenting stress, the negative psychological responses to caregiving challenges, could also be exacerbated in chaotic environments. However, the complex interactions among these factors, specifically how household chaos, parenting stress, and children's development of behavioral self-regulation mutually influence one another, remain underexplored. Grounded in the transactional framework, this study used longitudinal data from the Future of Families and Child Wellbeing Study (N = 4195) to examine the reciprocal relationships among these constructs during the transition from early to middle childhood (ages 3, 5, and 9). Results suggested reciprocal associations between household chaos and children's behavioral self-regulation from age 3 to 5 and a similar bidirectional link between parenting stress and children's behavioral self-regulation during the same developmental stage. In middle childhood, household chaos at age 5 predicted behavioral self-regulation at age 9. These findings highlight the need for interventions to mitigate household chaos and alleviate parenting stress to foster children's long-term behavioral self-regulation development.