Does positive parenting improve emotion regulation in at-risk youth across the transition to adolescence?
Rates of adolescent internalizing problems (especially anxiety and depressive symptoms) have increased over 40% in the past decade leading the US Surgeon General to declare a youth mental health crisis. There is an imminent public health need to study processes that mitigate risk for internalizing disorders prior to adolescence, an acute developmental inflection point for increased risk. These universal risks are further enhanced by exposure to early life stress.
Fortunately, positive parenting, especially following stress, may be an important avenue through which to redirect risk trajectories toward resilience. Positive parenting facilitates emerging emotion regulation abilities as children work with their caregivers to repair conflict. It buffers youth against chronic stress activation, especially after early life stress exposures. Better emotion regulation is, in turn, associated with resilience against internalizing disorders.
Dr. Bridget Callaghan, Assistant Professor, and Dr. Jennifer Somers, Postdoctoral Fellow, in the Department of Psychology at UCLA are using an MRI grant to add an important second year, longitudinal measure to an earlier study measuring youth psychopathology and child interaction in a recovery from conflict task. The first wave of data confirmed a relationship between positive/warm parenting behavior and recovery from early stress exposures. In this study her aims are to:
Characterize how positive parenting changes over time
Establish that increases in positive parenting from the first wave measurement to the second are associated with decreases in youth psychopathology symptoms
This work will contribute to a needed strengths-based treatment approach that focuses on resources that exist within families that can be leveraged to promote adolescent adaptation. It would suggest a needed shift within existing practice from interventions that focus on promoting adolescent self-regulation to inclusive interventions that leverage the potential of caregivers to facilitate positive adolescent adaptation. Highlighting the dyadic context of internalizing problems may also promote engagement in interventions by diffusing the responsibility of recovery to the family.