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Callous-Unemotional Traits and Effortful Control Mediate the Effect of Parenting Intervention on Preschool Conduct Problems

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Abstract

Parenting intervention (PI) is an effective treatment for children’s conduct problems (CP) that has been shown to be mediated by improved parenting practices and parenting self-efficacy. Recently, Hitkashrut’s randomized controlled trial demonstrated that ineffective parenting (IP) mediated effects on callous-unemotional (CU) traits and effortful control (EC), while controlling for more general treatment effects on CP. These temperament and personality-based features predict the formation of early-onset antisocial trajectories with poor long-term prognosis. The objective of this study was to use Hitkashrut’s 3-wave dataset to test posttreatment EC and CU mediation of treatment effect on 1-year follow-up CP, and to determine whether mediation by each child-level potential mediator remains significant when tested concurrently with the parenting mediator. Parents of 209 3–5 year-old preschoolers (163 boys; 46 girls), with subclinical-clinical range CP were assigned to 14-session co-parent training groups (n = 140 couples), or to minimal intervention control groups (n = 69 couples). Assessments were based on both parents’ questionnaires. An intent-to-treat analysis showed that EC and CU traits simultaneously mediated treatment effects on CP in one EC/CU mediational model. The concurrent testing of child- and parent-level mediators showed mediation by IP and CU traits in the CU/IP model, and IP mediation in the EC/IP model. Similar results were obtained in mediational analyses that controlled for the shared variance between the mediators and CP at T2. Overall, the findings support an intervention model of coaching parents of high-CP children to promote moral self-regulatory competencies while concurrently applying behavioral methods that directly target CP.

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Acknowledgements

The study was supported by grants from the Hebrew University, including grants for early intervention research from the Lubin and Levin Foundations, and by an Azrieli Fellowship awarded to Lior Somech from the Azrieli Foundation. We thank Amiram D. Vinokur, Institute for Social Research, University of Michigan, for providing statistical consultation, and Bruce Oppenheimer, Zofnat Institute, Jerusalem, for editing the manuscript and helpful suggestions.

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  1. Yoel Elizur and Lior Y. Somech contributed equally to this work.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. The Seymour Fox School of Education, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Mount Scopus, 9190501, Jerusalem, Israel

    Yoel Elizur & Lior Y. Somech

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  1. Yoel Elizur
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Correspondence to Yoel Elizur.

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Ethical Approval

The Ministry of Education’s Chief Scientist and the Hebrew University’s Institutional Review Boards approved Hitkashrut’s RCT. All procedures were in accordance with the ethical standards of these institutional and national research committees, and comparable with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments.

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Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study.

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Elizur, Y., Somech, L.Y. Callous-Unemotional Traits and Effortful Control Mediate the Effect of Parenting Intervention on Preschool Conduct Problems. J Abnorm Child Psychol 46, 1631–1642 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10802-018-0412-z

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