Although physical aggression emerges in infancy, concurrent with motor development, its possible connection remains poorly understood. Previous research has documented age-related changes in aggression but has not examined how fundamental motor transitions relate to these changes. This investigation examined associations between two key motor milestones (crawling and walking) and aggressive behavior patterns in early childhood. Mothers (N = 377) of infants aged 4-15 months reported on their children's locomotor abilities, aggressive behaviors (directed and exploratory), defiance, and temper loss. Results showed distinct developmental trajectories for different forms of aggression. The prevalence of directed aggression (e.g., hitting, kicking) increased linearly with age, and exploratory aggression (e.g., biting, hair-pulling) followed a curvilinear pattern, plateauing around 9 months of age before declining. Frequency patterns also differed. Exploratory aggression frequency declined linearly with age and directed aggression frequency decreased initially before trending upward around 11 months. The transition to independent walking, but not crawling, was associated with increased frequency of both types of aggression. These effects were mediated through increases in both defiance and temper loss; the indirect effect through temper loss was significantly stronger for directed than exploratory aggression in single-mediator models. These findings suggest that the transition to walking may serve as a reorganizing force in early aggressive behavior in infancy by influencing emerging behavioral opposition and negative emotional expression. Results contribute to a small but growing literature on the developmental systems that underlie aggression in infancy.

Preschoolers often exhibit problematic behaviors such as noncompliance and aggression. In response, preschool teachers may use ineffective discipline practices, which can exacerbate future misbehavior and lead to other negative outcomes for children's development. However, little is known about the cognitive and affective processes that contribute to teachers' use of these ineffective practices. The present study examined preschool teachers' self-reported use of harsh and lax discipline in response to hypothetical children's misbehavior, testing the indirect effects of teachers' maladaptive cognitions on discipline responses via anger. Preschool teachers (N = 351) completed the Teachers' Responses to Preschoolers' Behavior (TRPB) measure to assess their cognitive, affective, and behavioral responses to vignettes describing child noncompliance and peer aggression. Preschool teachers' ratings of intentionality, negative appraisal, and learning ability, but not locus of causality, had significant indirect effects on harsh discipline through anger. These findings contribute to the limited understanding of the cognitive and emotional processes associated with preschool teachers' discipline behavior and have important implications for the training of early childhood educators in effective behavior management.

This study examined the role of other-oriented empathy and personal distress in prosocial behaviours (sharing, helping, and comforting) during the second year of life. Participants were 200 mothers (Mage = 31.02 years) of toddlers aged 15-21 months (51% girl; Mage = 18.32 months, SD = 1.75) who completed parent-report measures of other-oriented empathy and personal distress, as well as helping, sharing, and comforting. We found that other-oriented empathy was positively associated with helping, sharing, and comforting, while personal distress did not have a significant effect on any of the prosocial behaviours. Moreover, when controlling for overlap among the three prosocial behaviours, other-oriented empathy was a unique positive predictor of comforting, with no significant effect on the two other prosocial behaviours. These findings underscore the importance of distinguishing between self-personal distress and other-oriented empathy, as well as different types of prosocial behaviours when studying associations between early empathy-related processes and prosocial behaviours.

We investigated whether crawling is associated with increased infant physical aggression through its links with parent-infant conflict and infant negative affect. Parents of 224 infants (ages 6.5 to 13.5 months) completed questionnaires measuring independent crawling, conflict, negative affect, and physical aggression. Using structural equation modelling, we found that, controlling for age, nearly three-quarters of the association between crawling and physical aggression was explained by parent-infant conflict and prohibition-related infant negative affect. These findings align with a proposed developmental cascade and suggest that infants' attainment of locomotor independence represents a developmental milestone that may be associated with aggression through interpersonal and emotional pathways. These results identify patterns of associations consistent with theoretical predictions; however, longitudinal research is needed to establish whether motor milestones temporally precede and influence behavioural outcomes through social and emotional mechanisms.

Aggressive behavior in toddlers is a significant concern for parents and caregivers. Although aggressive behaviors commonly occur during early development, research suggests that early aggression, particularly when frequent, may signal risk for adverse developmental outcomes. Therefore, understanding how specific aggressive behaviors and their frequencies contribute to overall aggression severity warrants attention. In this study, we employed item response theory (IRT) to examine how both the type and frequency of reported aggressive behaviors relate to underlying (latent) aggression severity. Mothers of 4- to 24-month-old infants and toddlers (n = 874) reported the frequency of 10 physically aggressive behaviors using the Child Behavior Record (CBR). Most children displayed some form of aggression, with "pull hair" and "hit or smack" as the most frequently endorsed behaviors, whereas "hurt animals" was the least frequently endorsed behavior. IRT analyses revealed that "push or shove" was the best indicator for distinguishing toddlers with high and low underlying levels of aggression. For most behaviors, scores above the 95th percentile typically corresponded to high-frequency occurrence (most days to many times each day), whereas scores above the 68th percentile corresponded to lower frequency patterns (some days or higher). However, these thresholds varied by behavior type, with some behaviors (e.g., hurting animals) indicating higher severity even at low frequencies. The results of this investigation provide an empirically derived framework for understanding how both the type and frequency of aggressive behaviors relate to overall severity, potentially informing early identification and intervention strategies.

Preschoolers with depression are more likely to receive treatment than those with anxiety or behavioral disorders. Parents’ perceptions of factors related to help-seeking, such as problem recognition, behavior severity, functional impairment, and parenting stress, may vary between disorders. The present study examined differences among these factors and help-seeking for early childhood depression, anxiety, and ADHD. Participants were 82 adult mothers of preschool-aged children who read four vignettes describing a preschooler with depression, anxiety, ADHD, or nonclinical behavior. Following each vignette, mothers answered questions about their perceptions of problem recognition, severity, impairment, stress, and help-seeking for each disorder. A series of one-way within-subjects ANOVAs indicated a significant difference between problem types. Planned contrasts and post hoc analyses further revealed that clinical problems received significantly higher ratings than the nonclinical control on all five factors. Additionally, mothers rated depression as significantly more severe than anxiety and ADHD. However, there were no significant differences between the clinical vignettes on the remaining factors. These results demonstrate that mothers of preschoolers perceive depression as more severe than other clinical problems, which may explain why help-seeking rates for depression are higher than for other problems. Previous research indicates parents of preschoolers are more likely to seek help for children’s depression compared to anxiety and ADHD. Differences in help-seeking may be due to differences in problem recognition and perceptions of severity, impairment, and parenting stress across disorders. Mothers of preschoolers rated depression as more severe than anxiety and ADHD. Mothers further rated all factors related to help-seeking as higher for clinical problems compared to non-clinical problems. Results suggest that parents’ severity perceptions may be particularly important facilitators to help-seeking.

Parents' ability to regulate their emotions during challenging discipline situations is important for effective parenting, yet little is known about how specific emotion regulation (ER) strategies influence discipline behaviors. We examined this association using parent-report measures, focusing on the roles of worry and anger, in a cross-sectional sample of 197 parents (72% female) of children ages 2-5 years. Structural equation model analyses showed that cognitive reappraisal was indirectly associated with greater overreactive discipline through increased parent anger, although it was not directly linked to discipline outcomes. Suppression was associated with lower levels of overreactive discipline but showed no significant indirect effects. In contrast, rumination was linked to greater overreactivity through anger and to greater laxness through worry; it also showed an unexpected negative indirect effect on overreactivity through worry. Escape was associated with both forms of discipline and showed indirect effects on overreactivity via anger and on laxness via worry. Finally, capitulation was strongly associated with lax discipline but showed no significant indirect effects through parent emotion. These findings highlight the distinct cognitive-affective pathways linking ER strategies, parental emotional responses, and discipline practices. This understanding may help guide targeted interventions that support parents in managing their emotions during challenging disciplinary situations.

Executive function (EF) is represented by a multidimensional set of measures. The central EFs considered are inhibitory control, working memory and cognitive flexibility (task shifting). Unlike other ability constructs, it has proven difficult to identify latent factors that underlie EF. Research has often taken a factor analytic approach for grouping executive functioning tasks. However, this approach has often proven unsuccessful. We aimed to compare factor analysis to a network analytic approach, as network analysis can summarize the pattern of relationships among elements without creating latent constructs. One hundred and thirteen undergraduate students completed a series of nine executive functioning tasks. In comparing exploratory factor analysis to network analysis, we found neither approach provided a compelling higher order grouping of EF measures.

This paper re-examined the factor structure of a recently developed parent report of aggression, the Provoked and Unprovoked Aggression Questionnaire, and evaluated measurement invariance and latent mean differences across gender, age, and time. Participants were 333 mothers of toddlers (younger age group: n = 167, 53.9% boys, Mage Time 1  = 18.30 months, SD = 0.45; older age group: n = 166, 48.8% boys, Mage Time 1  = 24.29 months, SD = 0.38) who filled out provoked (eight items) and unprovoked (five items) aggression scales twice over a 3-month period. We found evidence for the configural, metric, and scalar measurement invariance-a requirement needed to make a meaningful comparison between aggression means across gender, age groups, and time. When comparing means for boys and girls, gender differences emerged earlier for unprovoked than provoked aggression. Also, the frequency of provoked aggression increased among younger, but not older, toddlers. By developing a brief parental report of aggression in toddlerhood, we hope to fill a void of early aggression measures that tap the contextual variability in aggressive behaviors, and thereby stimulate more research to further our understanding of different types of aggression and their correlates in toddlerhood.

Physical aggression in toddlerhood is empirically linked to anger and often conceptualized as a byproduct of frustration and related negative affect. Further, parenting is the major environmental construct implicated in the development of aggressive behaviors. Given parents’ role as “external regulators,” parents’ responses to their toddlers’ negative affect may serve to escalate or de-escalate their toddlers’ affective experience, thereby impacting the likelihood of subsequent aggression. In the present study, we examined whether parents’ negative affect, harsh, soothing, and distracting responses to their toddlers’ negative affect mediated the relation between toddlers’ negative affect and their aggressive behavior in brief conflict episodes. During a laboratory visit, a community sample of 69 mother-toddler dyads was observed in a structured interaction task. We found that child negative affect is associated with subsequent aggressive behavior by way of maternal harsh responses to negative affect. Negative emotional expression, soothing, and distraction neither facilitated or hindered children’s escalation from negative affect to aggression. Our findings support a dyadic intervention in which patterns of coercive parent-child interactions are targets for prevention and intervention of toddler aggression.

This study assessed the factor structure and psychometric properties of the Parent Anger Scale in a sample of 326 parents of children ages 2-18 years. Exploratory factor analysis identified a two-factor solution: parent anger experience and parent anger expression. Subscales based on the items of each factor demonstrated excellent internal consistency and concurrent validity with measures of other negative affect and parent discipline. The Parent Anger Scale subscales also evidenced incremental validity, predicting discipline behaviors uniquely above that predicted by parents’ general anger and general anxiety. Specifically, analyses indicated that the Parent Anger Scale experience and expression scores were each unique predictors of inconsistent and punitive parental discipline after controlling for the influences of general anger and anxiety. However, only the Parent Anger Scale expression score had a significant incremental effect in negatively predicting positive parenting above the effects of parents’ general anger and anxiety. Results suggest that the Parent Anger Scale is a valid and useful measure for assessing anger specific to the parent-child context. However, additional research exploring the factor analytic structure and predictive value of the Parent Anger Scale in a clinical sample is needed.

Physical aggression in toddlerhood has received considerable attention in the past 20 years. The underlying theme has been that toddlers behave aggressively due to not yet being able to regulate their frustration. However, there is some evidence to suggest that early aggression can occur for other reasons. In this study, we tested the distinction between provoked and unprovoked aggression in toddlerhood, and examined whether different empathy-related processes would show unique associations with each type of aggression. Participants were 200 mothers of children aged 15-21 months (M-age = 18.32 months, SD = 1.75) who completed measures of provoked and unprovoked aggression, and empathy-related processes. We found that the two-factor aggression model fit the data well. In addition, when controlling for the overlap between other-oriented empathy and personal distress, other-oriented empathy demonstrated a negative association with unprovoked aggression, and personal distress showed a positive link with provoked aggression. Our findings underscore the importance of studying early physical aggression in a more nuanced way to better understand different functions it may serve in toddlerhood.

Objective: To investigate age-related trends in physically aggressive behaviors prior to age two. With exceptions (e.g., hair pulling), we hypothesized age-related increases in both prevalence and frequency of most aggressive behaviors.Study Design: A normative US sample of 477 mothers of 6- to 24-month-old children reported on the frequency of nine interpersonally directed aggressive child behaviors in the past month (kicking, scratching, hair pulling, hitting or smacking, pinching, biting, pushing or shoving, throwing objects, and swiping without making contact), as well as hurting animals.Results: Ninety-four percent of children were reported to have engaged in aggression in the past month. The prevalences of kicking (P = .023), pushing (P < .001), and swiping (P = .018) each increased with age (19 to 38 percentage points). The prevalence of hair pulling decreased (P = .020) with age (19 percentage points). The prevalences of hitting (P < .001) and throwing (P = .010) initially increased (42 to 52 percentage points), but plateaued at 18-20 months of age before decreasing. The frequencies of hitting (P < .001) and throwing (P = .030) increased by 29-40%, and the frequencies of hair pulling (P < .001) and scratching (P = .042) decreased by 22 to 50%, with age.Conclusions: Physical aggression in the 6- to 24-month age range appears to be nearly ubiquitous. Most, but not all, forms of aggression increase with age. These results can guide pediatricians as they educate and counsel parents about aggression in the first two years of life.