Poster #37 - Associations between parental childhood trauma, atypical parenting behaviors, and children's emotional lability

• In Event: Poster Session 11

Abstract

Parental experiences of trauma have been found to correlate with both parenting behaviors (Guyon-Harris et al., 2020) and children’s regulatory capabilities (Pat-Horenczyk et al., 2015). However, little is known about the associations between parental experiences of childhood trauma, atypical parenting behaviors, specifically fearful/disoriented behaviors toward their distressed children, and children’s later emotional lability. One hundred ninety-seven parents of high-risk children reported on their own childhood trauma during children’s infancy using the Childhood Trauma Questionnaire (CTQ; Bernstein et al., 2003). When children were 24 months old, parents and children completed the Strange Situation Paradigm (SSP; Ainsworth et al., 1978) and fearful or disoriented parenting behaviors were scored using the Atypical Maternal Behavior Instrument for Assessment and Classification (AMBIANCE; Lyons-Ruth et al., 1999) coding system (n = 109). In addition, parents reported on children’s emotional lability using the Emotion Regulation Checklist (ERC) when children were 8-10 years old (n = 213). Parental childhood trauma was positively associated with fearful/disoriented parental behaviors towards children during the SSP (r = .307, p = .004). Fearful/disoriented parental behaviors during the SSP were also positively associated with children’s emotional lability (r = .282, p = .011). In addition, parental childhood trauma was positively associated with children’s emotional lability-negativity (r = .351, p = .009). These preliminary results suggest the importance of parental childhood experiences and atypical parenting in children’s emotional lability and warrant further examination of these data. We plan to explore these data further using a mediation analysis to discover whether atypical parenting behaviors, specifically fearful/disoriented behavior during the SSP, mediate the association between parental childhood trauma and children’s emotional lability.

Authors

• Danielle Katz, University of Delaware
  Presenting Author

• Eliana Schulman, University of Delaware

• Heather Yarger, University of Maryland - College Park

• Mary Dozier, University of Delaware