Parent and Child Maltreatment Exposure, Emotion Regulation, and Obesity-Related Health Behavior in Young Children

• In Event: 2-188 - Early Childhood Child Maltreatment, Risk Factors, and Effects on Children’s Health

Integrative Statement

Sedentary behavior, diet quality, and insufficient sleep have been associated with the development of obesity in children (Cespedes et al., 2015; Rey-Lopez et al., 2008). Although maltreatment exposure is also linked to obesity, this trend does not emerge until young adulthood (Noll et al., 2005; Danese & Tan, 2014). It is unknown whether maltreatment affects the aforementioned health behaviors in children, thus paving the way to obesity later in life. How maltreatment affects health behavior is also unknown. Emotion regulation (ER) may be one such mechanism. Exposure to maltreatment, as well as parents’ exposure to maltreatment in childhood, is associated with ER difficulties in children (Hébert et al., 2018; Hughes & Cossar, 2016; Luke & Banerjee, 2013; Maughan & Cicchetti, 2002). Evidence further suggests that children with ER difficulties are more likely to consume high-fat, high-sugar foods (Hemmingsson, 2014), engage in less physical activity (Aparicio et al., 2016), watch more television (Domoff et al., 2017), and get less sleep (Palmer & Alfano, 2017). Therefore, the current study examined whether parent and child experience of maltreatment was associated with health behaviors through ER.

Participants included 207 parents of preschool-aged children enrolled in the Preschoolers’ Adjustment and Intergenerational Risk (PAIR) project. The sample was predominantly low-income, with 54% endorsing an income at or below $10,000 per year. Participants were 74% Black/African American, 12% multiracial, 9% white, and 5% other. Parents completed the Parent Childhood Experiences Measures (PCEM) and the Childhood Experiences Measure (CEM) – both 57-item measures asking detailed questions about a host of maltreatment events that the parent experienced prior to age 18, and the child experienced from birth up to the present. For this project, cumulative maltreatment was used for both measures, or a total score of maltreatment events endorsed. Parents also completed the Emotion Regulation Checklist (ERC), a 24-item measure assessing for adaptive ER and lability on a 4-point scale; total score was used. Other parent-report measures included the Children’s Eating Habits Questionnaire, which asks about the frequency of consumption of eight healthy and unhealthy food categories, the Children’s Sleep Habits Questionnaire, a 37-item measure asking parents to rate frequency of sleep issues on a 3-point scale, one item from the Outdoor Playtime Checklist assessing minutes spent playing outside on a typical weekday, and one item measuring average minutes of screen time per day.

Figure 1 displays the final path model. All tests indicated that the model fit the data well: χ2=26.23, p>.05; CFI=.96; TLI=.99; RMSEA=.04; SRMR=.07. Based on statistically significant indirect effects, it was determined that ER mediated the association between child exposure to maltreatment and worse diet, less physical activity, and more screen time, but not sleep. Parent exposure to maltreatment was directly associated with worse diet, less physical activity, and more screen time in children. Findings suggest ER is a possible mechanism linking children’s maltreatment exposure to several important health behaviors related to obesity, thus revealing a critical target for intervention, and providing a possible explanation for the delayed link between adversity and obesity.

Authors

• Lindsay Huffhines, University of Kansas
  Presenting Author

• Yo Jackson, Pennsylvania State University
  Non-Presenting Author