2013/10/28 by Kimberly Cuevas, Kirby Deater‐Deckard, Jungmeen Kim‐Spoon +3 · 1 citation
Psychology · Social Sciences · #Child and Adolescent Psychosocial and Emotional Development #Cognitive Abilities and Testing #Early Childhood Education and Development
paper · doi:10.1111/bjdp.12021
openalex publication_date 2013/10/28 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/29
Despite the importance of executive function (EF) in both clinical and educational contexts, the aetiology of individual differences in early childhood EF remains poorly understood. This study provides the first longitudinal intergenerational analysis of mother-child EF associations during early childhood. A group of children and their mothers (n = 62) completed age-appropriate EF tasks. Mother and child EFs were modestly correlated by 24 months of age, and this association was stable through 48 months. Importantly, maternal-child EF associations were still robust after controlling for verbal ability (potential indicator of verbal/crystallized intelligence) and maternal education (correlate of socio-economic status and verbal intelligence). Potential implications of these findings as well as underlying mechanisms of the maternal-child EF association (gene-environment interplay) are discussed.