Do Cumulative Stressors Moderate the Association between Emotion Dysregulation During Pregnancy and the Early Family Environment?

• In Event: Pregnancy and Childhood Determinants of Parent Emotion Socialization and Child Outcomes

Abstract

Background: Parenthood is one of the most life altering transitions that adults experience in their life, bringing a host of new positive experiences, as well as significant and chronic stressors. However, little is known about how individual parent characteristics and environmental factors may act together to influence how parents manage this transition, and subsequent outcomes for the family environment. It is well-established that external environment stressors, such as low socio-economic status, low social support, and stressful life events are linked to less optimal family environments, such as emotion dismissing and irritable parenting (Appleyard et al., 2005; Taylor et al., 2015). There is also clear evidence that parent emotion dysregulation is an important determinant of the family emotional climate, such as higher emotion dismissing and distress reactive parenting, and lower parenting warmth and emotion coaching (Beckerman et al., 2017; Cui et al., 2021). The diathesis-stress model proposes an interaction between individual vulnerability and environmental stressors, leading to disproportionately increased stress responses and negative outcomes (Zuckerman, 1999). In the current study, we test whether environmental stressors during the transition to parenthood exacerbate the influence of parent emotion dysregulation (i.e., assessed during pregnancy) on early family outcomes, including parent expressiveness, emotion coaching and emotion dismissing parenting practices, parenting warmth and irritability, and interparental conflict.

Methods: Data were first time prospective mothers and fathers (N=264) from two time-points of the Child and Parent Emotion Study (CAPES, recruited 2018-19), collected 12 months apart, collected via online survey. Parent emotion dysregulation was assessed using the Difficulties in Emotion Regulation Scale 16-Item Short-Form (Bjureberg et al., 2016). We created a cumulative stress index at Time 2 (both parents unemployed; government benefit; low income; low social support; 3 or more stressful life events). We assessed longitudinal associations using multiple regression in Stata and robust standard errors to account for clustering (where two parents were from the same household).

Results: We found that parent emotion dysregulation during pregnancy was associated with higher distress reactive parenting, parenting irritability, interparental conflict, and negative family emotion expression, but was not associated with emotion coaching, warmth, and positive emotion expression. Further, we did not find evidence for independent or moderating effects of cumulative stressors on any of the family environment variables. It’s possible our findings were influenced by the characteristics of our online sample, with an underrepresentation of parents from a low socio-economic background.

Conclusions: At the transition to parenthood, adults must learn new skills related to child care, while renegotiating the parameters of their old life, including their couple, family and social relationships, often in context of unprecedented sleep deprivation, and increased financial stress. Our findings extend on previous empirical evidence by showing the role of parent emotion dysregulation during pregnancy in influencing the subsequent early family environment. We did not find that socio-economic stressors contributed to family outcomes, but this is an unusual finding that may be due to having a relatively advantaged online sample, and should be further investigated.

Authors

• Elizabeth Mary Westrupp, Deakin University

• Gabriella King, Deakin University
  Presenting Author

• Eliza Bate, Deakin University