CHAMPAIGN, Ill. - A new study by researchers at the University of Illinois indicates that children who spend in excess of 30 hours per week in non-relative care through the age of 4 1/2 may be exposed to a social environment that popularizes aggression, leading some children to become more physically aggressive than peers who spend less time in nonmaternal care.
Philip Rodkin, a professor of educational psychology, and psychology professor Glenn Roisman studied more than 1,000 children in grades 3-6 across the U.S. to identify characteristics common among a small but influential group of children who are simultaneously aggressive and popular with their peers. Their study was published recently in the journal Child Development.
"Aggression can be popular if you're in an aggressive situation - and unpopular if you're not," Rodkin said.
Rodkin and Roisman wondered whether tough kids were smarter than other kids, enabling them to rise to the top socially. Did they have more attentive or affluent parents, perhaps?
"One of the reasons that we wanted to do this study was that we wanted to understand the kinds of conditions under which these characteristics co-occur," Roisman said. "Our quest to understand these individuals wound up leading us back to child care as the explanation."
Roisman is a co-principal investigator on the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development, an ongoing study that has tracked more than 1,000 children since they were infants. In their study, Rodkin and Roisman examined the trove of data from the study to explore possible alternate developmental antecedents - such as cognitive functioning or maternal
sensitivity - that might contribute to the co-occurrence of aggression and popularity among some children.
The children and their families were recruited for the study shortly after the children's births and were interviewed and observed at home and in 10 university laboratories. Children's cognitive functioning was assessed on four occasions through the age of 54 months, as well as in grades 1, 3 and 5. Their general social competence with adults and with peers in grades 3-6 was assessed through questionnaires completed by their mothers and teachers. Classroom observers also evaluated the children's disruptiveness and social skills using multiple observations at each grade level.
Based upon teachers' rankings of the children's popularity with same-sex peers, the children were categorized as nonpopular-nonaggressive, model, aggressive or tough - the last category comprising children who were simultaneously aggressive and popular.
Mothers' sensitivity to their children's emotional needs - including supportiveness, respect for autonomy and positive engagement - were observed during multiple videotaped parent-child interactions at the ages of 6, 15, 24, 36 and 54 months and during grades 1, 3 and 5.
In addition to examining the amount of time the children spent in non-maternal care each week, the researchers looked at the proportion of time spent in center-based care and assessed the quality of care through observations.
Rodkin and Roisman found, however, that the only characteristic that consistently differentiated popular-aggressive/tough children from their peers was the amount of time spent in nonrelative care.
Popular-aggressive kids spent an average of eight to 11 more hours per week - or a total of 31.8-34.6 hours - in non-maternal or center-based child care during early childhood. The more hours spent in early child care, the more likely children were to be both popular and aggressive by middle childhood.
The researchers found that both tough children and aggressive children spent a larger proportion of time in center-based care, experienced lower quality care and had mothers who were significantly less sensitive to their emotional needs than model children. Additionally, tough children, aggressive children and nonpopular-nonaggressive children all had significantly lower levels of cognitive functioning prior to and during grade school than model children.
Rodkin and Roisman also explored whether children in the tough group were socially effective - even if they were not socially skilled by adult standards. Classroom observers, who did not know the profiles of the children they observed, reported that tough children were extremely disruptive yet highly sociable and cooperative with their peers, and rated the children's social skills as being equal with model children and significantly higher than nonpopular-nonaggressive and aggressive children. Tough children's social competencies went unrecognized by mothers, teachers and caregivers, however, who reported that tough children engaged in more negative play behaviors such as teasing and bullying.
Spending a large quantity of time in non-relative care may render some children particularly adept at leveraging physical aggression to garner social and material resources, allowing them to access a peer reward structure that bolsters their popularity, dominance and status through middle childhood. By the time tough children reach the sixth grade, they "may have enduring patterns of peer aggression, possibly influencing other children toward antisocial behavior as well," Rodkin and Roisman suggested.
"What we think is going on with popular-aggressive kids is that in the peer context of early childhood there may be high levels of aggression and not very directive socialization on caregivers' parts, so that aggression becomes popular by virtue of children's interactions with one another," Rodkin said. "There is evidence from other studies indicating that aggression is socially contagious, and that once you 'catch' aggressive behavior patterns, they can endure, even after the original setting is no longer present."
The children, now age 18, have just been reassessed, and researchers hope to assess them again in their early 20s.
"One question that remains is how popular-aggressive kids fare when they transition to college or work roles," Roisman said. "Whether this is an approach to dealing with their peers that ultimately serves them well or not is totally unclear on the basis of these data."
"Will they become CEOs because they have this ruthless aggression coupled with social regard?" Rodkin said. "Or they do turn out to be like other aggressive kids, who are clearly on a negative trajectory? Our guess is that they are probably not the Donald Trumps of tomorrow because they lack resources such as high cognitive functioning and maternal sensitivity during childhood that would enable them to excel."
With recent funding from an Arnold O. Beckman Research Award, Rodkin and Roisman now are genotyping the children and mothers of the Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development and, among other research questions that they're exploring, they're hoping to determine if popular-aggressive children share a unique variation or polymorphism of a serotonin-receptor gene, 5HT2A. The serotonergic polymorphism may function as part of a genetic complex that regulates cognitive efficiency and has been linked to peer popularity in lab-based studies of college undergraduates.