Emotion Regulation and Parent Distress: Getting at the Heart of Sensitive Parenting among Parents of Preschool Children Experiencing High Sociodemographic Risk

Sensitive parenting requires modulation of emotions in order to effectively organize and orient behavioral responses. There is considerable evidence that psychological distress can impair sensitive parenting practices, and also that psychological distress is associated with deficits in emotion regulation capacities. The negative effect that psychological distress has on parents’ emotion regulation capacities may be a mechanistic pathway through which psychological distress impacts parenting, as dysregulated emotions may be more proximal to parenting behaviors than distress itself; however, this specific link between psychological distress, emotion regulation, and parenting is not often examined in parenting models.

There is considerable evidence for the importance of sensitive parenting practices for young children. Sensitive parenting describes parents’ abilities to be aware of their children’s emotional cues, interpret them accurately, and respond in a way that is temporally contingent and functionally appropriate (Ainsworth, 1969; Lamb & Easterbrooks, 1981). Additionally, sensitivity also reflects consistent parenting practices in which parents a) provide the opportunity for their children to experience autonomy, b) increase the child’s odds of success during exploration through developmentally appropriate scaffolding, c) express affection and positive regard, d) show awareness of their children’s needs and emotions, and e) promote child-centered, rather than adult-centered, interaction by following their children’s foci of attention and interest (Leerkes, Crockenberg, & Burrous, 2004). Sensitive parenting has been linked to higher attainment of emotional, cognitive, and regulatory skills (Morris, Silk, Steinberg, Myers, & Robinson, 2007). These skills are especially salient for preschool-aged children as they make the developmental transition from external regulation by caregivers to increasing self-regulation, as well as the social transition into formal school settings. Considering the importance of sensitive and engaged parenting for young children across broad developmental domains, identifying determinants of parental sensitivity may allow for greater specificity of theoretical models and points of intervention.

While there are many such determinants of parenting, studies have shown that parents with low levels of psychological distress, (i.e. the number and severity of symptoms of psychopathology parents experience), appear better able to manage their parenting behaviors, whereas parents who are more distressed have been shown to demonstrate lower levels of sensitivity and responsivity (Berg-Nielsen, Vikan, & Dahl, 2002; Deater-Deckard, Li, & Bell, 2015; Teti & Towe-Goodman, 2008), which has been found to pose a significant risk to children’s socioemotional development (Smith, 2004). Indeed, there is a considerable body of literature that has established associations between parents’ symptoms of psychopathology and parenting behavior (Creswell, Apetroaia, Murray, & Cooper, 2013; Dix, Moed, & Anderson, 2014; Lovejoy, Graczyk, O’Hare, & Neuman, 2000; River, Borelli, & Nelson-Coffey, 2016). As such, parents’ psychological distress may an important determinant of parenting.

Psychological distress may influence parenting behaviors by making it difficult to manage and regulate emotions. Gross and Thompson (2007) defined emotion regulation as the processes by which one intentionally or unintentionally modifies the intensity of an emotion or the behavioral response to the emotion; in contrast, emotion dysregulation can be understood as difficulty modulating or suppressing an emotional or behavioral response or inappropriate suppression of an emotional response (Mennin, Heimberg, Turk, & Fresco, 2005). While there is not yet enough longitudinal research to speak definitively about the direction of the relation between psychological distress and emotion regulation (Compas et al., 2017), there is theoretical and empirical suggestion that emotion regulation may be more proximal to parenting behaviors than psychopathology. For example, Dix’s (1991) affective organization model of parenting describes well-regulated emotions as a resource for parenting that: 1) organizes behavior, 2) shapes parental responses, 3) activates monitoring and attention, and 4) motivates parents to maintain their children’s positive behavior and change their children’s negative behavior. Alternatively, difficulties in regulating negative emotions associated with psychological distress may lead to more harsh, punitive parenting behavior (Deater-Deckard et al., 2015; Maughan, Cicchetti, Toth, & Rogosch, 2007). Thus, it may be that parents who suffer from psychological distress are at a disadvantage in their ability to organize and coordinate their own parenting style associated with their difficulty regulating their affect.

While there is considerable empirical support for the theory that positive and negative emotions impact parenting behavior (Dix, Moed, & Anderson, 2014; Dix & Yan, 2014; Rueger, Katz, Risser, & Lovejoy, 2011), extant examinations of emotion regulation and parenting behavior are still mostly theoretical (Jones, Cassidy, & Shaver, 2015). Some work using infant cry paradigms has documented these associations with simulated babies; for example, observing associations between mothers’ report of their ability to regulate their own distress and their persistence in soothing a simulated crying baby is thought to reflect more sensitive parenting (Rutherford, Booth, Luyten, Bridgett, & Mayes, 2015). Additionally, the cognitive-affective ability to be clear about, reflect on, and understand emotions has also been found to be predictive of sensitive parenting behavior (Fonagy, 2005; Kelly, Slade, & Grienenberger, 2005) and be impaired by parents’ own psychological distress (Slade, 2005). For example, the research on reflective functioning in parenting, or the ability to think about the mental states of oneself and one’s child, which is thought to serve a regulatory function, has demonstrated that reflective functioning has implications for positive behavior during parent-child interactions (Fonagy & Target, 2002). Furthermore, self-focused reflective functioning, which is closely linked to emotion regulation strategies, has been found to be associated with parents’ sensitive and contingent parenting behaviors (Suchman, DeCoste, Leigh, & Borelli, 2010). Consistent with this evidence, the current study proposes that emotion regulation is a key process by which parents are able to manage their emotional responses in order to organize and orient their sensitive parenting behaviors, particularly in contexts of high psychological distress.

Although emotion regulation, psychological distress, and parenting behaviors have been theoretically linked and are conceptually related, process-focused research examining all three constructs together is limited. One exception is a study by Kim, Teti, and Cole (2012), which examined parents’ emotion dysregulation and depressive symptoms as predictors of behavioral emotional availability, akin to sensitive parenting behavior, in a sample of non-clinical parents of infants. In their study, Kim, Teti, and Cole (2012) found a significant positive relation between depressive symptoms and affect dysregulation, as well as an inverse relation between affect dysregulation and behavioral emotional availability, but they did not find a significant relation between depressive symptoms and emotional availability. These findings suggest that emotion regulation processes may be more proximally related to parenting behaviors than psychological distress, as conceptualized by the current study.

Although understanding the mechanisms by which psychological distress affects parenting is important for all families, these mechanisms are critically important among families that are at higher risk for psychosocial problems due to sociodemographic factors, including poverty, single parent status, and racial minority status, as these families encounter disproportionate exposure to stressors that challenge parenting (Conger et al., 2002; McLoyd, 1998). Individuals from low-income contexts, an indicator of greater sociodemographic risk, may be as much as 2.6 times more likely to develop a psychological disorder than their higher-income counterparts (Wadsworth & Achenbach, 2005). Poverty can also diminish the capacity for consistent and available parenting (McLoyd, 1990), and is specifically related to behavioral parental sensitivity (Raviv, Kessenich, & Morrison, 2004). Additionally, while the research on emotion regulation in parenting behavior is sparse in general, it is especially lacking for low-income parents and children (Crandall, Deater-Deckard, & Riley, 2015). For these reasons, the current study explores these relations in a sample of low-income parents of preschool-aged children.

The goal of this study is to examine the co-contribution of parents’ psychological distress and difficulties in emotion regulation on observed parental sensitive behavior in a low income, high sociodemographic risk sample, oversampled for exposure to violence. We hypothesized that higher psychological distress would predict higher difficulties in emotion regulation, and that both higher psychological distress and higher difficulties in emotion regulation would predict less sensitive parenting behavior. Additionally, we hypothesized that there would be an indirect effect of difficulties in emotion regulation in the association between psychological distress and sensitive and engaged parenting behavior.