Maternal Responsiveness and Young Children’s Inhibitory Control in the Ecuadorian Amazon

Abstract Executive functions, including inhibitory control, develop rapidly in early childhood and are critical for academic, social, and emotional adaptation. Maternal responsiveness—timely, appropriate, and supportive reactions to a child’s needs—has been shown to foster executive function (EF) in Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic (WEIRD) populations, yet evidence is scarce in low-resource, Indigenous settings. The present longitudinal study examined the influence of early maternal behaviors observed in toddlerhood on later inhibitory control at school entry among Indigenous children living in the Ecuadorian Amazon. Fifty mother–child dyads from two rural Amazonian communities were assessed when the children were about 26 months old (T1) and again about 30 months later (T2). Maternal behaviors including responsiveness, encouragement and teaching were observed and coded from a 10 min free-play session, child cognitive ability was assessed, and mothers completed a parenting stress questionnaire at T1. At T2, children completed a Go/No-Go, inhibitory control task. Our findings indicate that early maternal responsiveness significantly predicts inhibitory control explaining a substantial proportion of variance beyond the covariates of child age, earlier cognitive ability and parenting stress. These results provide compelling evidence that maternal responsiveness is a critical and contextually adaptive predictor of inhibitory control development in one underserved, Indigenous Latin American sample and suggest the potential benefit of providing interventions to support maternal responsiveness as a strategy to buffer children from environmental adversity in under resourced communities.