Developmental Trajectories of Youth Psychopathology Symptoms and Parental Responses to Distress Among Black and White Adolescents

• In Event: Parent-Child Interactions and Marginalized Contexts: The Role of Race, Gender, and Discrimination Experiences

Abstract

On a daily basis, parents are faced with the task of responding to their children’s expressions of emotions. Mounting evidence suggests that parents’ responses to their children’s emotions, particularly negative emotions, are associated with a wide range of developmental outcomes – from academic success to psychopathology symptoms. Much of this research has focused on early childhood despite the fact that adolescence is typically characterized by an increase in negative emotionality. The limited work on parents’ responses to adolescents’ emotions has often been cross-sectional, precluding examination of how associations between parenting and adolescent psychopathology unfold over this important developmental period. Further, despite some evidence for differences in parental responses to distress and their associations with child outcomes based on sociodemographic characteristics, little is known about the effects of adolescent race and gender on the trajectories of parental responses to distress. In the present study, we examined the developmental trajectories of (a) parental responses to adolescent distress and (b) internalizing symptoms among Black and White adolescents.

Participants (N=216 dyads) were part of a longitudinal study of adolescent development. Black (n=91) and White (n=125) adolescents and a caregiver completed 6 annual assessments (T1-T6). Mean adolescent age at T1 was 13.01 years (SD=.87); the sample was 44% female. At each timepoint, parents reported their supportive and unsupportive responses to adolescent distress with the Coping with Children’s Negative Emotions Scale—Adolescent Version. Adolescents reported their internalizing symptoms with the Revised-Child Anxiety and Depression Scale.

We used multivariate latent curve models to examine the relation between parental responses to distress and youth internalizing symptoms over time. Such models allowed us to examine covariances among the slopes, intercepts, and residuals of both constructs. We included youth race and gender as predictors of intercepts and slopes. We tested separate models for parental supportive and unsupportive responses and their respective subscales.

Parental responses to distress did not predict initial levels of, or change in, internalizing symptoms over time. We did, however, observe a significant association between the intercept of internalizing symptoms and the slope of unsupportive parental responses (cov[Iy,Sx]=.007, p=.03) such that youth who reported higher internalizing symptoms at T1 experienced increasingly unsupportive parental responses to distress over time. We also observed several effects of youth gender and race. Across all models, boys reported lower initial levels (intercepts) of internalizing symptoms than girls. Parents of White youth reported higher initial levels of unsupportive distress responses and parents of Black youth reported higher initial levels of unsupportive minimization responses. In terms of slopes, the linear decrease in unsupportive parental responses was attenuated among parents of Black youth and accelerated among parents of boys (see Tables 1 and 2).

These results challenge traditional unidirectional models of parenting and highlight how child symptoms can elicit specific responses from parents over time. We also identified differences in baseline levels and trajectories of parental responses based on youth race and gender. These findings highlight the necessity of taking sociodemographic context into account when studying parenting and suggest important avenues for future research.

Authors

• Jason Daniel Jones, The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia
  Presenting Author

• Jessica A Stern, University of Virginia - Charlottesville

• R. Chris Fraley

• Carl Lejuez, University of Connecticut

• Jude A. Cassidy, University of Maryland - College Park