Disentangling the role of poverty-related experiences on children's self-regulation: Identifying dynamic and contextually-relevant mechanisms

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PROJECT SUMMARY Poverty-related adversities place children at an increased risk for developing behavioral self-regulation difficulties that disrupt their capacity to learn and thrive across the lifespan. With nearly 12 million children growing up in poverty in the United States, this represents a monumental public health concern. Clarifying the environmental determinants and underlying mechanisms that explain associations between poverty and child self-regulation skills is central for the creation of policies that address families’ challenges while leveraging extant strengths. Several complementary theoretical frameworks of early life adversity suggest that the accumulation of economic deprivation and psychosocial threat, and their corresponding patterns of (un)predictability, shape distinct developmental mechanisms that prepare children to meet the demands of their specific environments. This project bridges novel methodological and theoretical approaches to characterize dynamic patterns of change in early-life experiences in the context of poverty, and examine the role such experiences play in shaping children’s self-regulation in early childhood. Early childhood is marked by substantial neurodevelopmental changes that support the emergence of self-regulatory skills needed to meet the learning and psychosocial demands of schooling. Effects of poverty on these developing regulatory systems are present as early as infancy, with more years spent at or below the federal poverty line predicting greater self-regulation difficulties over time. Yet, how poverty leads to such disparities remains largely unknown. The type, timing, and temporal variability in poverty-related experiences, and their respective roles on contextually-adaptive self-regulation skills in early childhood, may be candidate mechanisms underlying the effects of child poverty on long-term outcomes. The current project addresses two aims using data from a large mixed-methods national survey (N~13,000) of predominantly low-income families during the pandemic. Aim 1 will apply innovative psychometric, time-series, and qualitative approaches to understand what, when, and for whom poverty-related experiences are most salient (1a), as well as how and under which conditions such experiences unfold (1b). Aim 2 will leverage quasi-experimental methods (i.e., propensity scores) to test the putative impact of experiences revealed in Aim 1 on children’s emerging self-regulation skills as they transition to formal schooling. Findings will afford novel and timely insights into the complex ways in which early poverty-related experiences affect children’s ability to thrive, with broad implications for public health and well-being during a monumental point in history that calls for much-needed policy reform. Under the guidance of Sponsors Fisher, Obradović, and Frankenhuis, the proposed research and training plan will prepare the applicant for a career as an independent researcher focused on the basic, translational, and applied study of child poverty and self-regulation.