Does Parent Personality Co-develop with Child Temperament? Findings from a Longitudinal Study of Mexican-origin Families

How long-term changes in parent personality are associated with long-term changes in child temperament is a fundamental yet largely unaddressed question about child development. Several developmental processes (including socialization, modeling, and evocation) suggest that parent personality might have transactional and thus co-developmental associations with child temperament. The present study used data from a longitudinal study of 674 Mexican-origin families to investigate the extent to which changes in parent Big Five personality traits co-develop with changes in child temperament from age 10 to 16. Using second-order bivariate growth curve models, we found that mother (but not father) personality co-develops with child temperament for most conceptually related pairs of personality and temperament traits; for example, when mothers increased in conscientiousness, their child tended to increase in effortful control. However, these results largely held only for parent reports of child temperament (or a composite of parent- and child self-reports), and not when using only child self-reports of temperament. Child nativity status moderated some of the co-developmental associations, where families with children born in Mexico (as opposed to being born in the U.S.) tended to exhibit stronger mother-child co-development. We discuss these findings and what they mean for the study of child development.