Journal of Child and Family Studies最新文献

Parental communication about body weight and shape is associated with offspring's eating behaviors and body image. However, predictors of parental weight/shape communication are less known. The present study explored whether direct (i.e., comments to the child about their weight and encouragement to diet) and indirect (i.e., modeling of the importance of body weight/shape via parent's own dieting and comments about their own weight) communication about weight, shape, and eating from parents in childhood predicted women's direct and indirect communication about weight/shape to their own child in adulthood. Participants were 634 adult mothers who provided retrospective reports of their parents' direct and indirect weight/shape-related communication during childhood. Participants then self-reported their own current direct and indirect weight/shape communication towards their own child. Multiple linear regression explored whether childhood direct and indirect communication predicts maternal weight/shape communication towards participants' own child in adulthood. Childhood direct weight/shape communication was a salient predictor of both current direct and indirect weight/shape communication. Childhood indirect weight/shape communication did not predict current direct communication when modeled with childhood direct communication, however, it was predictive of current indirect communication. Findings may highlight a need for parental psychoeducation on the lasting influence of familial weight/shape communication.

Parenting can be challenging, and military parents face additional family stressors related to relocations and deployments. ADAPT4U is an evidence-based preventive parenting program specifically designed for military parents of school-aged children. This study examines the feasibility and acceptability of in-person group and telehealth versions of the program. We used quantitative and qualitative data in a concurrent embedded design. Quantitative data were analyzed using SPSS with regressions and ANOVAs. Qualitative data were thematically coded by multiple authors and then a consensus process was undertaken. Both conditions were highly satisfactory for participants, with in-person group rated slightly higher. Families were more likely to attend telehealth than group, both at all and for at least 50% of sessions. Telehealth participants rated more highly: helpfulness, the facilitator was understanding and responsive, and they would participate in a future parenting program based on their experience. Qualitative results reflected positive experiences both with the content and facilitators, and concerns or recommendations that often were directly addressed by the other format (e.g., suggestions by in-person group participants for a telehealth format). Consistent themes across formats included wanting children to be involved in the program and more follow-up after the end of the program. The ADAPT4U program is highly acceptable to participants, and providing multiple format options (in-person group and individual telehealth) will likely make it more feasible for parents to participate in a way that works best for them.

The present study examined the dual moderating effects of parenting stress and negative COVID-19 pandemic impacts on the link between parental harsh discipline and child behavior problems. Mothers and children aged 2-6 years (M = 49.68 months, 51.03% female; N = 339) in the United States participated online via Amazon Mechanical Turk during the COVID-19 pandemic (Summer or Winter 2020). Mothers reported on harsh discipline, parenting stress, negative COVID-19 impacts, and children's internalizing and externalizing problems. As hypothesized, results showed a significant three-way interaction effect such that parenting stress and negative COVID-19 impacts exacerbated the positive relation between harsh discipline and child behavior problems, however, only for internalizing problems. Children had the highest levels of internalizing problems when harsh discipline, parenting stress, and negative COVID-19 impacts were higher; additionally, parenting stress still exacerbated the positive relation between harsh discipline and internalizing when pandemic impacts were lower. For externalizing problems, two-way interaction results revealed that positive relations between harsh discipline and externalizing were weaker when pandemic impacts were higher, suggesting that pandemic stressors altered these well-established effects. Findings suggested that proximal familial risks and broader environmental risks interact in complex ways to influence children's mental health difficulties, and that interventions to reduce parenting stress may ameliorate children's internalizing problems, especially when additional environmental stressors are present.

The Multidimensional Assessment of Parenting Scale (MAPS) was developed to assess a wide range of behaviors across positive and negative domains of parenting. This study aims to expand the utility of the MAPS by evaluating a youth-report version which provides an additional perspective on parenting practices. The study evaluated the youth-report form of the MAPS (MAPS-Y) in a large clinical population (N = 628) ranging from middle childhood (8-12) to adolescence (13-17) who were admitted to partial and inpatient psychiatric units. Youth and their caregivers completed the parent and youth versions of the MAPS questionnaire, and measures of child and adolescent psychopathology, emotion regulation, family context, and adversity. Analyses of factor structure, reliability, agreement, and validity were performed. The study also examined a short form of the MAPS-Y for reliability and validity. CFA and model fit indices indicated that all items loaded as expected onto subscales and with good fit. Analyses support strong reliability. The factor structure of the youth-report form was invariant across developmental stages, included both positive and negative domains, and demonstrated strong psychometric properties. The MAPS-Y short form demonstrated strong validity and reliability. The youth-report form of the MAPS and its short form are appropriate for use among children and adolescents experiencing acute clinical symptoms. The MAPS youth-report form will allow for nuanced, in-depth assessment of the parenting behaviors beyond parent-report that are critical to treatment outcomes in youth.

Black children are at significant risk for anxiety through heightened exposure to poverty, trauma, and racial discrimination, and females are at higher risk for childhood onset than males. One potentially relevant factor is difficulties with worry regulation. This study seeks to understand how difficulties with worry regulation and sex differences may affect risk for anxiety in Black children. The present study examined relations between difficulties with worry regulation and anxiety symptoms by sex in a sample of 98 Black children (M_age = 10.08, SD_age = 1.48). Caregivers reported on child worry dysregulation (i.e exaggerated displays of worry), worry inhibition (i.e suppression of worry), and anxiety. Positive associations were found between caregiver-reported child worry dysregulation and anxiety symptoms (r = 0.41, p < 0.01) but not worry inhibition (r = 0.11, p = 0.37). The association between higher child worry dysregulation and higher child anxiety symptoms was moderated by child sex, (B = 5.00, p = 0.01), such that it was significant in girls but not in boys, independent of child trauma exposure and pubertal acceleration. Higher worry dysregulation was related to higher anxiety in girls but not boys. Trauma exposure also predicted higher child anxiety symptoms (p < 0.01). Worry dysregulation may be a helpful target for identifying girls at risk for anxiety disorders. Future research should examine additional factors that may relate to anxiety symptoms in Black male children, including other facets of emotion dysregulation, to further disentangle sex specific pathways of risk.

School-based mindfulness programmes (SBMPs) are becoming widely used in primary schools, however findings regarding their effectiveness are controversial. Understanding how children describe and interpret the experience of taking part in these programmes may hold the key for improving their effectiveness. In this study we sought to gather children's views about a 12-lesson SBMP called Paws b. A week after the completion of the SBMP in five classes of two primary schools, during Personal Social and Health Education (PSHE) lessons, we conducted four focus groups with 8- and 9-year-olds. We randomly selected two girls and two boys from each class to form each focus group. The discussion was led by a different researcher that had not been associated with the delivery of the lessons. A reflexive thematic analysis was conducted on the transcribed data. We identified three major themes in children's discussions: (1) Mindfulness as instrumental for self-regulation, (2) Continued practice can lead to positive changes, and (3) Embedded memories from Paws b. The themes indicate that children remembered key practices and information, and used them in daily life. They enjoyed the training although not always from the beginning, observed changes in themselves and in their classmates and understood mechanisms through which mindfulness training can have positive effects. Implications of these findings are discussed in relation to both the content of this specific SBPM and the way in which the course was delivered.

Parenting in infancy is immensely important for children's development and therefore, contributors to varying quality of early parenting have been extensively studied. Among those, parents' personality and its links with parenting have attracted intense interest, but factors that may affect those associations, including characteristics of the child, particularly in father-infant relationships, remain poorly understood (Taraban & Shaw, 2018). We present a study of 200 families, including infants, mothers, and fathers (Children and Parents Study). Parents reported their Big Five traits and distress/psychopathology. We observed their parenting (a composite of responsiveness, positive affect, and reversed negative affect, defined as positive responsiveness) toward the infant in home interactions. The infants' anger proneness, most often considered a characteristic that poses parenting challenges, was observed in standard temperament episodes, and modeled as a moderator of personality - parenting relations. Mothers showed more responsiveness, more positive affect, and less negative affect than fathers. Fathers' higher Agreeableness, Openness, and Extraversion were associated with more responsiveness. The effect of Agreeableness was further qualified by its interaction with child anger proneness: More agreeable fathers were more responsive toward infants high or average in anger proneness, and highly disagreeable fathers were less responsive toward those infants. Mothers' personality traits, alone or in interaction with infants' anger proneness, were unrelated to their parenting; however, mothers who were higher in distress/psychopathology were less responsive toward their infants, especially when the infants were high or average in anger proneness.

Based on theoretical premises of ecological systems theory and the compensatory hypothesis, a subset of data from the Family Life Project (N = 773), a population-based study of rural families with low incomes, were used to test for associations between maternal literacy in infancy and children's academic outcomes and teacher-reported problem behaviors in kindergarten. A second aim tested whether increased time in child care averaged from 6-36 months moderated such relations. Results indicated that maternal literacy was significantly positively related to academic outcomes (ES = .17-.23) and significantly negatively related to children's problem behaviors (ES = -.15) in kindergarten. Child care hours were not significantly related to any outcome. Significant interactions were found between maternal literacy and hours in child care on both children's academic skills and problem behaviors. Specifically, for mothers with lower literacy levels, significant dose-response relationships were detected between increased time in child care and children's higher academic scores and reduced problem behaviors (ES = .07-.09). Implications for maternal literacy and child care access among rural families are discussed.

The study tests the effect of poverty-reduction intervention on family functioning reported by AIDS-orphaned children in extended families in Southern Uganda by asking two questions: (1) based on children's reports, how does poverty reduction intervention affect family functioning? and (2) to what extent do these effects vary by a child's gender and orphanhood status? Informed by the social causation theory, family stress model, and asset theory, the study aims to address the existing knowledge gap on effects of poverty reduction interventions on family functioning in low-income families caring for AIDS orphaned children in Uganda. We ran multilevel regression models using longitudinal data collected in a cluster-randomized controlled trial from N = 1410 children (n = 621 boys and n = 789 girls) recruited from 48 rural primary schools in Uganda. Survey data was collected every 12 months over the course of 5 years. The average age of children at enrollment was 13 years. We found significant positive effects of the intervention on family cohesion, family communication, and child-caregiver relationship. Effects vary by child's gender and orphanhood category. Intervention improves family communication for boys, while improving family cohesion and quality of child-caregiver relationship for girls. Single maternal orphans reported improved family communication, while single paternal orphans reported improved child-caregiver relationship. Poverty reduction interventions are important to improve family functioning for low-income families. Variations by child's gender and orphanhood status have not been reported in previous studies, and our findings underscore the importance of continued research in this area.

The main aim of this study was to evaluate the effectiveness of Pennsylvania’s state-wide intensive in-home treatment for youth with serious emotional disturbance (SED), EcoSystemic Structural Family Therapy-Family Based Mental Health Services (ESFT-FBMHS). Despite its long history of implementation, the program remains empirically under-evaluated. In this archival study, out-of-home placement and youth functioning outcomes were compared across four tiers of length of stay. Given the high-risk population treated in ESFT-FBMHS, it was hypothesized that the families and youth who completed the full duration of treatment (169–224 days) would have better outcomes than those who stopped treatment after 168 days or less. We utilized an ex post facto quantitative research design analyzing archived medical claims data of 2251 youth treated between 2018 and 2022 to assess out-of-home placement rates and analyzed archived data from six domains of the Child and Adolescent Needs and Strengths (CANS; Problem Presentation, Risk Behaviors, Functioning, Child Safety, Caregiver Needs, and Child Strengths) to assess changes in youth functioning post-discharge (90 and 180 days). An analysis using generalized estimating equations (GEE), controlling for potential confounding variables such as demographics and clinical features, suggest that length of stay in ESFT-FBMHS was significantly associated with out-of-home placement and youth improvement on the CANS at both 90- and 180-days post-discharge. As a group, youth with SED who did not complete the full duration of the program had 2–3 times the odds of out-of-home placement at 90 days post-discharge and 1–3 times the odds at 180 days post-discharge as compared to program completers. CANS scores showed improvement in 40.1% of youth who completed the program as compared to only 11.7%–18.2% for those who did not. The results of this study suggest that ESFT-FBMHS is effective for youth with SED as a group and can improve youth functioning and reduce out-of-home placement.