Predictors of Change in Mothers’ Reflective Functioning During the COVID-19 Pandemic

• In Event: Parent-Child Relationships During COVID-19: Intersectional Themes Across Development, Culture, and Race

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has created heightened levels of parenting stress but also, a natural context for examining change in mothers’ ability to manage stress and effectively parent. Both the extent to which mothers can tolerate distress and maintain goal-directed activity (Doan et al., 2018) and the specific strategies they employ for regulating negative affect (Gross & John, 2003) are likely to affect parenting sensitivity. One way to assess whether parenting sensitivity is likely to be impacted is by measuring parents’ perceptions of their children as capable of subjective experience, a capacity known as parental reflective functioning (RF; Luyten et al., 2017), a precursor to sensitive parenting (e.g., Grienenberger et al., 2005).

Major life stressors elicit greater negative affect and poorer emotion regulation (ER; Deater-Deckard et al., 2016). Mothers who respond with adaptive ER are more likely to continue to sensitively parent (e.g., Crandall et al., 2015), whereas parents who adopt less adaptive strategies (e.g., emotion suppression) are less warm/engaged during parent-child interaction (Waters et al., 2020). Additionally, mothers with lower distress tolerance (DT) have lower child-focused RF (Rutherford et al., 2015). We do not know how mothers’ ER strategies during a major stressor like the pandemic are associated with RF, nor whether low DT is an additional risk factor for impaired RF.

In a two-wave longitudinal study, we examine associations between change in mothers’ use of suppressive ER and change in levels of child-focused RF. We hypothesize 1) mothers who use more suppression will report lower RF, 2) mothers who increase suppression and are lower in DT will be at greatest risk for impaired RF.

At T1 (2017-2018, pre-pandemic) children were on average 3½ years and at T2 (June 2020, pandemic), 6 years; at T2 mothers were on average 35 years. At T1, we measured mothers’ DT (Simons & Gaher, 2005). From T1 to T2, we assessed change in mothers’ suppressive ER (ERQ; Gross & John, 2003) and child-focused RF (PRFQ; Luyten et al., 2017), specifically their “certainty” about their children’s subjective experience, an aspect of impaired RF.

We captured change in ER by regressing suppression at T2 on suppression at T1 to obtain standardized residuals. A hierarchical regression (n=88) using PROCESS Model 1 (Hayes, 2013) estimated the main and interaction effects of Suppr and DT on RF at T2 (controlling RF and income/needs at T1, and stressful life events at T2). There was a significant main effect of Suppression on RF, b=.60, SE=.23, p=.01, but no main effect of DT on RF, and a marginally significant interaction between suppression and DT on RF, b=-.13, SE=.07, p=.06, ΔR2=.03. At low and moderate levels of DT (lower 56%), Suppression and RF were strongly positively associated, ps<.01.

Mothers who suppressed more in response to heightened emotion during the pandemic were more likely to increase one problematic aspect of child-focused RF – certainty about children’s subjective experience. This association was pronounced for mothers who were low or moderate in DT. RF may constitute a mechanism by which pandemic stress affects parenting sensitivity.

Authors

• Patricia A Smiley, Pomona College
  Presenting Author

• Cindy H. Liu, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School
  Non-Presenting Author

• Stacey N Doan, Claremont Mckenna College
  Non-Presenting Author