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Parenting and Functional Connectivity in the Emotion Regulation Circuity of Pre-adolescents: The ABCD Study

Sat, March 23, 12:45 to 2:15pm, Baltimore Convention Center, Floor: Level 3, Room 322

Integrative Statement

Numerous studies have documented the role of parenting styles and behaviors in the development of children’s emotion regulation and social development. Parenting practices closely linked to the development of a child’s emotion regulation competency are parental acceptance, which is the parental warmth and understanding, and parental monitoring, which reflects parental control and involvement. While the association between parenting styles and child emotion regulation has been well-studied, the underlying neurobiology is unclear. Effective emotion regulation strategies are neurobiologically represented in prefrontal and other cortical structures regulating limbic regions. The present study investigates functional connectivity during resting state between a priori-selected regions of interest, i.e. major functional connectivity network including the amygdala, associated with child-reported parenting behaviors using the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) Study.
The data for these cross-sectional analyses came from the ABCD Study, a landmark study of child health in the United States (https://dx.doi.org/10.15154/1412097). Participants ages 9 to 10 completed questionnaires, tasks, and a resting-state magnetic resonance imaging scan (N=4,468; female=47.6%). Perception of parents’ degree of monitoring was measured using the Parental Monitoring Questionnaire. Children reported the quality of their relationship with both their mother and father using the Acceptance Subscale from Children’s Report of Parent Behavior Inventory. Resting-state functional connectivity was measured using each participant’s Fisher’s r-to-z transformed average correlation between the default-mode network (DMN), the frontoparietal network (FPN), and the amygdala.
Higher levels of parental monitoring were associated with weaker connectivity between FPN to the left amygdala (b=-0.011, SE=0.005, p<0.03), and stronger connectivity between the DMN and the left amygdala (b=0.026, SE=0.010, p<0.01) independent of race/ethnicity, sex, income, and age. No association was observed between parental monitoring and the connectivity between the DMN and the FPN. The association between maternal acceptance and connectivity between the DMN to FPN varied by child sex (interaction: p<0.001). In girls but not in boys, higher levels of maternal acceptance were related to weaker functional connectivity between the DMN to FPN (girls: b=-0.009, SE=0.003, p<0.001). Importantly, in girls, we observed a similar association between paternal acceptance and DMN to FPN connectivity. No association was observed between maternal acceptance and the connectivity between the DMN or FPN to the amygdala.
In this presentation we report the first results from the largest population-based imaging study in pre-adolescents. The data suggest that parental monitoring is associated with resting-state connectivity in both boys and girls. Whereas higher levels of monitoring are associated with weaker amygdala-FPN connectivity, more monitoring corresponds with stronger amygdala-DMN connectivity, which is typically deactivated in goal-oriented tasks. Only in girls, greater acceptance was associated with weaker connectivity between the DMN to FPN, consistent across ratings for fathers and mothers. Although this study cannot demonstrate the temporality of associations, these findings suggest that the connectivity in the limbic networks may contribute to the long-term effects of parenting quality on child well-being differently in girls and boys. In this presentation we will also show to what extent these patterns of functional connectivity determine the occurrence of internalizing and externalizing behaviors in girls and boys.

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