Child self-regulation in the context of poverty-related environmental risk: Neighborhood crime and family instability as predictors of cognitive, behavioral, and emotional control

A growing body of literature has found that children living in low-income environments show significant self-regulatory deficits compared to their more economically advantaged peers. The present set of papers explores the specific ways in which low-income children's exposure to several family and neighborhood risk factors may jeopardize their cognitive, behavioral, and emotional self-control. Specifically, Paper 1 provides a multidimensional theoretical model that outlines the complex relationships between children's exposure to family and neighborhood violence and their self-regulatory development. In particular, Paper 1 highlights the importance of considering familial and biological processes as mediating mechanisms, the ways in which individual, situational, and environmental factors may contribute to multifinality in children's outcomes, as well as the transactional, multi-directional nature of these relationships. Papers 2 and 3 serve as empirical case studies to test the roles that two poverty-related environmental risk factors - household instability and neighborhood violence - play in shaping self-regulation across two developmental periods. Using propensity score matching to mitigate observable selection bias, Paper 2 finds that low-income preschoolers who experienced multiple indicators of household instability (e.g., residential mobility, changes in family structure) were significantly lower in effortful control and attention/impulse control - but not executive function - compared to otherwise similar peers from stable households. In addition, Paper 3 found significant relationships between older children's exposure to violent community crime and their performance on a computer task measuring basic information processing and selective attention to emotional stimuli. Specifically, chronic exposure over the course of a year was found to predict increased vigilance toward threatening images in the full sample. In a complementary set of analyses using a radial fixed effects framework, exposure to a recent violent event within a particular distance of children's homes was found to predict higher levels of vigilance toward threat for children with low profiles of trait anxiety, and higher levels of avoidance for high anxiety children. Together, these studies provide a clearer theoretical and empirical perspective on the ways that low-income children develop self-regulation in the context of environmental risk, as well as several factors that may contribute to multifinality and resilience for children in these settings.