Infant inhibited temperament and peer relationships in early childhood: Investigating the roles of maternal and paternal personality

Previous research has found interactions between infant temperament and parenting behaviors predicting child outcomes. Almost no research has examined interactions between infant temperament and parent personality. The present study explored whether infant inhibition predicted children's peer status in kindergarten. The two aspects of personality that may be most likely to interact with inhibition are neuroticism and agreeableness to predict peer status. The dual risk hypothesis predicts that high inhibition infants who have high neurotic and low agreeable parents will have the lowest peer status and that low inhibition infants with low neurotic and high agreeable parents will have the highest peer status. In contrast, the differential susceptibility hypothesis proposes that inhibited infants will be more affected than less inhibited infants by both bad and good environments. Consequently, it was hypothesized that inhibited infants with high neurotic and low agreeable parents would have the lowest peer status, but inhibited infants with low neurotic and high agreeable parents would have higher peer status than low inhibited infants. In the sample of 985 mother-child dyads in the NICHD Study of Early Child Care, maternal agreeableness and education positively predicted peer status. Infant inhibition and maternal personality did not interact. In the HHS Study of Fathers subsample of 339 fathers and children participating in the NICHD study, paternal education predicted peer status. When mothers were included in the model with fathers, maternal agreeableness predicted peer status and paternal and maternal education no longer predicted peer status. The results of the study do not support either the dual risk hypothesis or the differential susceptibility hypothesis. The sample of mothers and children was large enough to provide sufficient power to detect interactions. However, the gap between infancy and kindergarten may have may have been too great to detect interactions. Future research could explore whether infant inhibition and parent personality interact to predict outcomes in the second year of life or explore interactions between inhibition and other aspects of parent personality.