UC Berkeley

Evolutionary theory related to the pursuit of dominance within social hierarchical structures supports the idea that externalizing traits are a consequence of the behavioral variability that has evolved to support high levels of dominance motivation and behavior. While decades of research have shown a profound influence of social rank on psychological syndromes in adults, this study aimed to ascertain whether there is evidence for this association beginning in early childhood. The present study used an observational approach to examine children’s social position during the kindergarten year and test its consequences for behavioral adjustment. This study also examined sociocultural predictors, including racial and ethnic minority status, family immigrant status, and socioeconomic status, as predictors of classroom social position, within a very diverse sample of children in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Participants were drawn from a community sample of 338 children (163 females, 175 males; mean age = 5.3 years) from 29 kindergarten classrooms sampled across six schools and three urban school districts with racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic diversity. Classroom interactions were observed during the winter months of the kindergarten year during structured, semi-structured, and free play activities. Prospective relations of classroom social position to children’s externalizing problems at T2 (end of kindergarten year), controlling for baseline externalizing symptoms in fall (T1), child age, and child gender, were tested using multilevel regression analyses. Kindergarten classroom social position predicted teachers’ reports of children’s externalizing problems at T2, such that those children with more dominant social positions during winter assessments had higher teacher-reported externalizing behaviors at the end of the spring semester than those with more subordinate social positions. This finding is especially noteworthy due to the study design. Although teacher-reported externalizing symptoms at T1 (the beginning of the kindergarten year) were not correlated with classroom social position, classroom social position was associated with developmental changes in children’s externalizing symptoms by the end of the kindergarten year. Immigrant status was associated with classroom social position such that children in immigrant families held more subordinate social positions when compared to children of non-immigrant families. Racial/ethnic minority status and SES were not significantly associated with classroom social position in this study. Although parents of racial/ethnic minority children (largely parent-identified as African American and mixed race/ethnicity) rated their children lower on externalizing problems than parents of racial/ethnic majority children, teachers reported more problematic externalizing symptoms for racial/ethnic minority children, and less problematic externalizing symptoms for children in immigrant families (primarily parent-identified as Asian American and mixed race/ethnicity) when compared to children of non-immigrant families. It is important to interpret these findings with the understanding that our data were gathered in ethnically and socioeconomically diverse schools in one of the most racially and ethnically diverse regions in the nation. This study contributes to the understanding of how sociocultural factors may influence a young child’s classroom social experience, how classroom social position may influence the development of problematic externalizing behaviors in children as young as kindergarten age, and what may contribute to differences in parent and teacher ratings of child behavior. This research also highlights the importance of taking an ecological framework that considers the layered and complex influences on children when developing interventions for families with young children.