Which of the following examples describe situations in which scaffolding is occurring?

Developmental psychology is concerned with the description and explanation of changes that occur in psychological processes at any point in the life span. Key guiding assumptions include: (a) the developmental perspective, or the notion that current behaviors are linked to past and present conditions and processes; (b) that developmental research methods must direct attention to individual change; and (c) that important developmental changes may occur throughout the life span. From this inclusive perspective, developmental psychology is a vast and diverse field. Theoretical and methodological diversity is reflected in the observations such as (a) research on nonoverlapping portions of the life span (e.g., infancy, childhood, adolescence, young and middle adulthood, and late life) is sponsored by different organizations and publications; (b) well-constrained psychological processes (e.g., selected aspects of personality, interpersonal relationships, reasoning, memory) are typically examined within specific periods; and (c) several legitimate but contrasting systems, or collections of theories and methods, of developmental psychology are presently active. During the twentieth century, increasing specialization in developmental psychology was associated with immense progress in understanding lifespan change.

3.2.2 Modeling Development of Achievements

Developmental psychology was characterized by Cronbach as an individual differences discipline, whereas Wohlwill tried to define a real developmental orientation. By considering the developmental orientation as an individual differences orientation, developmental research was biased toward investigating stability with the help of tests, that is, rank order and normative stability. Because researchers were looking for stability, they found it. However, there was never complete stability, even after correction for measurement error. The dominating message from this research is that achievements are relatively stable, predictable, and foreseeable. Moreover, the message is that achievements increase over time in the individual and sample because children grow older and because of the Flynn effect. Rarely is a developmental construct used to model the development of achievements in the course of time.

Collaborative Problem Solving

Developmental psychology research has demonstrated that emotion regulation, frustration tolerance, and problem-solving skills are not primarily wired in youth, but instead are cultivated via the relationships with primary caregivers and other key adults. Greene and Ablon (2006) have developed a program, aimed primarily at caregivers but also targeting other key adults, such as school, juvenile justice, and nursing staff. This program provides a framework for enhancing frustration tolerance, affect regulation, and problem solving in youngsters. Through active training and rehearsal, caregivers and other key adults are taught an empathic and collaborative style of responding to youth with patterns of disruptive, defiant, and explosive behavior. Primary effects are the reduction in aggression and dysregulation and secondary effects are improved behavioral, academic, and social functioning, along with improved self-efficacy and mood.

Pioneers of Qualitative Developmental Psychology

Developmental psychology, in fact, often has benefited from qualitative research: Several of the founding fathers and mothers of the discipline applied distinct interpretative procedures in their work, albeit not in such a systematic way as would be the standard for qualitative methods. They provided many arguments for the establishment and the development of a qualitative developmental psychology, although they never used the label qualitative themselves (for a further discussion of the historical development, see Mey, 2010).

These early works were in line with the main stances of qualitative methodology: They followed a knowledge-producing and theory-generating logic (rather than testing existing theories and ex ante formulated hypotheses). They developed theoretical stances strictly from the perspective of the individuals; they tried to avoid artificial settings and to do research in the everyday context of the individuals; and they reflected the process of production and construction of the data, mostly detailed and in a way of thick description using only a small number of cases.

Taking this into account, it can be stated that some of the most influential developmental theories are derived from qualitative research (e.g., Erikson’s theory of psychosocial development, Piaget’s theory of cognitive development, Kohlberg’s stages of moral development). Although the work is quoted widely in the field, little is mentioned about the methodological approaches they used to come to their conclusions.

Other examples of early ethnography of the children’s concrete everyday lives with the aim of setting a counterbalance to the prevailing mainstream in the discipline at the time are the diary studies of their own children by Darwin and Preyer at the end of the nineteenth, and by Clara and William Stern at thebeginning of the twentieth century. They kept a separate record for each of their three children that allowed for individual case studies. Only in a second step was the data discussed in relation to a broader theoretical context. In William Stern’s approach – the theory of personalism – a qualitative research style was embedded from the very beginning, a fact that often remains unmentioned, while at the same time, Stern often is acknowledged as the one who coined the term ‘intelligence quotient’.

Similarly, the ethnographical work on life space of urban children by Martha Muchow, a research associate at Stern’s Hamburg Institute is an example of the groundbreaking work in the first decades of the last century. Muchow used different open-ended methods like participant observation, conversations, methods based on essays next to the analyses of documents, and standardized methods. She acknowledged that to understand the particular nature of children requires one to understand the difference between adults (also researchers) and children, a position that also is crucial for contemporary research in the interdisciplinary field of children and childhood studies and children’s rights (e.g., see Burman, 2008; Greene and Hogan, 2005). Kurt Lewin’s renowned film of a young child learning to sit on a stone that demonstrates the barriers and field forces at play is another example of a radical departure from orthodox research methodology that arose from a dissatisfaction with the apparent triviality of much experimental psychology at the time.

Jean Piaget – probably the most prominent developmental psychologist of the twentieth century – postulated a clear qualitative perspective in his theory of genetic epistemology and his innovations of methods. His research can be described as a version of ethnography: For instance, in his clinical method, Piaget expanded the boundaries of the experimental approach to include context-specific tasks that can be applied to children in everyday life settings. He also considered standardized observations to be unsuitable for the study of child development. According to Piaget, traditional test procedures – such as intelligence test items – fail to address relevant questions, such as inquiry into children’s spontaneous interests and their emerging entirely original understandings.

Similarly, Lev Vygotsky’s reflections on (developmental) psychological hermeneutics – laid down in his work in 1930s – show how developmental psychology can be built only on qualitative grounds. His demand was that a psychology that wants to investigate ‘whole objects’ in their complexity requires analysis into units (rather than into elements) while at the same time preserving the whole objects in their complexity. Two case studies presented by Vygotsky’s partner Alexandr Luria – in the context of his ‘romantic science’ – in the second half of the twentieth century are brilliant examples of longitudinal studies that are informative for a qualitative developmental psychology. One of these case studies, described in his book The Man with a Shattered World, is about a man who suffered a left brain injury from shell splinters during World War II. The study that is based on more than 3000 pages of diaries and annotations by Luria captures the development of a man over a time span of 25 years. Erikson’s biographical reconstructions – beside his identity theory based on his work as a psychoanalyst – of the lives of prominent persons like Luther or Gandhi, can be seen as movement in this direction.

To define and found a qualitative developmental psycho-logy, including rethinking the theoretical and methodical assumptions, it is essential to remember one’s own research tradition. From a twenty-first-century perspective, this early works reveals an understanding that already points to central features of qualitative research, such as wholeness and holistic methods, historicity, and reference to single-case studies, and it is linked closely to some more general premises of a qualitative approach outlined in the next section. Moreover, although early works of developmental psychology focused on early and middle childhood, the field has expanded to include human development over the entire life span.

Historical Roots

Developmental psychology’s relative neglect of future-oriented processes may be traced, at least in part, to the mechanistic tradition of behaviorism. The behaviorist tradition rests on two classic discoveries. After Ivan Pavlov’s discovery that salivation could be elicited by a bell simply by repeatedly pairing the bell with food, proponents of radical behaviorism attempted to explain all behavior in terms of the organism’s basic biological predispositions in conjunction with the history of stimulus–response pairings to which the organism had been exposed. At about the same time as Pavlov discovered the essentials of classical conditioning, Edward Thorndike discovered the law of effect. Cats that were placed in puzzle boxes learned to escape by a process of trial and error; those responses that led to freedom were stamped in by the reinforcement of successful escape, while other responses dropped out. After Thorndike’s discoveries, proponents attempted to explain all behavior in terms of the organism’s reinforcement history. The discovery of the principles of classical and operant conditioning promised the early behaviorists mechanisms that might explain the emergence of intelligent behavior solely in terms of the past. Such mechanistic accounts were more parsimonious than other accounts available at the time that either invoked a nearly limitless list of instincts to explain intelligent behavior or that suffered from the logical flaw of teleology in which the cause of a behavior rests in the future and must work its way backwards in time to produce its effect. In behaviorism, in contrast, the source of explanations for the present rests in the past; the future is then free to unfold in a single linear direction that flows logically from out of the past.

It should be noted, however, that even the most ardent followers of Pavlov and Thorndike found it necessary to incorporate terms to represent the influence of the future in their behavioral equations. For example, Leonid Krushinskii, one of Pavlov’s intellectual descendents, described studies of the extrapolation reflex of birds, such as pigeons, ducks, hens, crows, and rabbits. Animals were given the opportunity to eat from a moving food dish that eventually entered a tunnel. Krushinskii speculated that the animal’s ability to extrapolate the movement of the food dish into the future became associated with the unconditioned response of eating in the vicinity of the dish. The capacity to make these associations explained the intelligent and future-oriented behaviors that Krushinskii observed in the animals such as running to the end of the tunnel to intercept the food that would soon emerge. Similarly, the fractional anticipatory goal response in Clark Hull’s classic learning equation was Hull’s clever way of bringing a representation of the goal backwards in space and time, to the start of the maze, giving the animal an incentive to run toward the goal. These examples illustrate a general tendency within the behaviorist tradition; in order to explain how animals were able to benefit from their past training, theorists had to credit their subjects with at least some capacity to look ahead into the future.

I Introduction

Developmental psychology has recently experienced a growing interest in the early development of prosocial behavior, and this interest has lead to a flurry of publications on the early development of helping, sharing, and comforting. In this chapter, we review recent studies on the development of both the production and understanding of prosocial behavior in early childhood. We first familiarize the reader with recent findings and point to open questions and contrasting views, with the aim to facilitate integrative discussion in the field. Following this section, we will introduce the reader to the classical findings on the development of prosocial behavior. In the subsequent sections, we will review current research on children's production of prosocial actions, in particular helping, sharing, and comforting, and children's understanding and expectations of other people's prosocial behavior. In the last section, we will summarize the open questions and suggest future directions for research. In what follows, “prosocial action” shall be defined as any kind of behavior that is costly and has no direct payoff for the agent, but benefits the person toward whom this behavior is directed, independent from the psychological mechanisms that subserves this behavior (e.g., empathy or a cognitive evaluation of whether the investment pays off in the future).

The development of prosocial behavior is an important topic for a number of different reasons. On the one hand, it has been suggested that prosocial behavior plays a number of important roles in human development. The tendency to act prosocially is positively related to the development of social skills and emotional regulation (Eisenberg et al., 1996), friendship quality (Markiewicz, Doyle, & Brendgen, 2001), and it predicts future social adjustments of the child (e.g., Crick, 1996; for a review, see Eisenberg & Fabes, 1998). Besides these obvious social aspects, research has also shown that prosocial behavior predicts later academic achievement (Caprara, Barbaranelli, Pastorelli, Bandura, & Zimbardo, 2000). From a sociological and historical point of view, theorists and researchers have suggested that prosocial behavior subserved an important function in the evolution of stable human societies and thereby contributed to the evolutionary success of homo sapiens (e.g., Keesing & Strathern, 1998). Given the relevance of prosocial behavior, there is great interest in early origins and the factors that promote the development of prosocial behavior. Knowledge about these factors would enable us to support children's socio-emotional development and facilitate the development of prosocial behavior (Hay, 1994).

On the other hand, the very existence of prosocial action itself has puzzled researchers for a long time. In particular, the idea that individual organisms will sacrifice their own resources to support others initially did not fit with evolutionary theory, according to which organisms should strive for their individual survival and reproduction (e.g., Darwin, 1871). In an attempt to reconcile evolutionary theory with the existence of prosocial behaviors, researchers have suggested that a variety of mechanisms might support the evolution of altruistic tendencies, including kin selection (Hamilton, 1964) and reciprocal altruism (Trivers, 1971). Others have suggested that socialization processes play an import role in the development of prosocial behavior (Grusec, Hastings, & Almas, 2011; Hastings, Utendale, & Sullivan, 2007). Knowledge about the early development of and the factors that affect early prosocial behavior is thus also informative for this ongoing discussion.

6 Psychology and its Development: The Need for Analytic Holism

Developmental psychology, like other disciplines, has struggled with the conceptual tensions between parts and wholes, analysis and synthesis, and reductionism and holism. Traditionally, psychology has privileged the analysis of parts over wholes. Researchers have tended to dissemble the human actor into a series of component modules and causes, which are then studied in relative isolation from one another. The primary criticism of the analytic approach is that analysis tends to be reductive. For example, imagine that we want to understand the properties of the human body. The human body is composed of multiple organ systems that operate together as a unified whole. No one system can function independent of the other. If we want to study the properties of the body, we face an immediate paradox. We cannot understand the functioning of the body without breaking it down into its component systems. At the same time, the moment we figuratively isolate one system from the rest of the body, we destroy the integrity of both the part and the whole.

The analytic approach has enjoyed considerable success in the natural sciences. However, over time, the very success of analysis tends to rub up against itself. Intensive analysis of an isolated part (e.g., cognition, genes, and mind) tends to reveal that properties attributed to the part are distributed beyond the part. For example, in The Mind’s New Science, Gardner (1985) suggested that the then new cognitive sciences would have little to say about emotional processes. A mere 10 years later, in Wet Minds, Kosslyn and Koenig (1992) would argue that cognitive and emotional processes cannot be studied independent of one another. In 1990, the Human Genome Project was launched with the anticipation that its result would allow scientists and practitioners to identify healthy and unhealthy phenotypic outcomes from analysis of the genome alone. While the Human Genome Project is a massive scientific advance, its predictive power has not lived up to the projections of its progenitors. For example, diseases and dispositions that were thought to be “genetic” in origin have turned out to be the result of complex intercouplings among genetic and extragenetic processes (Jablonka & Lamb, 2005).

Analysis is indispensable in any scientific endeavor, including psychology. It is not possible to study psychological activity without breaking it into its component parts. Problems arise, however, not from breaking down wholes into parts, but from the privileging of parts at the expense of the whole. In order to understand the nature and origins of psychological activity, it is necessary to study component processes (e.g., cognition, affect, and motivation). However, in psychology, the study of psychological activity and experience as a whole has been usurped by the study of component process and discrete external agencies (e.g., other people and culture) assumed to exert separate and independent influences on individual behavior. The prevailing attitude seems to be that the study of the psychological functioning as whole is simply too complex and must await progress in the study of the parts.

However, as the examples discussed above suggest, analysis alone is insufficient as a scientific mode of inquiry. Analysis is essential but must occur with sensitivity to the ways in which component processes make up the whole. We might call this stance analytic holism. Analytic holism privileges neither the parts nor the whole, but the relations among parts and wholes. There is nothing wrong with performing a study on how individuals remember lists of words. There is something wrong with performing such a study without some awareness of how such acts of remembering operate within a larger picture of psychological functioning. The act of remembering a list of words is not simply a memorial process. Instead, it is an integrative act that operates as but one strand in a coactive person–environment system. At the personal level, it reflects some form of integration of cognition, conation, emotion and motor action. At the social level, it is mediated by cultural tools (language and symbol systems) and operates continuously with reference to other people. At the cultural level, it is organized by historically constructed and socially distributed systems of meanings, practices and artifacts that preexist and coevolve with individuals engaged in the act of remembering. Although one cannot study coactions among these multilayered processes in any given project, program or lifetime, psychological theory and research would assume a dramatically different form if operated from the mindset of analytic holism.

The developmental sciences are leading the way in ushering such a mindset into psychology and related fields. The study of development focuses on origins, transformations and trajectories. As the early Greeks might say, from a consistently developmental approach, “nothing is, everything becomes.” From this view, we cannot take the forms of behavior that appear before as fixed, final or fossilized; they are products of development. Our search for the developmental origins of order requires that we explain how more powerful structures can emerge over time from less powerful ones. The moment we reject the primitivism that higher order structures have their origins in some sort of first cause (e.g., God, genes, and nature), we are ready to build a path toward dynamic, emergent, embodied, and relational modes of knowing.

3 Moral Judgments and Moral Emotions

In developmental psychology, there is a strong tradition for the study of children's and adolescents’ moral judgments (Killen & Smetana, 2015; Turiel, 2002) and moral emotions (Eisenberg, Spinrad, & Knafo, 2015; Malti & Latzko, 2012). Both are inevitably embedded into, and influenced by, situational factors, including group-level norms, normative group processes, status within the peer group, and social hierarchies. While many of these situational features distinguish contexts of social exclusion from situations involving interpersonal victimization, the boundaries are often fluid, particularly in proximal, real-time processes of peer exclusion and victimization, where peer victimization can easily lead to exclusion as a consequence and vice versa. An emerging literature on the intersection of intergroup exclusion and victimization from an integrative moral developmental and clinical-developmental viewpoint provides a new window into the origins of both phenomena.

For example, research on moral development in contexts of intergroup exclusion and inclusion has examined judgments and emotions attributed to excluders or excluded individuals within minority and majority populations. Conceptually, the assumption is that peer groups are likely to influence these judgments and emotions following exclusion in complex ways, especially when children find themselves in the role of the excluder or excluded child. Investigating contexts of intergroup exclusion also elucidate the role of children's emotions and reasoning in their actual exclusive and inclusive behavior (Hitti, Mulvey, Rutland, Abrams, & Killen, 2013). As such, this line of work provides insight into how children negotiate moral principles of fairness and equality with peer group processes, norms, and functioning. Ultimately, this knowledge can help us understand when intergroup exclusion is viewed as legitimate, how it may manifest in peer interactions, and when peer exclusion is judged as morally wrong and elicits feelings of guilt, remorse, and concern for excluded children.

Yet, despite an increasing number of integrative developmental studies on moral judgments and emotions in contexts of peer exclusion, it is still an evolving field. This line of research has examined judgments and/or emotions attributed to victimizers and victimized children across a variety of situational contexts, such as infliction of physical or psychological harm, the omission of prosocial duties, or unfair treatment (Arsenio, 2014; Malti & Ongley, 2014).

As has been extensively documented, social exclusion and peer victimization are pervasive problems in childhood, leading to negative long-term outcomes. The consequences of social exclusion range from mild anxiety and depressed motivation to achieve to social withdrawal and disengagement. Chronic victimization can lead to a number of more detrimental outcomes, such as persistent psychopathology, low well-being, and low productivity. While the majority of children report experiences of being excluded by their peers at some point during childhood, chronic victimization is more rare, reported by a minority of children, and also more severe. We turn to three sets of models, social reasoning developmental (SRD) model, developmental theories of social and group identity, and moral emotions clinical-developmental theory to report on integrated research on social exclusion and morality.

3 Lifespan Psychology: Definitions, Meta-theoretical Perspectives, and Theoretical Claims

Lifespan developmental psychology or lifespan psychology deals with the study of individual development (ontogenesis) as it extends across the entire life course. Influenced by evolutionary perspectives, neofunctionalism, and contextualism, lifespan psychology defines development as selective age-related change in adaptive capacity (Baltes 1997). In particular, this adaptive capacity involves the acquisition, maintenance, transformation, and attrition in psychological functions and structures. The focus on selection and selective adaptation highlights that development neither is a uniform nor integrated phenomenon across different domains of functioning and across time. This implies that development is conceived as a developing system comprising a multidimensional and multifunctional dynamic. Owing to selective adaptation, different parts of the developing system develop at different rates, in different directions, for different purposes, and may show continuities as well as discontinuities. A further consequence of this definition is that at any point in the lifespan, development is considered as being constituted by gains and losses. With increasing age, the proportion of gains to losses changes in favor of losses. Criteria of what constitutes a gain and what a loss can be of a subjective and objective nature. Losses, in the sense of selection and of crises, are even considered crucial motors of development (Montada et al. 1992, Riegel 1976).

Considering one domain of psychological functioning as an example may help to illustrate this terminological maze. Take for instance, the lifespan development of intellectual functioning. Two main components (multidimensionality) with very different developmental trajectories (multidirectionality) have been distinguished. The two components are the mechanics and the pragmatics of the mind or fluid and crystallized intelligence (e.g., Baltes et al. 1998). The mechanics refer to cognition as an expression of the neurophysiological architecture of the mind as it evolved during biological evolution. The cognitive mechanics are assessed by tasks of reaction speed or inferencing. In contrast, the pragmatics of cognition are associated with the bodies of knowledge available from and mediated through culture. The cognitive pragmatics are operationalized using tests of verbal ability or knowledge. While losses emerge in the mechanics of the mind quite early in development (after 25 years of age), the pragmatics are characterized first by gains and later by stability until quite late in adulthood. The mechanics and pragmatics of the mind also illustrate the notion of the developing system, as they do not operate in isolation but complement each other to support proactive, selective adaptation.

Besides multidimensionality and multidirectionality, the concepts of multifunctionality, equifinality, and multicausality are crucial when taking a dynamic-system view on lifespan development. Multifunctionality relates to the fact that one and the same developmental change can serve multiple purposes. Research on the concept of dependency provides impressive examples for how in old age, dependency not only implies the loss of autonomy but also the gain of social contact (Baltes 1996). Equifinality in turn refers to the notion that multiple roads can lead to the same developmental outcome. The example of intellectual development illustrates that one and the same behavioral outcome, such as a given cognitive performance, can be attained by using aspects of the mechanics of the mind if one is not used to that cognitive task or it can be accomplished by accessing one's experience with the task that is by referring to pragmatic aspects of the mind.

Multidimensionality and multidirectionality of development highlight the fact that within one individual there is variability in functioning across different domains. Lifespan psychology, however, is also interested in the intraindividual variability of functioning within one domain across time. This is an aspect of behavior that other subdisciplines of psychology often have devaluated as error variance. Lifespan psychology takes intraindividual variability seriously and considers it as an indicator of the plasticity of development. The notion of plasticity implies that any given developmental outcome is but one of numerous possible outcomes. The search for the conditions, range and limits as well as age-related changes in plasticity is fundamental to the study of lifespan development (Lerner 1984).

Over the years, systematic work on the concept of plasticity necessitated further differentiation. One involved the distinction between baseline reserve capacity and developmental reserve capacity (e.g., Kliegl et al. 1989). Baseline reserve capacity refers to the current level of plasticity available to individuals. For instance, how many words from a list of 20 can a person remember. Developmental reserve capacity specifies what is possible in principle given optimizing interventions. That is, how many words can a person remember after learning a mnemonic technique and practicing this technique for extended periods of time. Such training studies have found that there are impressive intellectual training gains well into old age.Training studies comparing young and old participants, however, have also demonstrated that the training efficiency or developmental reserve capacity is much reduced in old age (Lindenberger and Baltes 1995).

Developmental reserves decline with age. But it is not only the amount of reserves that changes but also the functions that they serve. With increasing age, reserves are less used for growth and more and more for maintenance, recovery and eventually also for the management of loss (Staudinger et al. 1995).

The concepts of plasticity and reserve capacity also highlight the contextual interdependencies of development. Ontogenetic and historical contextualism is another key element of lifespan psychology (Riegel 1976). Contextualism stands in contrast to mechanist or organismic models of development. Lifespan contextualism is related to ecological–contextualist perspectives as well as action-theoretical positions that emphasize the importance of both individual and social–contextual factors in the regulation of development (Smith and Baltes 1999). According to lifespan contextualism, individuals exist in contexts that create and limit opportunities of individual pathways. But individuals also select and create their own contexts.

Contexts evolve according to at least three different logics (Baltes et al. 1980). One is the normative age-graded logic, the second is the history-graded logic, and finally third there is an idiosyncratic or nonnormative logic. The age-graded logic refers to those biological and environmental aspects that, because of their dominant age correlation, shape individuals in relatively normative ways. Examples are developmental tasks such as starting school or retirement, or the age-based processes of physical maturation (puberty, menopause). The history-graded logic concerns those variations in ontogenetic development that are due to historical circumstances. Take for instance, the historical evolution of the educational system or the effect of war on ontogenetic development. Finally, the non-normative logic reflects individual–idiosyncratic events of a biological or environmental nature, such as winning the lottery or losing a leg in an accident. All three logics also interact in their shaping of ontogenetic development. In order to understand or predict development, age-graded, history-graded, and person-specific factors have to be taken into account. However, besides contributing to similarities in development, these logics, as Dannefer has argued, also contribute to systematic interindividual variations owing to, for instance, social class.

3.5 Parenting and Individual Differences in EF

In developmental psychology, there is a long tradition of explaining the development of higher cognitive function in the context of social interaction. Famously, (Lev Vygotsky 1978; Vygotsky & Luria, 1994; see Fernyhough, 2010) argued that every psychological function appears twice: first one a social plane and then on an individual plane. Vygotsky (1934/1962) articulated this idea particularly well for private speech. Private speech is rooted in and develops out of the social function of speech. Initially, speech serves a communicative purpose, and the communicative partners use it to regulate and steer each other’s behavior (e.g., giving commands, directing attention). Later, this speech is internalized and eventually can serve silently the function of regulating thought and action (see Berk, 1992; Lidstone, Meins, & Fernyhough, 2010; Müller, Jacques, Brocki, & Zelazo, 2009). In contemporary developmental psychology, the Vygotskian framework has guided the investigation of social factors on the development of EF (Lewis & Carpendale, 2009) in general, and the effects of parenting on EF in particular (e.g., Giesbrecht, Müller, & Miller, 2010; Hammond, Müller, Carpendale, Bibok, & Liebermann-Finestone, 2012).

Research on parenting effects on EF has largely focused on parental scaffolding. Scaffolding refers to the provision of developmentally sensitive support offered by a tutor to a learner in a problem-solving situation. Initially, the term was introduced by Wood, Bruner, and Ross (1976) to designate processes carried out by a tutor in fairly formal instructional situations, but in subsequent work, “scaffolding” has come to refer to more general learning situations. A seminal study on the relation between scaffolding and EF was conducted by Landry, Miller-Loncar, Smith, and Swank (2002). Landry and colleagues found that mothers’ verbal scaffolding of children’s activities at age 3 predicted increased verbal ability at age 4, and this verbal ability in turn was predictive of greater EF at age 6. Based on their findings, Landry et al. suggested that more sensitive scaffolding leads children to develop better verbal abilities; these verbal abilities put children in a position to make more effective use of language in guiding their own behavior.

A handful of recent studies have corroborated the positive effect of scaffolding on the development of EF in preschool children (Bernier, Carlson, & Whipple, 2010; Conway & Stifter, 2012; Dilworth-Bart, Poehlmann, Hilgendorf, Miller, & Lambert, 2010; Hammond et al., 2012; Hughes & Ensor, 2009; Matte-Gagné & Bernier, 2011). For example, Hammond et al. (2012) showed that parental scaffolding in a joint problem-solving task at ages 2 and 3 years predicted 9% of variance in EF performance when children were 4 years old, even after controlling for prior EF, verbal ability, and gender. Consistent with the finding by Landry and colleagues, verbal ability at age 3 partially mediated the relation between scaffolding at age 2 and EF at age 4 (see also Matte-Gagné & Bernier, 2011).

In addition to scaffolding; Hughes and Ensor (2009) examined several other social factors that have been posited to influence the development of EF. Besides scaffolding, they examined maternal planning, or parental demonstration of tasks that children could imitate, the global negative family characteristics of family chaos and inconsistent parenting, and the global positive family characteristics of mean length of utterances and calm parenting. Hughes and Ensor found that taken together, maternal planning, scaffolding, and family chaos at age 2 explained 14% of variance in EF at age 4, after controlling for EF at age 2 and verbal ability at age 4. The global positive family factors were not predictive and neither was inconsistent parenting.

Motivated by the finding that systemic and global family variables predicted EF, Hughes & Ensor (2000) suggested that researchers should take an approach to the caregiving environment that extends beyond the focus on scaffolding. Other researchers have demonstrated that the quality of the home environment and parenting practices are associated with EF (Noble et al., 2007; Rhoades, Greenberg, Lanza, & Blair, 2011; Sarsour et al., 2011). For example, Blair and Raver (2012) showed that changes in the quality of the home environment and parental sensitivity between 7 and 36 months were uniquely and significantly predictive of EF performance when children were 48 months old; these relations remained even after controlling for prior EF skills.

Recently, Bernier, Carlson, Deschênes, and Matte-Gagné (2012) extended the assessment of parenting by including an important social–emotional construct, the mother–child attachment relationship. In their study, both the quality of early parent (both mother and father)–child interaction and mother–infant attachment, as assessed between 1 and 2 years, emerged as significant predictors of EF performance when children were 3 years old; however, only attachment security explained a unique amount of variance in EF performance.

Part of the quality of the home environment is the extent to which it is intellectually stimulating (Hackman et al., 2010). Several studies have suggested that parents with a higher educational level provide a more intellectually stimulating environment to their children, in particular with respect to language, by using more explanations and fewer directives, a richer vocabulary, and reading more to their children (Hoff, 2003). The rich cognitive stimulation facilitates the children’s language development (Hoff, 2006). Children’s language skills, in turn, may promote their EF. Consequently, based on the cognitive stimulation hypothesis, it would be expected that children’s language skills mediate the relation between SES and EF. Indeed, several empirical studies support this hypothesis (Catale et al., 2012; Noble et al., 2005, 2007), although one study does not (Sarsour et al., 2011), which is probably due to the way language skills were measured in this latter study.

To summarize, there is evidence that the early caregiving environment contributes to individual differences in EF. The evidence is particularly convincing in studies that controlled for prior EF and assessed the contribution of caregiving variables on age-related changes in EF (Bernier et al., 2010, 2012; Hammond et al., 2012; Hughes & Ensor, 2009) and in studies that relate changes in caregiving variables to changes in EF (Blair & Raver, 2012). Finally, there is evidence that parenting partially mediates the relation between SES and EF (Blair et al., 2011; Dilworth-Bart et al., 2010). For example, Blair et al. (2011) found that positive parenting (e.g., positive regard, sensitivity) and negative parenting (intrusiveness, negative regard) in the context of free play (as assessed when children were 7 and 15 months old) mediated the effect of exposure to poverty on EF at age 3 years. Furthermore, positive parenting was inversely related to children’s resting cortisol levels at ages 7, 15, and 24 months, suggesting that supportive parents help regulate children’s stress reactivity “to facilitate reflective and flexible forms of behavior and cognition, such as EFs” (Blair et al., 2011, p. 1980).