Parenting Goal Flexibility: Well-Regulated Parents Change Priorities when Children are Upset

• In Event: Contextualizing Parental Belief Systems: Informing Traditional Models with Contemporary Questions

Abstract

Parenting goals are parents’ desired outcomes in parent-child interactions that serve to organize parenting behavior. Having parent-centered goals (focused on parent’s desires) directs parents’ attention to child behavior relevant to the parent’s agenda whereas child-centered goals (focused on child’s needs) primes attention towards the child’s well-being. Although posited to be susceptible to change during interactions, research has largely treated parenting goals as immutable. Parenting goal flexibility may depend upon both feedback processes during interactions and stable individual differences. Children’s sadness and anger communicate different needs to the parent, potentially eliciting parenting goal change (e.g., comfort vs. discipline child). A parent’s emotion regulation while caregiving (parenting-related emotion regulation, PRER) likely influences parent’s goal focus during challenging interactions. Leveraging an experimental design, we examined how initial goal focus and child’s negative emotions differentially predicted parenting goal flexibility during pandemic-specific, parent-child interactions, depending on individual differences in PRER.

In Winter 2022, 207 parents (89% female, MAge(SD)=40.53(5.47), 70% White) completed an online experiment manipulating goal focus and child emotion in vignettes about remote schooling for a specific child (MAge(SD)=9.04(4.04), 46% female). Following a 2 (Initial Focus) x 2 (Child Emotion) factorial design, parents read a vignette prompting either self-focus (SF) or child-focus (CF) (Vignette 1), then read a second vignette, wherein their child reacts with either anger or sadness (Vignette 2), yielding four conditions (SF-Anger; SF-Sad; CF-Anger; CS-Sad). For both vignettes, parents rated the importance of parent- (PC) or child-centered (CC) parenting goals, then wrote descriptions of parenting behavior.

A repeated measures MANCOVA revealed an interaction between vignette, child emotion, and goal ratings, F(1,184)=9.024, p=.003 (Table 1). Child sadness had pronounced effects on goal change as parents had lower Vignette 2 PC goal ratings compared to their previous Vignette 1 ratings. Moreover, parents responding to child sadness had lower Vignette 2 PC goal ratings compared to parents responding to child anger. Using multi-group comparison in path analysis (Figure 1), PRER predicted PC and CC goal change scores (positive score indicates decreased Vignette 2 goal rating), but only for child anger conditions. In CF-Anger, PRER was negatively associated with CC goal change (ß=-0.310, p=.018). When child-focused, parents with better PRER increased CC goal importance in response to child anger. In SF-Anger, PRER was positively associated with PC goal change (ß=0.323, p=.019). When self-focused, parents with better PRER decreased PC goal importance in response to child anger.

Our findings provide initial causal evidence that children’s discrete negative emotions – particularly sadness – stimulate parenting goal flexibility. Parents may interpret their child’s sadness as a request for support, subsequently re-orienting parents towards their child’s needs while diminishing self-focus, as reflected by the decreased importance of PC goals. Moreover, effective PRER may facilitate parents’ re-orientation towards children’s socioemotional needs during conflict, enabling parents to adjust goals accordingly. Ongoing qualitative analyses of parent’s written responses will examine how parenting goal flexibility corresponds with parenting behavior. Our study supports theorized but untested processes in seminal models, revealing that parenting goals are flexible and dependent upon children’s discrete emotions.

Authors

• Lindsey Partington, University of California - Davis
  Presenting Author

• Meital Mashash, University of California - San Francisco

• Paul David Hastings, University of California - Davis