Time Lag as a Moderator of Parental Control Effects on Child Anxiety Outcomes

Abstract

Substantial time and effort have resulted in a growing literature on the development of anxiety in childhood. Multiple contextual contributors to risk for anxiety problems have been identified including parental control and developmental age. Parental control generally, though inconsistently, predicts increased risk for anxiety problems across development and comprises a substantial portion of the available literature evaluating the influence of context on childhood anxiety. The timing by which contextual factors like parental control “get under the skin” and ultimately result in elevated anxiety in children has been relatively ignored. This is true despite available evidence that the size of the association between contextual factors like parental control and children’s anxiety symptoms differs across developmental periods, potentially explaining a portion of the inconsistency in the extant literature. In the current research, the role of temporal lag was tested as a moderator of the link between parental control and anxiety symptoms during more (i.e., 3-5 years and 14-18 years) and less (i.e., 6-13 years) sensitive periods of development using lag as moderator meta-analysis (LAMMA). It was hypothesized that temporal lag would moderate the effect of parental control on child anxiety during theoretically based sensitive periods (i.e., 3-5 years and 14-18 years), but not during less sensitive periods (i.e., 6-13 years). Hypotheses were supported such that time lag significantly moderated the effect of parental control on child anxiety for children within sensitive periods of development (B = 0.022, SE(B) = 0.009, p < .05), but did not significantly moderate the effect of parental control on child anxiety for children outside of these periods (B = -0.018, SE(B) = 0.016, p = .254). This work is the first to use a theoretically informed empirical design to assess the role of temporal lag in longitudinal work assessing child anxiety, which are the gold standard for developmental research. This research provides an important basis for understanding the role of parenting in the development of anxiety risk across childhood. Results are poised to inform subsequent methods for studying anxiety risk in developmental science.