1-025 - Determining When Treating Parental Emotion Regulation is a Necessary Component of Parenting Interventions

Session Type: Paper Symposium

Integrative Statement

Parenting is an emotionally demanding endeavor, which can be particularly challenging for parents who struggle with psychopathology or lack emotion regulation (ER) skills. Poor ER has consistently been associated with less effective parenting practices, yet parents with poor ER are underserved by extant parenting interventions. The papers in this symposium explore when parental ER might be a critical component to target in parenting or other mental health interventions, and they examine treatment outcomes for children, parents, and for parenting behaviors. Two papers (1, 3) will detail 2 different emotion-coaching interventions that teach mother’s how to be aware of their own emotions in order to coach their children around distressing emotions. Two other papers (2, 4) use evidence-based adult psychotherapies, namely Dialectical Behavior Therapy and Cognitive Behavior Therapy to specifically target mothers who struggle with extreme emotion dysregulation and depression, respectively, as pathways to improve parenting. All of these papers grapple with how to integrate key ingredients from adult psychotherapy and parenting interventions to address the needs of various at-risk populations, as the predominant therapeutic models have had little cross talk between adult treatments and parenting intervention. Towards this goal, these papers support the idea that helping parents to better regulate their emotions may allow them to better benefit from (parenting) interventions and lead to improvements in parent and child well-being, as well as improvements in parenting.

Sub Unit

• Prevention and Interventions

Chair

• Christina Gamache Martin, University of Oregon

Individual Presentations

• An emotion coaching parenting intervention for survivors of intimate partner violence - Presenting Author: Lynn Fainsilber Katz, University of Washington; Ashley Maliken, University of Washington; Kyrill Gurtovenko, University of Washington; Joy Kawamura, University of Washington; Nicole Stettler, University of Washington

• A Dialectical Behavior Therapy Skills Group Case Study on Mothers with Severe Emotion Dysregulation - Presenting Author: Christina Gamache Martin, University of Oregon; Leslie E. Roos, University of Oregon; Maureen Zalewski, University of Oregon; Nicole Cummins, University of Oregon

• The Role of Parent Emotion Regulation in an Emotion Coaching Parenting Program: Tuning in to Kids - Presenting Author: Sophie Havighurst, University of Melbourne; Christiane Kehoe, University of Melbourne; Ann Harley, University of Melbourne

• Integrated Parenting Intervention to Enhance Parent Emotion Regulation: Moderating Effects of Maternal ADHD Symptoms - Presenting Author: Christina Danko, University of Maryland, College Park; Kelsey Woods, University of Maryland; Andrea Chronis-Tuscano, University of Maryland