Sharon Wolf, Ottavia Anna Veroux, Marc H Bornstein, Britta Augsburg, Jophus Anamuah-Mensah, Sonya Krutikova
This exploratory study examined risk and protective factors of prosocial skills and behavior problems among Ghanaian preschool children in rural Ghana (N = 627; M = 66.3 months, SD = 8.9). We examined whether and how previously identified factors related to social and emotional development in a setting where parental socialization goals and children's opportunities for socialization differ from those in Western settings. We draw on multimodal data collected between 2022 and 2024 to assess associations using cross-sectional regression and longitudinal lagged models, controlling for children's earlier prosocial skills and behavior problems to account for the influence of children's past experiences and unobserved characteristics. Factors spanned three sets of determinants: child (birth order, age, sex, height for age, and weight for age), mother (education, cognitive skills, well-being, relationship conflict and closeness, teaching and discipline practices, and time with child during a typical day), and household (home learning environment, household wealth, and family size). For prosocial skills, cross-sectional analyses identified child age, height for age, less violent home discipline, and maternal mental health problems as protective factors; none remained significant in the lagged models. For problem behaviors, protective factors included mother-child close relationship, nonviolent disciplinary strategies, and mother's time spent with child. Risk factors in both the cross-sectional and lagged models included mother's mental health problems, mother-child conflictual relationship, stimulating activities, and negative parenting styles. In the rural Ghanaian context, prosocial skills may be more developmentally stable or influenced by earlier, unmeasured factors, whereas behavior problems appear more malleable to concurrent inputs. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).