Adversity, engagement, and later achievement: The role of emotion regulation and parent-child relationship quality

•Academic engagement can improve outcomes for children who have faced adversity.•Emotion regulation skills explained the effect trauma symptoms had on engagement.•Parent-child relations mitigated the effect trauma symptoms had emotion regulation.•Emotion regulation skills and parent–child relations could improve engagement. Students who have experienced adversity tend to demonstrate poorer academic outcomes than their non-maltreated peers. Academic engagement, a multidimensional, motivational construct, associated with a myriad of positive academic outcomes is an important academically-related mechanism that can be leveraged to improve the outcomes of this population. The present study aimed to better understanding of how engagement develops in the context of adversity by exploring the effects emotion regulation skills and parent–child relationships have on engagement development. Analyses were conducted on 795 participants in the NSCAW dataset. Path analysis was used to estimate mediation and moderated mediation models. Emotion regulation skills significantly mediated the effect experiencing trauma symptoms had on engagement. Parent-child relationship quality moderated the mediation effect emotion regulation skills had on the relationship between experiencing trauma symptoms and engagement. Emotion regulation skills and parent–child relationship quality are potential intervention targets to improve engagement for students who have experienced adversity.