Transactional effects between parental sensitivity and child social adjustment: Specifying trait-state aspects of parenting.

This study examined the reciprocal relations among maternal sensitivity, paternal sensitivity, and children's social adjustment from 54 months of age to 5th grade. Using a subsample from the National Institute of Child Health and Development Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development ( = 829), we employed an autoregressive latent trajectory model with structured residuals (ALT-SR) to unpack the trait and state aspects in the relations between parental sensitivity and children's social adjustment. After taking into account trait factors, among all the significant autoregressive and cross-lagged paths originally found in the autoregressive cross-lagged panel models, less than one third of them remained significant in the ALT-SR model. More specifically, in the ALT-SR model, more parent-driven effects were observed for fathers and child-driven effects were detected between children's social skills and fathers' sensitivity. Taken together, it appears that parents' central tendency to be sensitive in the long term is a stable trait, and experiences less state-level fluctuations, and these appear to matter more for children's general tendency to show well adjustment as opposed to change over time. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).