3-165 - Emotion Regulation, Mentalization, and Parenting Under Stress: Cognitive and Affective Parenting Mechanisms Across Risk Conditions

Session Type: Paper Symposium

Integrative Statement

Parents’ capacities to regulate negative emotions and understand children’s internal experiences have been suggested as contributors to parenting sensitivity and child healthy social-emotional development (Leerkes et al., 2015). Nonetheless, less is known about the role of these mechanisms in families struggling with poverty, adversity, and child behavioral difficulties. Examining the role of emotion regulation and parental reflective capacity in high risk families is critical, as understanding such processes may suggest protective mechanisms and illuminate points for preventative and clinical interventions with at-risk families.

This symposium seeks to enhance understanding of cognitive and emotional mechanisms of parenting by evaluating different approaches to measuring parental reflectiveness, their relation to parents’ emotion regulation capacities, and links to parenting stress and behavior across lab and clinical settings. In these papers, cognitive and affective predictors of parenting are examined across a range of ages (0-3, preschool, and school-aged) and risks (parents with histories of trauma, families in poverty, children with ADHD). Findings suggest that coherence regarding childhood attachment experiences protects against relational parenting stress in parents of young children (paper 1); emotion dysregulation, but not insightfulness, predicts less sensitive parenting among low-income parents of preschoolers (paper 2); and mentalization is particularly critical for parents with limited emotion regulation among clinically-referred children (paper 3). While differing in methodology and population studied, a pattern evolving from the data supports the role of emotion regulation and mentalization as moderators and mediators of the relation between risks factors and parenting outcomes. Additional developmental and clinical implications will be discussed.

Sub Unit

• Parenting & Parent-Child Relationships

Chair

• Sarah A.O. Gray, Tulane University

Discussant

• Miriam Steele, The New School

Individual Presentations

• High Coherence of Transcript in the AAI Moderates the Influence of ACEs on Parenting Stress re the Parent-Child Relationship - Presenting Author: Howard Steele, The New School For Social Research; Jordan Bate, The New School; Anne Murphy, Montefiore Medical Center; Hannah Goldman, The New School; Miriam Steele, The New School

• Cognitive and Affective Predictors of Sensitive Parenting: Exploring Psychopathology, Insightfulness, and Emotion Dysregulation - Presenting Author: Sarah A.O. Gray, Tulane University; Justin Carreras, Tulane University; Danielle Forbes, University of Massachusetts Boston; Alice C. Carter, University of Massachusetts, Boston

• Parental Emotion Regulation and Parental Mentalization in Families of Children with ADHD and Behavior Difficulties - Presenting Author: Naama Gershy, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem; Sarah A.O. Gray, Tulane University