Poster #89 - Buffering Effects From Parents’ Emotion Regulation for Some but not all Families of Adolescents

• In Event: Poster Session 09

Abstract

Rates of mental health struggles, most notably anxiety, were exacerbated during the COVID-19 pandemic (Breslau et al., 2021), such that for the first time the US Preventative Services Task Force recommends primary care include anxiety screening for all adults (US PSTF, 2022). Families faced particularly heightened risks to mental health and family dynamics (Feinberg et al., 2022). Evidence is clear that heightened mental health struggles impair maximally responsive, affectionate, and communicative parenting practices widely recognized as protective against adolescent risk outcomes (Godleski et al., 2020; Padilla et al., 2019; Rogers et al., 2019). While extant evidence suggests anxious parenting (intrusive, controlling, and sometimes for negative behavior) is linked to negative child and family outcomes (Ballash et al., 2006), not all parents experiencing anxiety symptoms or stress report less ideal parenting strategies (e.g., compensatory parenting reported among high-risk families can provide a buffering effect; Nelson et al., 2009). Informed by the transactional model of stress and coping which posits that regulatory skill modulates the links between stressors and behavior (Lazarus & Folkman, 1984), we aimed to estimate the attenuating role of parents’ emotion regulation (ER) on the associations between parents’ anxiety, stress, and discipline behaviors.
In August of 2022, 452 parents of adolescent children (ages 14 to 17 years old) participated in a longitudinal online study. Two-thirds of the participants at baseline identified as female (63%) and were employed full-time (66%), three-quarters identified as White-only (76%). The current paper utilized reports of anxiety (GAD-7; Spitzer et al., 2006), parental stress (4 items from the Parenting Stress Index; Abidin et al., 2006), and ER (DERS-SF; Kaufman et al., 2016) as predictors of parents’ use of over-reactive discipline strategies (Parenting Scale; Arnold et al., 1993). Interaction terms between anxiety and emotion regulation, and parental stress and ER tested whether ER moderated associations between parental anxiety, stress, and over-reactive discipline.
Hierarchical linear multiple regression was used to test direct and moderating influences on parents’ discipline; all three steps of the model were significant. In step one, both parental anxiety (β = .13) and parental stress (β = .37) were significantly associated with over-reactive discipline (R2 = .19); higher stress and anxiety were associated with over-reactive discipline. Upon adding parents’ ER to the model in step two, anxiety became nonsignificant, and ER was associated with over-reactive discipline (β = .26; R2 = .23); ER difficulties were associated with more use of over-reactive discipline. In step three, only the interaction between anxiety and ER was significant (β = -.12; R2 = .23); parental stress was not moderated by ER. Post-hoc examination of anxiety/discipline correlations indicated that the association between parental anxiety and over-reactive discipline strategies was negative and significant for parents with low ER difficulties (r = -.24, p < .001) but nonsignificant for those with higher ER difficulties (r = -.11, p = .10), suggesting a buffering effect among parents with stronger regulatory skills. Developmental implications for families raising adolescents during the current mental health crisis are discussed.

Authors

• Beth S Russell, University of Connecticut
  Presenting Author

• Kari Adamsons, University of Connecticut

• Yuyang Hu, University of Connecticut