How Mothers with Extraversion Address Contextual Challenges

SYNOPSISObjective. Personality helps determine the way an individual interprets environmental conditions and the behavior of others. Accordingly, it is important to document how parental personality characteristics help drive parental responses to challenges in the environment and how personality characteristics help direct parental interactions with children based on children’s dispositions. Design. Relations between maternal extraversion and parenting (sensitivity and stimulation and the total HOME score were examined when children were 4.5 and 10 to 11 years old, with a focus on how maternal extraversion moderates the effects of low household income and child temperament on parenting. Results. Mothers who scored high in extraversion were more likely to engage their children in a sensitive manner, provide them a greater amount of stimulation for learning, and provide a higher quality home environment. Maternal extraversion moderated the influence of household income-to-needs on sensitivity, stimulation, and the total HOME score when children were 4.5 years old. By contrast, interactions between maternal extraversion and child difficult temperament were only found for the total HOME score when children were 10–11 years old. Conclusions. Living in adverse circumstances does not keep mothers high in extraversion from engaging productively in parenting to the same extent it does for mothers not high in extraversion. Further research is needed on how best to support parents with different personalities so that the findings from research benefit both them and their children.