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This study pursued three goals. The first goal was to explore children's trajectories of anxiety from age 6 to 12 using a representative community sample. The second goal was to assess the link between certain behavioral characteristics assessed in kindergarten (i.e., inattention, hyperactivity, aggressiveness, and low prosociality) and these trajectories. The third goal was to determine whether certain aspects of maternal parenting (i.e., warmth and discipline) could moderate the association between these characteristics and the trajectories of anxiety. A population sample of 2,000 children (1,001 boys, 999 girls) participated in this longitudinal study. Developmental trajectory analyses allowed us to identify four trajectory groups: low, low-increasing, highdeclining, and high anxiety groups. Moreover, multinomial logistic regressions revealed a profile of children at risk of developing high anxiety symptoms (i.e., high group), characterized by sociofamily adversity, inattention, and low prosociality in the classroom. Hyperactivity was also found in this profile, but only for children exposed to a mother who showed little affective warmth. Finally, mothers' high level of discipline increased the odds of belonging to the high anxiety group. The results are discussed in relation to studies examining the association among anxiety, behavioral characteristics, and parenting during childhood. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Temperament and parental practices (PP) are important predictors of adolescent alcohol use (AU); however, less is known about how they combine to increase or decrease risk of AU. This study examined whether age 6 temperament (i.e., impulsivity and inhibitory control) interacted with age 6 coercive PP and/or age 14 parental monitoring to predict AU at 15 years among 209 adolescents. Results showed that low parental monitoring was associated with more frequent AU and that coercive PP interacted with impulsivity to predict AU. This interaction was examined as a function of two models that were not studied before in the prediction of AU: the diathesis–stress model (i.e., impulsive children are more “vulnerable” to adverse PP than those with an easy temperament); and the differential susceptibility model (i.e., impulsive children are also more likely to benefit from good PP). Results supported the differential susceptibility model by showing that impulsive children were not only at higher risk for AU when combined with high coercive PP but also benefit from the absence of coercive PP. This supports the suggestion that the conception of certain temperament characteristics, or in this case impulsivity, as a “vulnerability” for adolescent AU, may need revision because it misrepresents the malleability it may imply. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]