Mothers’ and Fathers’ Dysregulation and Response to Child Distress in the Context of Child Reactivity

• In Event: Predictors of Parenting Processes and Parent-Child Relationship Quality across Four Developmental Periods

Abstract

A parent’s emotion regulation (ER) ability is essential to their capacity to provide supportive parenting behaviors, such that better regulated parents provide more supportive and less non-supportive responses to their children (Dix, 1991; Leerkes, 2010). Additionally, some child characteristics, such as temperamental negative affectivity, can be emotionally taxing for parents, such that children with greater negative affect may elicit less sensitive responses from their parents (Belsky, 1984; Crockenberg, 1986). What is less understood is how parents’ ER capabilities and child negative affect interact in relation to parenting behavior. Additionally, little is known about the dyadic relations between mothers’ and fathers’ ER on their own and their partner’s parenting. This study assesses how the combination of each parent’s emotional dysregulation with child negativity relates to parents’ and partners’ responses to their children’s distress.

The current sample consists of 109 families with a 3- to 5-year-old child that participated in a larger study on family mealtime interactions. Approximately half the children were male (50.4%). Most of the children were white (61%); 12.4% were African American, 9.5% were Hispanic, 5.7% were Asian American, and 11.4% reported multiple races or other. Most families were considered middle income (income-to-needs ratios 2-5; 49.5%), 28.6% of families were considered low-income (ratios <2), and 21.9% were high-income families (ratios >5). Mothers’ and fathers’ ER functioning was assessed using the self-report Difficulties in Emotion Regulation Scale (36-item; Gratz & Roemer, 2004); parents’ responses to their children’s distress were measured with the self-report Coping with Children’s Negative Emotions Scale (72-item; Fabes, Eisenberg, & Bernzweig, 1990); and the Negative Affectivity sub-scale from the parent-report Very Short Form of the Child Behavior Questionnaire (12-item; Putnam & Rothbart, 2002) was used to examine child temperamental negativity.

Analyses were conducted using a path model in Mplus v.8 controlling for child age and gender and accounting for relations between mothers’ and fathers’ reports. We ran two dyadic path models (Figure 1): one for mothers’ and fathers’ supportive responses and one for mothers’ and fathers’ non-supportive responses. Both models fit the data well. Main effects in the supportive model showed more father dysregulation related to more mother support and less father support of children’s distress. In the non-supportive model, more father dysregulation related to less mother non-support of children’s distress. There were two significant interactions (Figure 2). There was a significant interaction between fathers’ dysregulation and child negativity predicting mother’s supportive responses, such that mothers were more supportive when fathers were more dysregulated and when children were less negatively reactive. Moreover, dysregulation in mothers predicted greater maternal non-supportive responses, but only when children were low in negative reactivity.

Findings show a consistent pattern of mothers compensating for fathers’ dysregulation by providing more sensitive responses to children. Also, seeing parent ER effects only when child negativity is low may be because children who are already more temperamentally reactive elicit more negative parenting behaviors regardless of parents’ ER abilities. These results underscore the need to continue examining mother, father, and child characteristics when studying parenting behaviors.

Authors

• Mariam Hafiz, University of Texas at Dallas
  Presenting Author

• Jackie A Nelson, University of Texas at Dallas
  Non-Presenting Author

• Nishita Patel, University of Texas at Dallas
  Non-Presenting Author

• Shayla C Holub, University of Texas at Dallas
  Non-Presenting Author