Poster #52 - Not This Again: Associations Between Parental Perceived Everyday Hassles, Toddler Emotion Expression and Parenting Behaviors

• In Event: Poster Session 20

Abstract

Parenting behaviors are influenced by their contextual environment as well as their child’s characteristics and emotion expression (Newland & Crnic, 2011). For example, mothers are less likely to be sensitive to child cues in the face of high stress (Booth et al., 2018). Additionally, child emotion expression has been shown to influence parenting behavior (Kiff et al., 2011). Together, these findings suggest the potential interplay among parent stress, child emotion expression, and parenting behaviors. Yet, limited research has looked at the impact of parent stress in tandem with in-the-moment child emotion expression on parenting behaviors.
To address this gap, we examine main and interacting effects of parent stress and toddler emotion expression on maternal sensitivity to distress and maternal detachment. We focus specifically on parents’ experiences of daily hassles, a category of stress capturing how often minor everyday stressors occur and how much of a hassle they are perceived to be (Crnic et al., 2005). Twenty-five toddlers (Mage=16.60 months; 92% White) and their mothers participated in a semi-structured toy removal task. We coded toddler emotion expression, maternal sensitivity to distress, and maternal detachment (NICHD ECCRN, 1999) from the “Dyadic Challenge” part of the task, where mothers were instructed to respond to the child as they typically would without returning the toy to the child and from the “Dyadic Recovery” part of the task, where mothers were instructed to return the toy and interact with the child as they typically would. Mothers reported on the frequency of daily hassles associated with a) general aspects of their lives and b) child and family events.
For the Dyadic Challenge, we found main effects of child emotion expression; higher toddler positive emotion expression was marginally associated with higher maternal sensitivity to distress and lower maternal detachment whereas the reverse was true for toddlers high in negative affect (Table 1). This highlights the differential impact of toddler emotion expression on parenting behaviors. General life hassles were unrelated to parenting during the Dyadic Challenge. Surprisingly, higher child and family hassles predicted marginally higher maternal sensitivity during the challenge, possibly suggesting that mothers reporting more frequent child and family hassles may already be more cognizant of stress in the household, making them more attuned to their toddler’s distress.
During the Dyadic Recovery, when toddler negative emotion expression was high, general life hassles positively predicted maternal detachment; this was also true when toddler positive emotion expression was low. Interestingly, however, when toddler positive emotion expression was high, more frequent general life hassles were associated with lower maternal detachment (Figure 1), highlighting the buffering effect of toddler positive emotion expression in the face of stressors.
The findings underscore the complex relations between stress and parenting; the associations depend on type of stressor, child in-the-moment emotion expression, and type of challenge the dyad faces; in some cases (i.e., when child positive emotion is high), stress may enhance supportive parenting behaviors. These findings lend insight into the transactional nature of parent-child interactions in the context of parental stress.

Authors

• Brianna Halter, University of North Carolina at Greensboro
  Presenting Author

• Crystal Thinzar, University of North Carolina at Greensboro

• Margaret A. Fields-Olivieri, University of North Carolina at Greensboro