Abstract
According to recent theories, both person characteristics and environmental characteristics have to be taken into account in order to understand individual development. In line with these theories, the present thesis focused on the ways in which child characteristics and parental characteristics interplay in affecting an important negative outcome in toddlerhood;
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externalizing behaviors. To investigate these issues, five empirical studies were conducted. Participants of these studies were 117 toddler boys and their parents. The families were followed from the moment the children were 17 months of age until they were 35 months old. Since toddlerhood is one of the most critical periods in development with many changes for both children and their parents, four measurement waves with 6-months intervals were used to keep track of these changes. It was found that toddlers’ externalizing behaviors are predicted by both child temperament and parental personality traits and psychopathological symptoms. However, child temperament seemed to be more important than parental characteristics in predicting these externalizing behaviors. The findings of the studies presented in this thesis also demonstrated that an exclusive focus on main effects of child and parental characteristics only partly unravels the ways in which these characteristics affect children’s externalizing behaviors. Parental personality traits partially affected toddlers’ externalizing behaviors through the impact on parenting. Above and beyond these indirect effects, parental personality was also directly associated with externalizing behaviors in toddlerhood. Parenting did not affect all children to the same extent; poor parenting was found to be particularly negative for children with certain vulnerable temperamental traits. Longitudinal data provided evidence that parenting practices predict subsequent changes in the level of toddlers’ externalizing behaviors. Additionally, changes in parenting were found to be accompanied by changes in toddlers’ externalizing behaviors and vice versa. For very young children maternal parenting was stronger associated with child externalizing behaviors than paternal parenting. During toddlerhood the influence of fathers seemed to become more similar to that of mothers. Consequently, later in toddlerhood disciplining techniques of both mothers and fathers affected children’s externalizing behaviors. However, mothers’ warmth more strongly predicted children’s externalizing behaviors than fathers’ warmth. With regard to different types of child problem behaviors, both common and specific risk factors were found. Finally, parental personality traits appeared to have little distorting effect on parental reports of toddlers’ temperament, supporting the value of parental reports of children’s adjustment. Taken together, the main conclusion that can be drawn from the studies presented in this thesis, is that it is important to integrate person and environmental characteristics in research on child externalizing behaviors. Furthermore, the results presented in this thesis indicate that attention should be paid to the contributions of both mothers and fathers, the specificity of relations between risk factors and negative child outcomes, and the longitudinal relations between these constructs.
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