Children's elicitation of changes in parenting during the early childhood years

• We examine different typologies of parenting across the early years (ages 2 and 5).
• Roughly half of the “at-risk” parents exhibited improvements in parenting.
• Improvements in parenting were elicited by children's reading and behavior skills.
• These “child effect” patterns were stronger among higher-income families.

Using a subsample of the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study-Birth Cohort (ECLS-B; n = 1550), this study identified parents who engaged in more developmentally problematic parenting—in the form of low investment, above average television watching, and use of spanking—when their children were very young (M = 24.41 months, SD = 1.23) but changed their parenting in more positive directions over time. Latent profile analysis and other techniques revealed that parents who demonstrated less optimal parenting behaviors when their children were 2 years old were more likely to be African American, from lower socioeconomic backgrounds, and experiencing greater depressive symptoms. Approximately half of such parents, however, made positive changes in their parenting practices, with 5% in the profile characterized by high investment and low use of spanking by the time that their children were in elementary school. These positive changes in parenting behavior were more likely to occur among parents whose children were already demonstrating early reading skills and less problem behavior. These potential “child effects”, suggesting that children elicited improvements in parenting, were more pronounced among higher income families but did not vary according to parents’ educational attainment. Findings from this study have implications for intervention programs, suggesting that children's academic and behavioral skills can be leveraged as one means of facilitating positive parenting.