Parenting Stress (Current Perspectives in Psychology)

Current Perspectives in Psychology Parenting Stress Kirby Deater-Deckard YA L E U N I V E R S I T Y P R E S S N E W ...

Author: Prof Kirby Deater-Deckard

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Current Perspectives in Psychology

Parenting Stress Kirby Deater-Deckard YA L E U N I V E R S I T Y P R E S S

N E W H AV E N A N D L O N D O N

Excerpt in Chapter  from How to Be Good by Nick Hornby, copyright © by Nick Hornby. Used by permission of Riverhead Books, an imprint of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. Copyright ©  by Kirby Deater-Deckard. All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections  and  of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers. Set in Garamond type by The Composing Room of Michigan, Inc. Printed in the United States of America. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Deater-Deckard, Kirby. Parenting stress / Kirby Deater-Deckard ISBN: ---X (cloth: alk. paper) LC Control Number:  The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources.          

For my parents, Loren and Mary Jane Deckard

Contents

Series Foreword Alan E. Kazdin Acknowledgments xi

ix

CHAPTER 1

Hello Baby, Hello Stress: Introduction and Overview

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CHAPTER 2

Parenting Stress and the Parent 27 CHAPTER 3

Parenting Stress and the Child

55

CHAPTER 4

Parenting Behavior and the Parent-Child Relationship CHAPTER 5

Parent and Child Effects 95 CHAPTER 6

Family, Culture, Community

115

CHAPTER 7

Coping and Intervention APPENDIX

Selected Studies 165 References 167 Index 202

▪ vii ▪

139

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Series Foreword

Current Perspectives in Psychology presents the latest discoveries and developments across the spectrum of the psychological and behavioral sciences. The series explores such important topics as learning, intelligence, trauma, stress, brain development and behavior, anxiety, interpersonal relationships, education, child rearing, divorce and marital discord, and child, adolescent, and adult development. Each book focuses on critical advances in research, theory, methods, and applications and is designed to be accessible and informative to nonspecialists and specialists alike. The focus of this book is on the stress that parents experience in raising children. Parenting stress is influenced fundamentally by who it is that has primary care responsibility for child rearing (e.g., mother, father, relatives), as well as parental employment, parent mental health, and child social, cognitive, and physical development. The book moves systematically from the concept of parenting stress to the impact of these and other influences on parent mental health, child behavior and functioning, and family relations. Interestingly, parenting stress is both an antecedent and consequence of many influences in everyday life. For example, parent or child illness, disability, and psychiatric disorder affect the stress that parents experience, but parent stress also influences parent and child adjustment. Apart from charting parenting stress and how it operates, the book directs us to what can be done to alleviate stress and to controvert its potential deleterious influences. Influences in everyday life such as the role of family supports, interventions for parents that train coping responses, and social policies that can relieve some of the stresses of parenting, particularly maternity and paternity leave policies, are also presented. Parenting is of broad interest for the obvious reason that most of us have been a parent or at least have known one or two while we were growing up. Interest in parenting is heightened by the many other fascinating topics that are directly related, including marital relationships, child-rearing practices, differences among siblings raised in the ▪ ix ▪

x

Series Foreword

same home, and the impact of genetics and culture on parenting. Parent and child health adjustment and functioning are greatly influenced by the stress that parents experience. This brings parenting into the health domain, and the author addresses questions of what might be done to ease parenting and improve health and well-being on a large scale. Dr. Deater-Deckard has integrated the research findings from many areas to provide an authoritative, scholarly, and highly readable book on parenting. The book is without peer in bringing to us scientific advances that directly inform everyday life. We are fortunate to have the benefit of the author’s many years of scholarly work on parenting and his ability to apply and translate research in a concrete way to key challenges of child rearing. Alan E. Kazdin Series Editor

Acknowledgments

Thanks to my family—Keirsten, Anna, and our new baby, Helen—for making parenthood so fun and fulfilling, in big and little ways every day. I am grateful to the parents and children who have participated in the research projects that are described in this book. Much appreciation goes to my mentors, colleagues, and graduate and undergraduate research assistants, whose collaborations and friendships have contributed to my enthusiasm for the research described here. While working on this project, my research was supported by funds from the National Science Foundation (BCS-), the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (R-HD– A), and the Kathryn Rudolph Memorial Research Fund of the University of Oregon Foundation. Last but not least, caffeine and moral support were provided by the cheerful staff and regulars at the “L and L Market” in Eugene, Oregon.

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1

Hello Baby, Hello Stress Introduction and Overview

In his novel How to Be Good (), Nick Hornby describes a mother of two who is struggling to keep her family together. Although the emphasis of the novel is on Katie’s dissolving marriage, Hornby also offers the following incisive passage as evidence of Katie’s insights about her deteriorating relationships with her children: “It hurts me and worries me to say it, but I have become less fond of Tom and Molly. I have been aware of this for a while, and have always presumed that this was perfectly normal—how could I feel the same about this quiet, occasionally surly boy as I did about his smiling, miraculous, two-year-old counterpart? But now I’m not so sure. Now I’m beginning to wonder whether he should not, in fact, be more lovable than he is, and whether the shortfall in lovability is due to something unattractive in him, or something unmaternal in me” (p. ). There is more to Katie’s story. The novel makes clear that her occasionally hostile feelings toward her children go well beyond a mere lack of fondness. At the same time, this passage encapsulates the important aspects of what I will define and describe in this book as parenting stress. Parenting stress includes subjective experiences of distress such as emotional pain and anxiety. It also includes parents’ thoughts, beliefs, and attributions—expectations about what is “normal,” per▪1▪

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Hello Baby, Hello Stress

ceived lack of control and violations of those expectations, and selfdoubt. And it includes roles for parents and children as contributing members of enduring and emotionally powerful relationships. However, the other message of Hornby’s novel that is not captured by this brief passage is that the struggle of facing family difficulties large and small is worthwhile, and there is happiness in succeeding. Parenthood, stress, and joy are distinct concepts that at the same time are connected in the experiences of parents around the world. As behavioral models, teachers, socializing agents, and providers for children’s many fundamental and idiosyncratic needs, parents are critical to the health and development of their children. Parenthood and “good” parenting can mean very different things to different people, but nearly everyone can agree on this: Parenting is hard work, it is often stressful, and success (in the moment, over several days, or over years) requires adaptation. At the very least, successful parenting involves rearing children who themselves rear children. However, this survival goal is only one of the many goals of parenthood. We strive for many kinds of success for our children, including self-control, selfdetermination, and other psychological attainments. To reach these goals, our bodies and our cultures have put in place the complex machinery that maximizes the likelihood that we will be successful—no matter what the environment may throw at us. The same biological and psychological mechanisms that have evolved to maximize our chances of survival as a species—vigilance, emotional reactivity, and physiological arousal, to name a few—can put some parents at risk for distress in their roles as caregivers. Parenting stress can create or exacerbate physical and psychological vulnerabilities, whereby the distress that arises from the day-to-day strain of caregiving becomes a crucial aspect of the mental health and functioning of parents and children themselves, and the functioning of their relationships with each other. The connection between more extreme but rare forms of parenting stress and adults’ problems in functioning is only part of the story. In fact, modestly to moderately stressful experiences in parenthood are very common. Yet another part of the story is about individual differences between parents in the subjective experiences they have, in the way in which parents respond to and cope


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with parenting stress, and in the way children are affected by parenting stress and parental behavior. The causes and effects of parenting stress are usually referred to in this book as parenting stress mechanisms or processes. These can be measured at different levels, ranging from the physiological activity of organ systems within a single individual to population-wide rates of child abuse for a community, state, or nation. I emphasize psychological parenting stress and coping mechanisms at the level of the individual parent and child, and links between the individuals and their relationships with each other, other family members, and the community and broader culture. Although it is not highlighted, the role of biological factors also is described.

Defining Parenting Stress What is parenting stress? Evelyn could tell you. She is a single mother of three-year-old identical twins. Although to outsiders the twin boys seem virtually indistinguishable, they are two very different children to Evelyn. One misbehaves constantly and seems to intentionally push her buttons, while his brother is almost always compliant. Although she has ambivalent feelings about using physical punishment, her more troublesome son gets spanked several times a week, when he hurts his brother or when he persists in dangerous behavior like trying to push over a dresser or crawling beneath their neighbor’s truck. By comparison, she has rarely even thought of spanking his brother, who usually needs little more than a frown and mild scolding to stop misbehaving. Evelyn is a busy working mother, and although she enjoys being a parent at times, she is usually exhausted and frustrated. She is always behind at work, and feels badly about not spending more time with her children. She also feels guilty about the growing disparity in her relationships with her sons. On one occasion that she will never forget, she bruised her son’s arms by grabbing him and shaking him. Sometimes, she finds herself becoming so livid that she fears she will one day completely lose control. Bo could also tell you a thing or two about parenting stress. He is

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a father of three school-age children. His job involves operating heavy machinery at locations that keep him away from home for up to two weeks at a time, with rest periods at home from three to five days between new locations. His wife always wanted to be at home with the children while they were growing up, but although Bo’s job pays pretty well, she must work part-time for them to make ends meet. Bo enjoys fatherhood, but worries every day about the possible negative effects of his work schedule on his children and marriage, especially when he is away from his family. There is not much relief during his rest periods though. His weeklong stints at home have made him realize how difficult and tedious daily life with three children can be. Their seemingly constant demands for his attention tire him out and annoy him nearly every day. He is particularly concerned about his youngest child, who is doing very poorly at school and has been tested for a learning disability. Although Bo wants to be at home with his family, when he is there he finds himself wanting to go back to work within a day or so. In addition, he and his wife argue when he is at home. She needs time to herself after he has been away for a week or two, but he resists because he also wants to get out of the house. Their whole situation has put a very serious strain on their marriage. Evelyn and Bo are only two parents, but their experiences are like those of many others. Parents face a multitude of different circumstances. Some parents are wealthy and some are poor; some have help, and some are on their own. Yet all of them experience parenting stress to some extent at one time or another, and some are chronically distressed. Scientists have known for decades that the well-being of adults and children alike is linked to the kinds and degrees of stressful circumstances that they face in their daily lives. Those who experience more stressful events are more likely to suffer from depression and other problems in mental and physical health (Brown and Harris, ; Goodyer, ). We also are coming to realize that stress in the parenting role is distinct from the stress arising from other roles and experiences—from the workplace, unfortunate events or experiences, and interpersonal relationships with other family members and friends. That is, stress is probably specific to particular roles. It is likely that parenting stress more strongly affects parenting


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behavior and children’s development than does stress in other domains of life, such as work-related stress (Creasey and Reese, ; Quittner, Glueckauf, and Jackson, ). This is exemplified in two distinct studies of families facing multiple difficulties and problems. In one study that followed the development of a group of children (some who had chronic illnesses), parenting stress was the strongest predictor of children’s emotional and behavioral problems at four years of age (Goldberg et al., ). In another, researchers studied a group of homeless families who were at risk for problems in mental and physical health due to the many sources of stress that they faced in their daily lives (Gorzka, ). Among these families, it was those parents with the highest levels of parenting stress that had children with the highest levels of problems in their cognitive and social development (Danseco and Holden, ). Parenting stress may be particularly powerful as a cause and consequence of the variation that is found in parenting behaviors and children’s outcomes across different families. However, stress in the parenting role is not completely independent from stress in other roles and from other experiences; there is likely to be overlap or spillover in the stress that we experience in these different roles (Barnett, Marshall, and Singer, ; Creasey and Reese, ). A core feature in any theory of parenting stress is the idea of a balancing act between the parent’s perceptions of the demands of this role and access to available resources for meeting these demands. Indeed, this balance between demands and resources is central to most theories of human stress and coping (Hobfoll, ; Lazarus, ). Accordingly, parenting stress arises when the parent’s expectations about the resources needed to meet the demands of parenting are not matched by available resources (Goldstein, ). As will be explored in this chapter, the demands of parenting are many and varied, and involve adapting to the child’s unique attributes as well as the social role of parenthood. The demands include meeting children’s needs for survival like feeding, sheltering, and protection, but also include psychological demands for attention, affection, and help in controlling or regulating emotions. Parents’ perceptions of their children’s behaviors (including attributions about why the child is behaving in a particular way), and perceptions of their own competence as parents, are also critical in most theories (Mash and Johnston,

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). Resources for parents are similarly diverse, and include a host of mental and physical factors such as adequate protection for survival (e.g., sufficient housing, food, and income), knowledge, feelings of competence, and instrumental and emotional support from others (Deater-Deckard and Scarr, ). Parenting stress can and does arise for parents who in absolute terms have everything they should need to live a life free of stress, such as adequate income, housing, and social resources. Certainly, individual differences in parenting stress arise in part due to concrete, absolute differences between parents in access to these resources. However, parenting stress also has much to do with the subjective experience of childrearing. One parent’s “overactive, demanding” child may be another parent’s “energetic, assertive” child. Much of the research on parenting stress has focused on families seeking help from mental health professionals for such problems as parental depression or child attention deficits. However, there also are many studies that have examined families selected from the broader communities in which they live. All parents, regardless of their mental health or social and economic resources, experience parenting stress to some degree. Furthermore, the mundane day-in, day-out hassles of parenting contribute just as much, if not more, to parenting stress as do major stressors such as serious mental or physical health problems, divorce, or sudden loss of income (Creasey and Reese, ; Crnic and Greenberg, ; Crnic and Low, ). Parenting stress can be defined succinctly as a set of processes that lead to aversive psychological and physiological reactions arising from attempts to adapt to the demands of parenthood. This often is experienced as negative feelings and beliefs toward and about the self and the child. By definition, these negative feelings arise directly from the parenting role. Although helpful in its precision, this simple definition should not detract from the fact that parenting stress involves a broad set of complex, dynamic processes linking the child and her behaviors, perceived demands of parenting, parenting resources, physiological reaction to the demands of parenting, qualities of the parent’s relationships with the child and other family members, and links with other people and institutions outside of the home. In addition, as I describe throughout this book, the stress process also is about coping—successful adaptation to the demands of being a parent. For many, the de-


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mands are manageable, and although the job of parenthood may be hard at times, it is also very rewarding. Even in families that face very serious and chronic difficulties such as child or parent illness, many if not most parents adjust to these challenges successfully. These experiences of meeting challenges and coping with stress are critical to the development of resiliency in the face of severe adversity when it occurs, for parents and children alike (Rutter, ).

Causes and Effects: Theories of Parenting Stress Although parenting stress has been conceptualized in a number of ways (e.g., Abidin, ; Belsky, ; Crnic and Low, ; WebsterStratton, ), there are two predominant approaches to assessing and testing its causes and effects. These include what I call parentchild-relationship (P-C-R ) theory, and daily hassles theory. These are not opposing or competing theories, but instead are alternative and complementary perspectives about the nature of parenting stress, its causes, and its consequences.

Parent-Child-Relationship (P-C-R) Stress The most widely tested theory of parenting stress posits three separate components: a “parent” domain (P those aspects of parenting stress that arise from within the parent), a “child” domain (C those aspects of parenting stress that arise from the child’s behavior), and a “parentchild relationship” domain (R those aspects of parenting stress that arise within the parent-child relationship). According to P-C-R theory, elevations in parent-, child-, and relationship-domain stress will be found in families in which parenting stress is high, and problems in parenting and children’s development will be more prevalent (Abidin, ; ; ). Parent domain stress is most strongly associated with problems in the parent’s own functioning (e.g., depression, anxiety), child domain stress is most strongly linked with attributes of the child (e.g., behavioral problems), and the parent-child dysfunction domain is tied primarily to the degree of conflict in the parent-child relationship (Bendell, Stone, Field, and Goldstein, ; Eyberg, Boggs, and Rodriguez,

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). These three domains of parenting stress, in turn, cause decrements or deteriorations in many aspects of the quality and effectiveness of parenting behavior. These could include decreases in expressions of warmth and affection, increases in harsh methods of discipline and expressions of hostility toward the child, less consistency in parenting behavior, or complete withdrawal from the parenting role. In turn, these deteriorations in the quality of parenting (in the most extreme instances, defined as child maltreatment and abuse) promote further increases in child emotional and behavioral problems, such as aggression, noncompliance, anxiety, and chronic sadness. P-C-R theory predicts that there are bi-directional parent effects on the child, and child effects on the parent. Accordingly, if a child’s emotional and behavioral difficulties increase over time, parenting stress is likely to increase, the result being a promulgation of problems in parenting and child well-being. At the same time, the parent’s own difficulties in mental health and functioning (e.g., depression, anxiety, substance abuse) can lead to problems in parenting and resulting increases in child emotional and behavioral problems, which in turn can further increase levels of parenting stress. Although this parenting stress mechanism unfolds over time and involves both the parent and the child, the adult’s stress reaction to the demands of parenting is a key causal factor that propels the process forward. Accordingly, as parenting stress increases, the quality of parenting will deteriorate and the child’s emotional and behavioral problems will increase. As parenting stress decreases, parenting will improve and so will the child’s socialemotional well-being. The results from many studies testing various mechanisms included in P-C-R theory are described in more detail in subsequent chapters, although a general comment regarding the utility of this theory is worth noting here. P-C-R theory has received strong support, based on many studies conducted over the past several decades. At the same time, this broad conclusion is based on a huge research literature that consists almost entirely of correlational studies (as opposed to experiments) in which parents’ self-reports often serve as the sole source of data. More research is needed that uses experimental designs and multiple sources of data collected at multiple levels of measurement including partners’ reports, observations, and assessments of the biolog-


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ical components (i.e., psychophysiology) of the stress response (DeaterDeckard, ).

Daily Hassles (DH) Theory Most of the research on parenting stress focuses on the consequences of stressful circumstances or life events such as child illness or economic hardship (Webster-Stratton, ). In the majority of studies that have invoked or tested P-C-R theory, researchers have relied on samples of parents or children who have been diagnosed with emotional or behavioral disorders (e.g., depression, conduct disorder). However, there is a critical distinction between the ideas of parenting stress as disorder and parenting stress as typical or normal. The factors that can lead some parents to become so distressed that they become depressed or chronically anxious are likely to be the same factors that account for typical differences between parents that are found in the wider population of adults who are not suffering from emotional or behavioral disorders. It is interesting that the most widely used measure of parenting stress (Parenting Stress Index; Abidin, ) is almost always used in studies of clinically referred parents (e.g., depressed mothers), although this instrument was developed using large community samples of parents and children—most of whom were not experiencing serious problems in mental health or functioning. Understanding how parenting stress develops over time, how it influences parenting and child development, and how it affects the parent’s psychological and physical health requires consideration of the typical stress that arises for most parents on a daily or weekly basis. This is the thrust of daily hassles theory, and what makes it distinct from the more general P-C-R theory (Crnic and Greenberg, ; Crnic and Low, ). Parents must learn to cope with the day-to-day stressors of child rearing. Adaptation is part of the job, and it is so important to family and child functioning that it is arguably tantamount to the very definition of success in parenting. Thinking of parenting stress only as an indication of mental illness or pathology in the family ignores what we already know from decades of psychological research. Parenting stress occurs nearly every day. Thankfully, for most parents, the daily doses of stress are usually small. However, when coping is in-

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effective, the effects of minor daily stressors on the parent and child can become persistent and powerful. Researchers who study parenting and child development have come to recognize the importance of these daily sources of parenting stress. As a result, there is a growing research literature focusing on daily stress and its impact on the family system (Crnic and Greenberg, ; Crnic and Low, ). Daily hassles theory does not contradict P-C-R theory; it complements and extends those ideas by helping to explain typical parenting stress as it occurs for most parents. This work has shown that the parenting stress that occurs most frequently and that may have the greatest impact on parenting and children’s development is the broad array of daily hassles. Daily parenting hassles are not major stressors when considered in isolation, as compared to divorce or loss of employment. Instead, these are minor stressful events that occur in most families, sometimes daily, and their effects can build over time. These include the typical stress that arises when having to deal with a child’s minor misbehavior or problems, when carrying out the many mundane tasks of childcare, and when navigating the complicated and usually conflicting schedules of work and family life. This idea of low-level, chronic parenting stress stems from earlier work demonstrating a similar pattern of results for stress and adult psychological health. Thus, for most adults, it is the accumulation of minor stressful events that arise from day-today existence that may matter most in the prediction of problems in mental health and well-being (Kohn, ). At the same time, parenting stress must be distinguished from daily annoyances experienced by all parents. In order for daily hassles truly to be part of a parenting stress process (and not merely annoying), their effects must be serious in their more extreme forms and must create a potential threat to the parent’s identity or role (Wheaton, ). This distinction between annoying and stress-inducing hassles is complex, when you consider that the features of a daily hassle may mean very different things to different parents. For example, consider the common situation of a child’s frequent unwillingness to wear what her mother wants her to wear. To one mother, this behavior may be seen as a sign of her daughter’s stubbornness and strongly held personal pref-


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erences, but is not connected to the mother’s perception of her own ability to parent her daughter effectively. To another mother, this noncompliance may be perceived as just one of many indicators of her daughter’s lack of respect and intentional desire to undermine the mother’s parental authority. It is for the latter mother that this and other daily hassles are more likely to feed into parenting stress. For the former mother, the momentary annoyance is far more likely to pass quickly.

Stability and Change Adults differ from each other in the amount of parenting stress they experience, as well as the factors that go along with those levels of stress (e.g., emotional social support from others). These individual differences appear to be fairly stable over time. A parent who experiences a high degree of parenting stress when her child is young is likely to continue to show higher levels of parenting stress (compared to other parents) several months or several years later. In our own research, we examined whether parenting stress would remain stable or change dramatically among mothers whose children were making the transition from preschool childcare to kindergarten or grade school (Child Care and Family Project or CCFP, described in detail in chapter ; Deater-Deckard, Pinkerton, and Scarr, ). We found moderate stability in the individual differences in parenting stress over a four-year period. Thus mothers who were highest in parenting stress at the first assessment were likely to be the most distressed mothers at the second assessment (and the least distressed mothers were likely to remain so). Other researchers have documented similar results in their studies (Abidin, ; Dyson, ; Hauser-Cram, Warfield, Shonkoff, and Krauss, ), suggesting that these individual differences really are stable over time. Although several studies show moderate stability in parenting stress, the same studies show that a number of parents change over time—sometimes dramatically. For a moment, consider the transition to parenthood. Although the seeds of parenting stress may be germinating prior to and during pregnancy, the transition to parenthood is a

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remarkably powerful one, and centers on a single discrete event—the birth of the child. Typically, pregnancy is a highly stressful life event (Holmes and Rahe, ). It is not surprising to find that expectant parents who are approaching parenthood with as many resources and as few potential problems as one could hope for end up having an extremely difficult time after the child is born for a variety of reasons. However, it also is true that some who are experiencing fairly serious stress and problems in adjustment prior to the child’s birth may come to flourish in the parenting role after delivery. Examination of changes in parenting stress requires consideration of the changes in individual family and parent circumstances that may be specific to each family or parent.

Perception, Cognition, Emotion, and Physiology To understand the components of the complex systems of causes and consequences of parenting stress (i.e., P-C-R theory), a broader framework is needed that addresses human perception, emotion, thinking, and biological mechanisms. These components are interconnected, and operate in transactions that include bi-directional influences between the person and the environment, between the person and her or his attempts to cope with stress, and between the environment and these coping strategies (Aldwin, ). According to this framework, stress arises from an ongoing process involving at least four components (Lazarus, ; Levy-Shiff, ). There must be an external causal event or agent or stressor that the individual perceives. The original source of stress originates from outside of the individual. In the case of parenting stress, the agent is the child or children, but the events can be many and varied. Second, once the individual notices this event or agent, she or he makes a cognitive appraisal to determine whether it is potentially aversive or noxious. Third, the individual then engages coping mechanisms, in an attempt to reduce the negative experience surrounding this event. Fourth, there are consequential effects on the mind and body, known simply as the stress reaction. Importantly, there is feedback between these various components. For example, appraisals are involved in the initiation, maintenance, and evaluation of coping mechanisms, and


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emotional distress can itself become a stressor (Aspinwall, ; Lazarus, ).

The Child and the Parenting Role as Causes of Stress All kinds of human stress can be described as processes involving thoughts and emotions, physiology, behavior, and experiences. So what makes parenting stress different from stress arising from work, romantic relationships, or illness? Theories about the causes and consequences of parenting stress are distinct from other theories of human stress because they posit the external causal event as “parenthood,” or the causal agent as the child or children for whom the parent has ultimate responsibility. It is easy to take for granted how intensely dependent children (and especially infants) are on their parents. This dependency represents an immediate, constant, and sometimes aversive set of demands on parents (for example, cries for food, comfort, and attention) that they have not experienced before the arrival of the child. Sometimes, these causal events are farther removed from the child’s immediate survival needs, but instead are tied to the particular socialemotional attributes of that child. These attributes might include oppositional or noncompliant behavior, hyperactivity and distractibility, or hostility and moodiness. They may also include chronic illness and medical conditions. These demands on the parent are stress inducing; they must be in order for the infant or child to survive (“the squeaky wheel gets the grease”). These demands work, in that they usually lead to physiological arousal (including emotion) in parents, which in turn motivates parents to attend to and care for the child in order to eliminate the demand. When the parent-child pair is functioning in a healthy and adaptive way, the child’s demanding behaviors are a highly effective means of getting needs met long before the child is able to help herself—as long as the parent can respond appropriately and not become distressed. The child is more likely to be noticed, and the parent is more likely to be motivated to meet the child’s needs in order to reduce or eliminate noxious behaviors. Although children’s abilities to care for themselves develop in time, this process takes years. Old demands are replaced with new ones

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that continue to present potentially stressful experiences for parents. In addition, these potentially stress-inducing events surrounding a child’s attributes and behaviors typically are not rare and acute, but instead occur on a daily basis (or even more frequently), and are modest or moderate in their seriousness. As noted above, these chronic daily hassles are the nuts and bolts of parenting stress, in addition to less frequent but very serious stressful events that arise for many parents (Crnic and Low, ). Furthermore, attributes of the parent including temperament, personality, emotions, beliefs, and physiology also contribute in powerful ways to the types and severity of stressors that are experienced. In addition, stressors typically co-occur either by coincidence or because some aspect of the individual parent or child serves to create additional stressors (Lepore and Evans, ). The parenting role itself can be a source of distress. That is, parenting stress can also arise from social stressors. These include threats to the parent’s identity, mental health, or general well-being, “over demand” (e.g., burnout), or “under-demand” leading to boredom and abandonment of the parenting role. Also structural constraints on the social environment can lead to physical and psychological isolation; low reward, the complexity of daily life, uncertainty, interpersonal conflict, restricted choices, and deprived personal resources are all factors to be contended with (Wheaton, ). Parenthood constitutes a social role that exists inside and outside of the family (Alexander and Higgins, ). Parents must be able to meet their own needs and those of their children, while also meeting the demands placed on them by other family members (including spouses or partners), the community, and broader society. Social roles tend to be valued highly by most members of the society, and are very stable across situations and time. Thus parenting stress arising from feelings of failure to meet the expectations of others is likely to be persistent or chronic for some parents (Lepore, ). As members of a larger community (whether we have children or not), all of us depend on other adults to make the required investment in the care, nurturing, and child rearing of the next generation of our society. These societal expectations lie at the heart of a broad array of issues surrounding families, parenting, marriage, and child health and development. Should parents (and especially women) with young chil-


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dren work outside the home? Who is responsible for contributing to the cost of caring for children inside and outside of their homes? Should keeping a family together take precedence over the happiness of the parents, in families where the parents do not get along with each other and would prefer to separate or divorce? Should fathers be more involved in child rearing? All parents sometimes feel the pressure of their children’s demands, but there also are pressures from outside of the family that influence parenting stress and coping.

Appraisal: Is This a Stressor or Not? Given the external agents and events described above as stressors (e.g., child behaviors, social role of parenthood), there is wide variation across people in how these experiences are defined and evaluated. In order for a stress reaction to follow from a causal agent or event, the parent not only must notice the stressor, but also must consider it to be a threatening or aversive experience to be stopped if at all possible. To accomplish this, a cognitive appraisal is made. Appraisal of a stressor involves at least six dimensions: valence (how aversive is it?), controllability (can I modify it or make it go away?), changeability (will it go away on its own?), ambiguity (what is going to happen?), the likelihood that the stressor will reoccur, and familiarity with the stressful situation or circumstance (Perrez and Reichert, , cited by Boekaerts, ). Parental attributions about the causes of a child’s difficult behaviors are a critical part of the appraisals involved in parenting stress (Bugental and Johnston, ). Parents who tend to view crying, whining, and misbehavior as arising from their children’s willful intentions are more likely to hold their children responsible for those noxious behaviors and to have a more pronounced stress reaction. In contrast, other parents may view their children’s noxious behaviors as arising from temporary states or circumstances (for example, “He’s not feeling well today”), and in turn are less likely to hold their children responsible for these actions or to view these events as being difficult to handle. In addition to these individual differences in parents’ appraisals of their children’s behaviors, there are cultural differences in what parents view as appropriate or aversive.

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Although a parent’s attributions and appraisals of his or her children’s noxious behaviors are critical, this does not mean that parenting stress is simply “in the mind” of the parent. For example, nearly all adults find certain types of infant cries to be incredibly aversive and stressful to hear (Frodi and Lamb, ; Zeskind, Sale, Maio, Huntington, and Weiseman, ). Nonetheless, individual variation in parents’ appraisals about what is and is not regarded as a stressor is a very important part of the parenting stress process. It is this individual variation in parents’ thinking about whether a child’s behavior is stressful and why that behavior is occurring that may tell us why certain parents cope well with the demands of parenting, whereas others do not.

Coping: What Do I Do Now? Up to this point, I have described the source of stress and how the parent appraises the stressor. Once an event has been deemed to be potentially stressful, there are a number of cognitive, emotional, and behavioral strategies that parents can use to minimize the likely resulting stress reaction. These various coping mechanisms are as much a part of the psychology of parenting stress as are the child’s difficult behaviors or situations and the parent’s appraisals. Parents in the same situation cope in different ways, and some cope better than others. This helps explain why some parents who struggle for years with chronic child problems (e.g., illness, conduct disorder) show only mild stress reactions but others are affected profoundly. These coping mechanisms are described here briefly, and in greater detail in chapter . Some coping mechanisms operate in a preventative way. That is, they work to reduce the stress reaction by minimizing the frequency and intensity of causal events and by maximizing material, behavioral, cognitive, and emotional resources that can be used when stressful events do occur. One example of this is preparation and planning for becoming a parent. Adults who report that they were prepared for becoming parents and that their pregnancies were planned show lower levels of parenting stress, compared to those who report that becoming a parent was unexpected or unintentional. Similarly, a distinction can be made between adults who do or do not feel ready and well prepared emotionally, physically, and materially for the new and stressful job of


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caring for children. It is not surprising that parents who feel prepared and confident about their parenting abilities (i.e., parenting self-efficacy) are more likely to be effective and satisfied in the parenting role (Coleman and Karraker, ; Sommer et al., ). Other coping strategies are utilized in the heat of the moment, when a stressful event is occurring or is being thought about (perhaps after the fact) and must be addressed. In the face of difficult life circumstances, certain ways of thinking about the experience can strongly influence the persistence and severity of the emotional turmoil that follows (Beck, ). Adults who rely on passive, emotionally focused coping strategies also are more likely to experience parenting stress (Barnett, Hall, and Bramlett, ; Miller, Gordon, Daniele, and Diller, ). Emotion-focused ways of thinking about stressful experiences in which the person views herself or himself as a passive recipient of experiences, or that focus on the denial of or preoccupation with aversive emotions such as fear or sadness, are linked with symptoms of emotional problems, including anxiety and depression. In contrast, problem-focused strategies are more likely to promote problem solving; unlike emotion-focused approaches, problem-focused strategies do not involve attention to the negative emotions arising from the stress reaction. Problem-focused coping can be highly effective at reducing parenting stress in many situations. Stress is lower among adults who feel confident in their abilities to be supportive parents, and who navigate through stressful situations with their children by focusing on identifying the sources of problems and on generating solutions to those problems (Frey, Greenberg, and Fewell, ; Miller et al., ). Adaptive, problem-focused coping strategies have their positive influences not only on the reduction of stress reactions arising from stressful experiences but also on dampening the deleterious effects of stress on the parent’s behavior toward the child. As I describe in chapter , there remains little doubt that the quality of parenting behavior suffers when parenting stress increases. However, the link between parenting stress and parenting behavior may be broken if the parent is able to continue to use effective coping strategies in the face of stressors. For example, one study found that there were fewer problems in infantmother attachment relationships (e.g., emotional security, acceptance)

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in families in which the parents avoided using emotion-focused coping strategies (Jarvis and Creasey, ). Thus these coping mechanisms serve not only to reduce the stress reaction itself, but also may be operating to reduce the consequences of a stress reaction on parenting and the parent-child relationship. There is a caveat to the general conclusion that problem-focused coping is more adaptive in the face of parenting stress. Any particular approach to coping with a stressor may be effective at reducing stress only for certain individuals (depending on their resources, personalities, and cognitions) and only under certain circumstances (Lazarus, ). There is not a “one size fits all” coping mechanism that will reduce parenting stress for all parents in all situations. For example, in those situations in which the individual believes that he or she has some control over the circumstances surrounding a stressful experience, problem-focused coping would probably be a successful approach to staving off distress and the mental and physical health problems that could arise. In contrast, problem-focused coping strategies may not be effective in those situations in which the individual has little or no personal control over the stressor; in those instances, emotion-focused coping may be effective (Aldwin, ; Kohn, ). The perception of control over the sources of stress for parents— and children’s behaviors in particular—may well be tied to parents’ appraisals of whether particular instances of child behavior are aversive or not. Parents vary widely in the extent to which they view difficult child behaviors (e.g., aggression, hostility) as being under the child’s control versus arising from situational circumstances outside of the child’s control. There also are individual differences in parents’ attributions about their own power over controlling their children’s behaviors. In general, research has shown that parents are more likely to be harsh and punitive in their treatment of their children if they believe that misbehaviors arise from children’s intentional desires to anger or upset their parents or to get what they want (Bugental and Johnston, ). Such parents are less likely to believe that they have control over their children’s behaviors, and problem-focused coping may not be an effective way for them to reduce parenting stress because they have so little perceived control over the source of their stress. In contrast, parents who look to the details of the situation, and what they can control in that


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situation, are more likely to utilize coping strategies that focus on identifying the problem and solving it. Elaboration of several mechanisms. There are recent advances in theory and research methods for studying the ways in which people process social information (e.g., appraisals, including evaluation of coping strategies) that further clarify stress and coping mechanisms. One theory articulates a multiple-step information processing model that has a number of feedback loops linking many of the steps (Aspinwall and Taylor, ). The first step involves a goal of gathering and accumulation of resources. This idea follows from conservation of resources theory (Hobfoll, ), which posits that we are inherently motivated to gather and keep resources—those things that we value most. There are four basic categories of resources: objects (material goods), conditions (status, social capital), personal attributes (personality, e.g., optimism), and energy (money, knowledge). Accordingly, stressors lead to psychological distress when these valued resources are placed in jeopardy, are lost, or are not gained or amplified when such resource accumulations are anticipated. We then counteract this loss by utilizing resources to regain and ideally increase our resources (Hobfoll, Freedy, Green, and Solomon, ). Thus stress arises when a goal has been threatened. Beliefs about why the goal is threatened and whether the threat persists become integral to the ways in which we approach dealing with the stressor. The second step involves attention to and recognition of events that may threaten the goal of maintaining resources. Humans have remarkable abilities to monitor their environments for these potential threats; this attention to the environment involves both conscious and unconscious evaluation of perceptual information from various sensory systems (e.g., hearing, sight, touch). The specific goals that we have can influence the nature of what it is that we notice and experience. For example, consider a situation involving a parent who is distressed because his two year old has begun throwing temper tantrums of remarkable ferocity, and the tantrums are becoming more frequent and severe. Given the same situation, one father may form an approach goal, such as striving to increase the amount of time that his toddler spends in a happy mood and reducing the amount of time that the tod-

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dler is in a nasty mood. This father will be attending to and noticing instances when his child is behaving well, and will experience these positive mood episodes as evidence of his own success at obtaining his goal. In contrast, another father might form an avoidance goal such as seeking to minimize or avoid tantrums. For this father, the evidence that his goal is being attained means that he will need to pay attention to all of the child’s tantrums, with little attention to the toddler’s happy moods and appropriate behaviors. Variations in goal definition and attainment have strong implications for appraisal and coping with stressors (Aspinwall, ). In the third step, once a potential stressor has been perceived, an initial or primary appraisal is formulated. As noted previously, if this potential stressor is appraised to be an actual stressor, emotional arousal involving fear or anger ensues. This negative emotional arousal is unpleasant, and motivates the individual to regulate that emotion and, if possible, think and act in a way that will remove the stressor. In the fourth step, the individual will consider and implement some kind of coping strategy, as described above. This involves secondary appraisal (Lazarus, ). The fifth and final step includes the eliciting and interpretation of feedback regarding how things are going. The individual investigates whether or not the coping strategies that have been implemented are effective. If not, then modifications in coping strategies can be made. When functioning well, this cycle of attention, emotion, appraisal, coping, and evaluation is remarkably effective at reducing stressful psychological reactions. When not functioning well, these processes can instantiate chronic stress in the individual, with deleterious effects on physical and psychological health. These cognitive and emotional factors operate in cycles of forethought, intentional behavior, and self-reflection. Forethought includes an analysis of the task at hand and what lies ahead (e.g., setting goals, planning), as well as beliefs (e.g., expectations about likely outcomes, value placed on desired outcome, self-efficacy). Intentional behavior includes attempts at self-control (e.g., self-instruction, imagining, focusing of attention) and self-observations (e.g., consciously attending to, noticing, and recording how the self is responding to a stressor). Self-reflection involves judgments (evaluating yourself against some standard) and reactions (the ensuing satisfaction or dis-


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satisfaction based on those judgments, e.g., shame, anger, happiness). This is followed by adaptive or defensive inferences about ways to proceed. Adaptive inferences involve highly effective alterations of goals or strategies of self-control, whereas defensive inferences involve focusing on the avoidance of future dissatisfaction or aversive emotions. These inferences then feed back into forethoughts (Zimmerman, ). Although the social cognitive models of appraisal and coping described above are well articulated and have been tested repeatedly, these theories have limitations. Social cognitions certainly matter, but they can arise as reflections on feelings and behaviors only after those feelings and behaviors have occurred. In other words, some of our behaviors precede unconscious activity, conscious thoughts, and subjective feelings. Social cognitive theories alone cannot account for all of the processes that link causal events and the psychological and biological stress reaction (Kuhl, ).

The Stress Reaction Now that I have described stressors, appraisals, and attempts at coping, I turn to the stress reaction itself. The stress reaction includes a large set of physiological and psychological events and experiences that arise following a stressor. This stress reaction can be observed readily in parents’ behaviors, cognitions, and emotions. Most of the research conducted on parenting stress has emphasized the observable links between the stress reaction and parenting behaviors (e.g., parental discipline, maltreatment and abuse), social cognitions (e.g., attitudes about and feelings toward the child), and psychopathology (e.g., depression, anxiety). These links are described in greater detail in subsequent chapters. Before delving into these details, I consider briefly the physiology of the human stress response. Through the psychophysiology of the stress reaction, biology provides us with an elaborate armory of weapons of offense and defense against potential risks to our survival. Given our remarkable ability as a species to manipulate our environments, some might be tempted to conclude that our biology remains only as a reminder of our distant evolutionary past—that we do not need these defenses for protecting our children and ourselves from dangers because we no

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longer live “in the wild.” Yet the reality is that we continue to be neurologically wired to attend to our environments, to detect potential sources of risk to our own survival and survival of our young, and to react when those risks become critical. These functions continue to promote our survival. If you are a parent, think about the first time you thought you had lost your toddler in the shopping mall or grocery store. Chances are, your heart skipped a beat and then began to fire rapidly as panic set in and motivated you to stop what you were doing and find your child. This physiological reactivity provides a foundation for maintaining vigilance in the day-to-day protection and care of ourselves and our offspring. However, there is a price to be paid. The weapons of awareness, vigilance, and rapid reactivity to perceived danger in the environment are blunt instruments that require heavy use of physical and psychological resources. Thus, in its efforts to keep us safe and sound, the physiological stress reaction presents potential risks to physical and mental health. The psychophysiology of the stress response is well understood, based on a century of empirical research with humans and other species (Aldwin, ; Cannon, ; Selye, ; Lazarus, ; Wheaton, ). Although the emphasis of this book is not on biology, some general information about the biological mechanisms of the stress response can be very useful for understanding the emergence of parenting stress and its effects on parents and children. The autonomic nervous system (ANS) is involved in the control of many biological systems, including the cardiovascular, muscular-skeletal, gastrointestinal, endocrinological, and immune systems—our lungs, heart, blood vessels, muscles, gut, and glands. The ANS does not require conscious effort to do its work, which is to maintain the functioning of these systems in a way that produces homeostasis. This homeostasis is a balance between gearing up the body and mind to respond to or cope with a stressor (the sympathetic nervous system), and slowing it down to return to baseline or normal functioning after a threat has passed (the parasympathetic nervous system). Striking this balance is critical to the health and well-being of the individual. A physiology that is constantly behaving as though it were reacting to a potentially threatening event (even when there are no


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such stressors in the environment) can wreak havoc with the mental and physical health of that individual. At the same time, a physiology that does not react to stressful stimuli can put the individual at risk, particularly in the face of an actual life-threatening event. When our physiology is activated in reaction to a stressor, it costs us in calories (immediately) as well as in physical health and psychological well-being (intermediate and long term). Thus, the ANS must do a sufficiently good job of obtaining homeostasis so that risks to the individual are minimized, while resources for coping with current and future stressors are maximized. A number of biochemicals, including neurotransmitters and hormones, are involved in maintaining or disrupting the homeostasis between arousal and soothing. Messages regarding potential stressors travel along sensory neural pathways to the brain’s limbic system and on to the hypothalamus. Some of these connections travel through the cortex before reaching the hypothalamus, which controls the sympathetic nervous system using the neurotransmitter norepinephrine. Messages to various glands (thyroid, adrenal, pituitary) lead to the release or production of ACTH (adrenocorticotrophic hormone), cortisol, thyroxin, oxytocin, vassopressin, epinephrine, and norepinephrine, all of which are involved in the stress response. These create changes in a variety of the body’s systems, including strength and tension in muscles, constriction of blood vessels, increases in heart rate and respiration, and the shutting down of digestion, to name just a few of the many resulting changes in physiology. The rate of metabolism of calories from sugars stored in fat and muscles increases dramatically in order to fuel these changes in the body. As the threat to the individual dissipates, or as she or he begins to cope effectively with a stressor, the parasympathetic system gradually returns these physiological systems back to normal functioning. This can happen quickly or can take some time, depending in part on the nature and severity of the stressor and in part on individual differences in reactivity to and coping with the stressors that arise. To summarize, the individual components of the stress process are best thought of as parts of a whole mechanism or as a set of mechanisms that operate in real time, are dynamic, and that connect experiences, sensations, cognitions, and emotions (Wheaton, ). The

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stress process includes internal states, stressors, and transactions between the person and the environment. Internal states combine biological, cognitive, and emotional experiences (e.g., arousal, fear). Stressors involve content (e.g., a stressful life event such as losing a job) and temporal components (i.e., rapidity and duration of the stressor). Person-environment transactions involve cognitive appraisals (e.g., threat, loss) that vary in their intensity and clarity. Coping mechanisms are invoked to aid in removing a stressor, and ameliorating its effects (Aldwin, ; Mason, ). Theories of stress described above overlap with contemporary theories about how it is we come to control our own feelings, thoughts, and behaviors.

Self-Regulation: Controlling Thoughts, Emotions, and Behaviors From early infancy on, we gain the ability to control or regulate our own thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. This is commonly referred to as the development of self-regulation (Matthews, Schwean, Campbell, Saklofske, and Mohamed, ). Self-regulation goes hand in hand with the development of self-understanding. Together they distinguish humans from other species in providing a set of skills and an astoundingly broad and flexible array of strategies for surviving and potentially thriving in the face of the widest variety of environmental conditions (Demetriou, ). There are various types of self-regulation, including the observation and modification of our own behaviors, internal states (e.g., attention, thoughts, emotions), and environments (Zimmerman, ). Our ability to self-regulate and plan continues to develop throughout childhood, adolescence, and very likely into adulthood. There are wide-ranging individual differences in self-regulation and planning that are fairly stable over time. Much remains to be learned about the development of such planning behavior, but it is likely that individuals who are better at regulating their attention and thoughts, impulse control, reasoning, and planning are also better at performing perceptual and cognitive tasks and regulating their emotions and behaviors. These aspects of reactivity and regulation are key components of temperament in infancy, childhood, adolescence, and adulthood.


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They are also central to the ways in which parents respond to and cope with the mild to severe stressors that arise (Boekaerts, Pintrich, and Zeidner, ; Rothbart and Bates, ). A note regarding changes in demands. Thriving as a parent is not about simply being a “good,” as opposed to a “bad,” parent. It is about adaptation to often changing demands on resources. The resources are concrete instrumental ones like money and time, as well as more abstract psychological ones like motivation and energy. The shifts in demands occur throughout the day, the year, and over the years of direct parental involvement in a relationship with the child. This happens as a result of accumulating parenting experience and changes in the child’s competencies, behaviors, and circumstances that arise from development. A mother who by all accounts seems to pass happily through her child’s infancy and toddler years may stumble in her attempts to communicate with that same child twelve years later when adolescence arrives. A father and teenage son with a warm and supportive relationship may have gone through many battles to arrive there and only after years of distress, because the father could not tolerate his son’s crying in infancy or whining in middle childhood. These are examples of typical parents and children, not disordered or dysfunctional relationships. Certainly, many parents have additional problems that must be addressed. Perhaps they struggle with depression or poor self-control, or their children have serious behavioral or physical disorders. Regardless of the circumstances for any particular parent, the need for adaptation to parenting stress is much the same for all parents. The demands of the role are a constant presence in daily life, but these demands change. Typical age-based changes in cognitive skills, social behaviors, and emotions in early- and mid-adulthood also should be considered. Adults do not emerge from adolescence as fixed or finished social, emotional, biological, and psychological entities. Theories and research on adult development over the entire lifespan have documented remarkable changes that can and do occur as adults mature physically and psychologically (Baltes, ). Experientially, we accrue more resources as we get older. These accumulating resources include social support in stable relationships, stable social roles (i.e., occupation), stable income, and knowledge from experience, to name a few. Biolog-

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ically, there is some evidence from animal studies that the prefrontal cortex of the brain continues to develop into adulthood. This area of the brain includes systems responsible for executive functions that assist in the self-regulation of attention, emotions, cognitions, and behaviors (e.g., Gould, Reeves, Graziano, and Gross, ). Thus a parent who has her first child in her early twenties may be better equipped to control her own cognitions and emotions once the child is older, in part from learning “on the job” but also in part from her own continuing maturation involving neural systems that underlie this self-regulation. By the same token, among those adults who experience chronic parenting stress as well as stress in other domains, the harmful consequences of these difficulties may accumulate, leading to growth and spreading of problems in multiple domains of health and functioning (e.g., physical and mental illness, job loss, relationship difficulties).

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Parenting Stress and the Parent Who of us is mature enough for offspring before the offspring themselves arrive? The value of marriage is not that adults produce children but that children produce adults. Peter De Vries, Tunnel of Love

Becoming a parent thrusts you into a new world of great responsibility, many challenges, and fantastic potential for personal growth. Whether or not it is true that parenthood makes us “grow up,” there is no doubt that parenthood brings a mixture of rewards and difficulties that are at times extraordinary. For some, parenthood is a rocky road that involves concerns about their children, changes in relationships with partners, and declines and improvements in physical and mental health that affect functioning at home and at work. In the opening chapter, I presented theories that define parenting stress as being part of an interconnected system of people and relationships (e.g., couples, parent-child relationships) within each family. In this sense, it is difficult to consider parenting stress and its effects on parents as being separable from its effects on children and parent-child relationships. At the same time, such a separation is warranted, because the attributes of each of the individuals in any given family are distinct. Furthermore, it is at the level of the individual parent and child that parenting stress operates as a psychological process. In this chapter, the connection between parenting stress and the health and functioning of the parent is described. But even here, social relationships with others cannot be completely ignored or separated ▪ 27 ▪

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Parenting Stress and the Parent

from the functioning of the individual. For instance, how well a parent copes with chronic parenting stress involves the presence of emotional and instrumental social support from other people in her or his life. Thus the role of social support is critical.

The Transition to Parenthood The transition to parenthood can be joyful, exciting, and stressful. The child arrives and is dependent on parents for survival and well-being. The infant, and later the child or adolescent, presents an ever changing bundle of demands for attention and care. These demands and their dynamic nature can result in stress for the parent. In addition, the sense of responsibility (to the child, to the family, and to the larger community) that accompanies parenthood is itself a source of stress for some. This is particularly true for those who do not wish to be parents before or after the child is born. Parents who report that the pregnancy was unplanned or unwanted are more likely to be harsh and negative in their parenting of that child, sometimes even years following the child’s birth (Pinderhughes, Dodge, Bates, Pettit, and Zelli, ). Another example comes from recent cross-cultural research on parenting stress and discipline practices among grandmothers caring for their grandchildren who have become orphans as a result of AIDS. The roles of “parent” and “grandparent” are usually distinct—for example, parents are disciplinarians and grandparents spoil and enjoy their grandchildren. However, because of their circumstances, the roles of parent and grandparent are in direct conflict for these aging women, which itself creates a great deal of stress. In one such study, Kenyan grandmothers reported using frequent and sometimes severe forms of physical punishment. The interviews with these “parenting” grandmothers suggested that they were doing this in order to demonstrate in an obvious way to others that they were fulfilling their communities’ expectations that they fill the disciplinarian role of the parent. Not surprisingly, given all of these stressors, these grandmothers reported high levels of parenting stress as a group (Oburu, ). Yet the transition to parenthood is stressful for nearly every parent and family, regardless of whether or not child rearing was planned. This transition often involves dramatic shifts in feelings and thinking,


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behavior, relationships, and lifestyle. These arise in part from the actual demands of caring for a child but also from having a new role in the family and society (Lepore, ). Fortunately, for most parents, this transition is fulfilling and a positive experience overall. A number of longitudinal studies (i.e., studies in which the same parents and children are studied repeatedly over time, to examine stability and change) have shown that as the months pass after a child’s birth, mothers typically feel warmer toward and more positive about their infants (Fleming, Ruble, Flett, and Van Wagner, ; Moss, Bolland, Foxman, and Owen, ). Nonetheless, the transition to parenthood is marked by increases in distress for some parents. This is particularly true for parents who are at greater risk for having problems in the parenting role, such as teenage mothers or adult victims of child abuse (Taylor and Kemper, ). For  percent to  percent of new mothers and fathers, serious postnatal depression can arise out of the comparatively common mood fluctuations that occur in the weeks or months following birth. In addition, most parents experience more conflict in their marital relationships following this transition (Ballard and Davis, ; Fleming et al., ; Lavee, Sharlin, and Katz, ; O’Hara and Swain,  ). Stress early in parenthood also has been found to arise from problems in functioning prior to the birth of the child (Crnic and Low, ). A number of studies that have examined stress and adult psychological health prior to and after the birth of the child have shown that for some soon-to-be parents, the seeds of parenting stress already have been planted. Parents’ developing beliefs about their young infants’ personalities and behaviors are being formed before the infants are even born. For instance, pregnant mothers who think about and describe their soon-to-arrive infants as unique individuals show better adaptation in the parenting role, whereby their mother-infant relationships are more likely to be secure and emotionally rewarding (Benoit, Parker, and Zeanah, ). Signs of depression in the mother or father prior to the birth of the child are the best predictors of a parent’s symptoms of depression and distress postnatally, and are known to be associated strongly with parenting stress. In addition, difficulties in the marriage or partnership prior to the birth can predispose both parents to greater distress once the baby arrives (Colpin, DeMunter, Nys, and Vande-

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meulebroecke, ; Deater-Deckard, Pickering, Dunn, and Golding, ; Hyde, Essex, Clark, and Klein, ; Soliday, McCluskeyFawcett, and O’Brien, ; Vicary and Corneal, ). Next, I turn to a discussion of some of the factors that are thought to influence and be influenced by stress and coping, during the transition to parenthood and beyond.

Parent Age and Gender Age Parenting stress does not appear to increase or decrease systematically with parental age. There may be a curvilinear relation between parent age and parenting stress, with distress in the parenting role greatest among mothers who are either very young or very old (in comparison to the typical age range for parenthood). In industrial societies, young teenage mothers do not have the resources that they need to take care of their children on their own—resources such as psychological maturity, education, job skills, and steady sources of income. By comparison, most adults in their twenties and thirties who are having children for the first time have acquired the psychological and social resources that are necessary to be successful. Thus it is not surprising that teenage parents are more likely to experience greater distress in parenting compared to adult parents (e.g., Richardson, Barbour, and Bubenzer, ). All other factors considered, waiting until our twenties or thirties to have children bodes well for adaptation and coping in the parenting role. At the other end of the age continuum are those who become parents in their late thirties or after. On average, older first-time parents are more likely to face health issues and physical problems, since the younger body rebounds from pregnancy and delivery and adapts to the physical rigors of parenthood more easily. Consistent with this idea is research showing that older mothers report higher amounts of parenting stress, in comparison to mothers in their twenties (Ostberg and Hagekull, ). There also are biological and psychological changes that are still occurring in our twenties and thirties that may have implications for stress and coping in parenthood. For example, among healthy males, those who become fathers in their thirties are more


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likely to have higher self-esteem than are those who become fathers in their twenties (Rimmerman and Sheran, ). It may also be the case that we continue to show improvements in our abilities to control our own thoughts, emotions, and behaviors into adulthood, due to continuing development of brain regions and continued learning of strategies that contribute to these aspects of self-control. Not all studies find straightforward effects of parental age on greater parenting stress, however (e.g., Garrison, Blalock, Zarski, and Merritt, ). There are a number of circumstances that may matter more than parent age per se. For instance, mothers who become pregnant using in vitro fertilization (IVF) are less distressed compared to other mothers, although they are considerably older than the population of women who become pregnant without fertility intervention (Hahn, ; Hahn and DiPietro, ). This may be because none of the IVF pregnancies is unplanned, and few if any of the resulting babies are unwanted when they are born. Another consideration is that it is easy to inadvertently confuse the effects of parent age with the effects of marital or partner relationship stability. There is a distinction between becoming a parent in your thirties or forties within the context of a supportive decade-old relationship, versus doing so after having gone through several turbulent long-term relationship transitions. Having more partners and changes in partners via serial marriages or cohabitations is associated with more symptoms of emotional problems and difficulties in parenting (Capaldi and Patterson, ; Dunn, Davies, O’Connor, and Sturgess, ). Thus studies that examine only stable marriages may find particular effects for parent age, whereas studies that examine nondivorced as well as divorced and remarried parents may find different effects. In addition, parent age is confounded with child age (on average, older parents have older children). Overall, there does not appear to be a systematic effect of child age on parenting stress. Aside from the timing of when someone becomes a parent, age also matters if parenthood is considered as an experience that covers the entire lifespan. Parents do not stop influencing or being influenced by their children once the children are adults and living on their own. For example, it is unlikely that a parent who was highly distressed by a teenager’s emotional difficulties will become less distressed when that

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adolescent becomes an adult, simply because the child no longer lives at home. Consider for a moment the parents of children or adolescents with serious and lasting health or psychological problems such as depression, or parents whose children develop serious problems in functioning just as they are making the transition to adulthood, as is often the case with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder (Greenberg, Greenley, McKee, Brown, and Griffin-Francell, ). For some, parenting stress may even increase when they no longer have the ability to monitor and exercise some degree of control over their children’s daily lives. For these parents, the distress is not likely to dissipate, and it is not transient. Instead, the effects of chronic distress in the parenting role may continue to persist or accumulate even into old age. Little is known about parenting stress among middle-aged and older parents specifically, although we do know that older people cope with stress no better or worse than younger people, on average (Strack and Feifel, ). However, especially inasmuch as the parenting role continues even after the child has moved out of the home, biological changes that accompany aging also must be considered. As we get older, we face more health problems and decreases in energy, and many of us also have to care for our aging parents. However, we also improve with age in other ways. With accrued experience, we learn more about what we can and cannot control, about what works and does not work in terms of coping, and about separating the challenges that we face from who we are as individuals (Aldwin, )—all of which can be used to adapt to the continuing demands of parenthood.

Gender Another attribute to consider is the parent’s gender. Adults’ and children’s gender roles have changed rapidly in many societies over the past century, and over the past few decades in particular. It is now more common for men and women to share household duties, ranging from producing income to making dinner to changing diapers. Options have multiplied for women and men alike. Women now have more opportunities to pursue advanced education and have careers while also having a family. Men now have more opportunities to spend time with their children and become involved in the day-to-day management of


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the household, while also pursuing their educational and occupational goals. From several decades of psychological research on both “fathering” and “mothering,” we know that even though biological sex constrains who can carry and deliver babies, it need not constrain who it is that nurtures and cares for children (Lamb, ). In the prototypical American family of the s, the father went to work and spent little time with his children outside of leisure that might occur after work or on the weekends. Men were not involved in the daily routines of childcare. Mothers spent much more time with their children, and were responsible for their daily care and maintenance of the household. Educational and career opportunities for women were more limited. Although it is not wise to view the s household as the way things always used to be, the prototype serves as an informative contrast to the contemporary family in many industrial nations. Today, it is the norm for both the mother and father to work outside the home and to contribute to child rearing. In decades past, there was less social pressure for men to be involved with their children and for women to pursue college educations and to work outside the home. Now there are social pressures for men to be involved with their children, and for women to have academic credentials and careers. Furthermore, there are predictable differences between men in the degree to which they are “involved” fathers. Men who are more involved with their children also tend to be happier in their careers or jobs, to have better relationships with their own fathers, and to value within themselves both “masculine” traits like strength and bravery and “feminine” traits like nurturance and warmth. These shifts in attitudes and behaviors are not fads; they have been documented in a number of studies. It also is clear that men and women alike are perfectly capable of nurturing and caring for their children. For instance, most infants form strong and secure attachment relationships with their fathers as well as their mothers, because men are as capable as women of providing the sensitive, responsive attention that children require (Lamb, ; Pleck, ). Yet gender differences in opportunities and practices remain. A gender gap persists in employment, particularly with respect to salaries and childcare. In the vast majority of two-parent households where

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both parents work outside the home, the mother continues to be the primary caregiver who is responsible for the majority of daily child rearing. In addition, there are gender differences in the ways in which men and women interact with their children. For instance, from studies of fathers in the United States, we know that men tend to be playful and physical in more of their interactions with their children. This stands in contrast to the more verbal and nurturing interactions seen between mothers and their children. Note, however, that this gender difference is a matter of degree, not kind; men and women alike show both types of interactive behaviors with their children (Levy-Shiff, ; Parke, ). Gender differences or similarities? What are the implications of gender differences in work and family life, in terms of possible gender differences in parenting stress? Furthermore, what are the implications of biological sex differences? There is behavioral and physiological evidence from human and animal studies suggesting several possible differences in the biochemical pathways of stress and coping. For women, oxytocin is implicated in the initial increased nurturing response to a stressor, whereas androgens are more strongly implicated for men. This reflects a more basic distinction between genders in prototypical responses to and coping following a stressor. For men, stress and coping may be best represented as “fight or flight,” whereas for women this process may be best described as “tend and befriend.” Accordingly, mothers are more likely to respond to stressors by increasing their focus on nurturing and caring for their children, thereby reducing their offspring’s vulnerabilities to the effects of those stressors. Women also are more likely to respond to stress by seeking out stronger ties with other individuals or groups. When functioning well, this system of tending to the child and strengthening networks of support in the face of stress operates as part of the enduring and emotionally rewarding relationship between parent and child (Taylor, Klein, Lewis, Gruenewald, Gurung, and Updegraff, ). What is not clear from the research on gender similarities and differences in stress is whether and how parent gender is linked to parenting stress in particular. As the primary caregivers in most households, do women tend to bear the brunt of the stress of the parenting


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role? Or as the less frequent caregivers of their children, are fathers at greater risk of showing stress in the parenting role? A number of studies have addressed this question. Their findings converge to suggest that if there are gender differences in parenting stress, the differences are small. Some studies show that mothers report slightly higher levels of parenting stress than fathers, whereas other studies show no gender difference at all (Baker, ; Creasey and Reese, ; Deater-Deckard and Scarr, ; Hauenstein, ; Krauss, ; Perry, SarloMcGarvey, and Factor, ; but see Beckman, ). My colleagues and I attempted to answer the question as to whether there are gender differences in parenting stress using data from the Child Care and Family Project or CCFP, a study of over five hundred married dual-earner couples with at least one child under the age of five (Deater-Deckard, Scarr, McCartney, and Eisenberg, ; Deater-Deckard and Scarr, ). The parents in this study were selected because both parents worked outside the home (they were mostly highly educated and earned good incomes), and they all paid out of pocket for full-time center-based childcare. Mothers and fathers completed a number of questionnaires, including the Parenting Stress Index (Abidin, ). In addition, parents rated their own feelings of anxiety about daily separations from their children, and husbands rated their perceptions of their wives’ separation anxieties. Parents also completed questionnaires regarding marital satisfaction and levels of instrumental support (e.g., help with housework) and emotional support (e.g., listening and encouragement) from spouses; they also responded to a checklist of stressful life events that might have occurred in the prior twelve months (e.g., moving, job change or loss, divorce). We also assessed parents’ child-rearing attitudes (e.g., degree of emphasis on authority and obedience)and harshness of discipline (e.g., physical punishment with little or no reasoning and explanation). Finally, we measured children’s social and emotional development using parents’ and childcare center caregivers’ ratings of child emotionality and irritability as well as child behavioral and emotional problems (e.g., aggression, noncompliance, anxiety). We had anticipated that mothers would be more anxious about separations, and higher in parenting stress. We were wrong. In fact, the men and women in these middle-class, dual-earning couples were vir-

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tually indistinguishable in their parenting stress and separation anxieties. The average parenting stress score was . for women (on a scale of  very low stress to  very high stress), and . for men. The standard deviation of the parenting stress scale (an estimate of the degree of variation in scores across people) was nearly identical for women and men. For the parental separation anxiety score, the average score for women was . and for men was .; and the standard deviations for both groups were again very similar. Thus mothers and fathers in this study were comparable in their average levels of parenting stress, and there was as much variability in stress from one woman to another as there was from one man to another. Just as striking were the gender similarities in the links between the parenting stress and anxiety scores and other aspects of parent functioning and the family environment. For mothers and fathers alike, distress in the parenting role was more severe for those who had less income and education, less social support from their spouses, unhappier marriages, more stressful life events, harsher styles of child discipline, more traditional child-rearing attitudes that emphasized child obedience to authority, and children with more behavioral problems. We also found that within each married couple the husband and wife had somewhat comparable levels of parenting stress and anxiety about separations from their child. Although it was not possible to delineate why and how spouses start out or become similar to one another in their parenting stress, we did discover one fascinating pattern in the data based on the husbands’ reports of their wives’ and their own anxieties. First, nearly every one of the men in the study reported that their wives were more anxious than themselves, even though their wives’ self-reports of their own separation anxieties indicated that this was not the case. Second, men were not accurate in rating their wives’ separation anxiety; it was not possible to predict a mother’s selfreported separation anxiety from her husband’s rating of his wife’s anxiety. Third, there was a very strong tendency for men to report a high degree of similarity between their own separation anxieties and the separation anxieties of their wives. Thus, in the families in our study, the fathers’ perceptions of their own anxieties about leaving their children during the day were strongly tied to their perceptions of their wives’ anxieties. This result, when


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considered with the other findings from the study described above, suggests that many men experience levels of parenting stress that are similar to those experienced by women. Furthermore, in any given family, it is difficult to predict whether it is the mother or the father who experiences more distress in the parenting role. In addition, the fact that married partners’ parenting stress levels are similar within each family indicates that on average a child who has one highly anxious and distressed parent is more likely to have two anxious and distressed parents. This partner similarity has implications for the quality of the marital relationship. Although women and men display similar levels of parenting stress on average, it remains to be seen whether parenting stress actually operates in the same way for both parents. As noted above, in our own as well as others’ studies (e.g., Lavee et al., ), the links between parenting stress and other parenting and family environment factors were similar for men and women. However, other research suggests that the mechanisms linking parenting stress, parenting behavior, and children’s adjustment may in fact be quite distinct for mothers and fathers. Consideration of several studies illustrates why it can be difficult for scientists to elucidate gender differences in parenting stress. One study found that mothers became concerned about minor indications of behavioral and emotional problems in their children, whereas fathers became concerned only after the problems became more serious. This was true even though mothers and fathers were equally adept at noticing their children’s behaviors and emotions (Baker and Heller, ). In another study, researchers followed a group of expectant mothers and fathers over time as they became first-time parents. A different pattern of links between parenting stress and behavior was found for men and women. Among fathers, difficulties in their interactions and relationships with their babies could be predicted from their own prior expectations and beliefs about the likelihood of parenting stress and their own lack of ability and power in the parenting role. In contrast, these same aspects of beliefs about competence were not linked systematically to parenting behavior for mothers (Noppe, Noppe, and Hughes, ). Yet another example comes from several studies of children with disabilities. These studies have shown that the

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type and severity of the disability may be linked with higher levels of parenting stress, and that this connection is stronger for fathers than for mothers (Frey et al., ; Margalit, Shulman, and Stuchiner, ). Further complexity is seen when gender differences in susceptibility to and coping with stress are considered. Such gender differences would appear only in studies that measure directly the specific susceptibility factor or coping strategy in question. As described in more detail later in this chapter, depression and anxiety are strongly associated with parenting stress. Females are more likely than males to experience depression, suggesting that mothers also may be at greater risk for parenting stress. In terms of coping strategies, different types of strategies may be more effective for women and men. On average, women are more likely to perceive causal events as threats and stressors, to believe that they have less control, to utilize emotionally focused coping strategies, and as noted above, to seek social support when distressed. In contrast, men are more likely to view a stressor as being under their personal control and to engage problem-focused coping strategies. Nonetheless, these are only average group differences. Bear in mind that there is wide variation in these patterns of responses to stress within groups of women and within groups of men (Levy-Shiff, ). One illustrative example of gender similarities and differences in coping comes from a recent ten-year longitudinal study of parents and their disabled children. Some parents (regardless of gender) showed increases in parenting stress over the ten-year period, whereas others did not become more distressed in their parenting roles. What differed for these mothers and fathers were the coping strategies that were most effective. For the mothers, parenting stress did not increase if they had accessible and effective social support from others. For the fathers, parenting stress did not increase if they used problem-focused coping strategies (Hauser-Cram et al., ). Although this study suggests that different coping strategies work better for women or for men, other research demonstrates that emotional support from partners, friends, and family members is comparable for women and men in its effect on minimizing parenting stress (Deater-Deckard and Scarr, ). Apparently contradictory findings can arise within a single study.


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Consider as an example a study of first-time mothers and fathers in which a group of parents was followed through the first year of their children’s lives (Levy-Shiff, ). There were some gender similarities in parenting stress and coping, but also a number of differences. For men and women alike, better adjustment (i.e., less exhaustion and distress) followed for those parents who viewed the new role as a challenge, as opposed to a source of difficulties. In contrast, viewing parenthood as stressful was linked to problems in adjustment. In addition, mothers’ and fathers’ emotion-focused coping was associated with poorer adjustment and less involvement with the infant, although this effect was stronger for women than men. Yet there were also a number of gender differences. As others have found, the men were simply less affected by parenthood. Compared to their female partners, they viewed it as less of a challenge, less stressful, less threatening, less controllable, and they were less likely to use coping strategies or experience “burnout.” In addition, the same coping strategy had different effects for men and women, a pattern of results that was like those reported by Hauser-Cram et al. (; described above). For the new fathers who were experiencing high levels of parenting stress, greater use of problem-focused coping was associated with lower levels of exhaustion. In contrast, problem-focused coping had no effect for mothers. Instead, among mothers who were highly distressed, having more social support was associated with higher observed levels of soothing and holding their infants—in contrast to fathers, for whom social support had no effect. In sum, the research on gender differences in parenting stress shows mixed results. This may be because all of the research has focused on biological sex status—being “female” or “male,” based on typical and obvious physical characteristics. In contrast, few studies have examined the psychological dimensions of gender. Doing so would require assessment of parents’ gender beliefs and self-concepts, as well as personality and behavioral attributes such as masculinity and femininity. Variation across individuals in these different components of gender role identity may be more important in their contributions to parenting stress than biological sex per se. There are known sex differences in the physiological stress reaction (Taylor et al., ), but some of this may be accounted for by individual differences in sex-role

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orientation and gender-typed patterns of thought and behavior (Frankenhaeuser, ; Polefrone and Manuck, ). For instance, new mothers who are gender “typical” (predominantly feminine) or androgynous (moderately masculine and feminine) may show the best mental health and adjustment to parenthood, compared to cross-typed or gender “atypical” (predominantly masculine) women (Dimitrovsky, LevyShiff, and Perl, ). It is likely that individual differences in gender beliefs, behaviors, and self-concepts also account for variation in fathers’ parenting stress. Assessing and testing the effects of these indicators of gender role behavior and attitudes is a potentially fruitful direction for future research. Doing so may clarify parent gender differences and similarities in parenting stress in an area of research that has thus far yielded complicated results that are difficult to interpret.

Individual Differences The emphasis so far in this chapter has been on groups of parents (e.g., mothers and fathers) and the potential differences between them. Group differences aside, there also are influential individual differences to consider. Parents differ from each other in what it is they bring to the major or minor stressors of parenthood. They also differ in how they respond to these stressors. Understanding individual differences between parents is essential when examining connections between distress in the parenting role and adult health and functioning. Parents differ from one another in the degree to which they are prone to stress, which itself stems from biological and environmental influences. Although there are numerous aspects of individual variation that could be considered, I will concentrate on those that have received the most attention in psychological theory and research.

Depression and Psychopathology There is a bridge between adult well-being and parenting stress, with influences traveling in both directions. From the mundane to the rare and severe, the stressors that arise in parenthood can lead to chronic stress that causes, and is caused by, serious problems in mental and physical health. Some people enter into parenting with relatively few


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difficulties in adjustment, but may start showing signs of psychopathology as a result of chronic, serious parenting stress. Others come into the parenting role already at risk for becoming deeply distressed, because of prior histories that may include problems in mental health. It is worth bearing in mind that the connections between parenting stress and problems in mental health, although no doubt present, are by no means deterministic. The majority of the adults who face significant stressors in parenthood do not become seriously ill or truly dysfunctional in their thoughts, emotions, or behaviors. In addition, some parents who have had to cope with serious difficulties in their own mental health in the past can actually benefit from the experience of a happy parenthood and successful navigation through its challenges. Parenting stress and other problems that can arise are strongly tied to the mother’s and father’s psychological health and well-being. In addition, psychopathology in the parent can exacerbate the effects of stressful circumstances (e.g., job loss or marital problems) on parenting stress (Gelfand, Teti, and Fox, ). This is clearest in the connection between parenting stress and parental depression. Prolonged feelings of sadness and despair, loss of appetite and enjoyment, lethargy, and thoughts about suicide are indicative of depression. These symptoms often co-occur with anxiety as well as other forms of psychopathology and antisocial behavior, such as drug and alcohol misuse and aggression. Depression is fairly common, with about  percent of women and  percent of men likely to experience it at least once in their lifetimes. The majority of affected individuals are likely to experience depression more than once. For some, it will be essentially chronic, yet the childbearing years can be a time of greater risk for still others. Others go through periods of depression that are transient and not severe enough to merit a diagnosis of depression per se, but the symptoms nonetheless remain influential in parenting stress and coping processes (Gotlib and Goodman, ). Regarding timing, parenting stress may precede and contribute to the emergence of depression or anxiety for some adults, but depression or anxiety may precede and cause distress in the parenting role for others. Regardless of the temporal sequence, parenting stress and psychopathology typically co-occur as part of an integrated stress and cop-

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ing process that involves social cognitions (e.g., attitudes, self-esteem), emotions, and behaviors, all of which influence the parent-child relationship (Abidin, , ; Anastopoulos, Guevremont, Shelton, and DuPaul, ; Deater-Deckard et al., ; Downey and Coyne, ; Gelfand et al., ; Hammen, ; Ostberg, Hagekull, and Wettergren, ). Depression disrupts the parent’s ability to regulate her or his own emotions, and interferes with various aspects of parent-child interaction and parenting behavior. One of the key indicators of depression is prolonged periods of sadness and despair, and being unable to pull out of this negative emotional state. This has implications for parent-child interactions. From early in infancy, children develop expectations about a number of properties of parent-child interaction. Children’s cognitive and social-emotional development is optimized when parent-child interactions are well organized, coherent, and mutually rewarding. These interactions form a foundation for the development of the parent-child attachment relationship, and the skills that are acquired and practiced can later be generalized and applied to other social interactions and relationships (Cohn and Tronick, ; Hammen, ; Jaffe, Beebe, Feldstein, Crown, and Jasnow, ). If a parent is struggling with his or her own emotion regulation, it is that much more difficult (although still possible) to enter into and sustain coherent, contingent, and responsive interactions with a child. Parents with depression may withdraw or may be more emotionally labile and reactive, and their relationships with their children are likely to be less rewarding and are more conflicted, thereby feeding back into feelings of distress (Goodman and Gotlib, ). Depression and the transition to parenthood. The transition to parenthood is particularly important, given that the foundations of the parent-child relationship and patterns of interaction are being formed early in the child’s life. Brief periods of sadness and moodiness are common for most women after childbirth; this is often referred to as the “baby blues.” For most, these less severe symptoms of emotional distress pass after a month or two; although not pleasant, the baby blues do not appear to be associated with problems in infant development, unless the symptoms become more serious and persistent. Postnatal depression is a serious concern for a number of parents, and its


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presence can affect parenting at a time when the child’s attachment relationships and skills for controlling emotions and behaviors are being established (Field, ; Lyons-Ruth, Lybuchik, Wolfe, and Bronfman, ). My colleagues and I examined some of the connections between parental depression and parenting stress in a diverse group of families in England, before and after their children’s births. The Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children, or ALSPAC, includes over ten thousand children and their parents (Golding, ). These families were recruited from a two-year period of births, so that they represent a nearly exhaustive sample of families in western England. The parents periodically completed a number of mailed survey instruments before and after the target children’s births, including a brief measure of their symptoms of depression (see chapter  for more details on the ALSPAC study). We found that the rates of depression in this large community sample of parents did not increase after birth for the majority of mothers and fathers (Deater-Deckard et al., ; O’Connor et al., ). The best predictor of a parent’s level of depression symptoms following birth was her or his level of symptoms prior to the birth. This was true for women and men alike. These results are consistent with other studies that have found that individual differences in depression symptoms are generally stable over time, even over the course of major life transitions like pregnancy and childbirth (e.g., Soliday et al., ). Furthermore, for both mothers and fathers, we found that one parent’s depression was a good predictor of the spouse’s or partner’s depression. Partner similarity in depression symptoms could occur because each partner influences the other through their behaviors, or it could be a by-product of how it is that people select their romantic partners—birds of a similarly depressed feather flocking together. There is evidence supporting both explanations, and it is likely that both mechanisms work together to account for this husband-wife similarity in depressive symptoms. Regardless of why the similarity arises, it has implications for the children in the family as well as the parents. Children who live with two depressed parents, compared to those with only one depressed parent, are more likely to show more signs of problems in their development (Goodman and Gotlib, ; Ham-

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men, ; Phares, Duhig, and Watkins, ). This effect could reflect environmental as well as genetic influences on children’s socialemotional development and mental health outcomes. In addition to studying parental depression symptoms in the ALSPAC study, we focused on marital transitions (e.g., divorce, single parenthood, remarriage) as family contexts or settings for change in depression symptoms prior to and following the birth of a child. For mothers as well as fathers, those who had experienced more transitions or changes in their adult romantic relationships were more likely to be depressed. This effect held regardless of whether the relationships were formal marriages and divorces, or nonmarital cohabitating relationships. The effect could arise because exposure to the difficulties of relationship transitions makes the adults more prone to depression. Alternately, it could be that those who already are prone to depression are more likely to break up when their relationships hit rough patches. Regardless of the direction of the effect, it is clear that depression accumulates within some families, and often is piled on top of a number of other difficulties that accompany the breaking up and reformulation of households (Deater-Deckard et al., ; O’Connor et al., ; also see chapter ). We also found in the ALSPAC study that individual differences in mothers’ and fathers’ depression and stressful life circumstances were connected with various indicators of parenting stress and problems in the parent-child relationship. Mothers who experienced higher levels of depression symptoms when their children were infants were likely to report higher levels of parenting stress a year later, when their children were toddlers. They also reported that their children had more behavioral problems (e.g., aggression) at four years of age, even after controlling for earlier behavioral problems. These connections between depression, parenting stress, and child behavior problems were accounted for, in part, by mothers’ feelings of hostility and negativity toward their young children (Deater-Deckard and ALSPAC Research Team, ). Drug and alcohol use. Although depression has received most of the attention of researchers, there also are connections between parenting stress and drug use and addiction. There have been a number of studies examining parenting stress and coping among mothers who are


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drug addicted or are recovering addicts. As a group, addicted and recovering mothers have elevated parenting stress and symptoms of depression and anxiety. This effect is due, in part, to their own child-rearing histories, which often include trauma such as past or current domestic violence victimization. For these mothers, family relationships and interactions are more likely to be troubled and to include high levels of conflict and anger. In addition, among those adults who want help to overcome their addictions, there is fear that seeking aid will put them in contact with authorities who may want to separate them from their children (Harmer, Sanderson, and Mertin, ; Kelley, ; Powis, Gossop, Bury, Payne, and Griffiths, ). However, even among currently addicted mothers (for example, those who are in methadone replacement treatment programs), there can be large differences between mothers in how much parenting stress they experience. These individual differences are connected in expected ways with difficulties in parenting. Although the effect is robust, it is a small effect, probably because there is less variation in mental health and parenting stress in the population of drug-addicted mothers, compared to the broader community of parents (Suchman and Luthar, ). There is a similar connection between parenting stress and alcohol use. In other respects, alcohol addiction and its effects are more insidious, in the sense that its effects impact far more families than illicit drug use. This is because of alcohol’s availability, low expense, and social acceptability. Adults who enter into parenthood with existing drinking and drug problems are more likely to experience problems and distress in the parenting role. It also is likely that parents use substances as a means of coping with parenting stress (Pelham and Lang, ). For instance, in one experiment, researchers found that college males who were exposed to noxious infant cries (compared to a noxious smoke alarm) were not only more likely to rate the infant cries as more aversive, but were more likely to drink more alcohol in response to exposure to infant cries (Stasiewicz and Lisman, ). Over time, chronic substance abuse and addiction can lead to a dramatic deterioration in the functioning and quality of family relationships, which in turn leads to increases in children’s behavioral and emotional problems (Roosa, Dumka, and Tein, ). Parental aggression and antisocial behavior (e.g., criminality), as

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well as physical health, also are worth considering. The connection between parenting stress and parental anger is considered in detail in the next chapter. As for physical illness, there is little in the way of research that has examined associations with parenting stress. Although speculative, it stands to reason that for some adults distress arising from the demands and difficulties of parenthood will predispose them to illness. At the same time, for those who are or become ill, parenting stress may work to further the negative effects of the illness and co-occurring depression, through its impact on parenting behavior and the parentchild relationship. The majority of parents do not suffer from these problems in mental health and functioning. Far more relevant for all parents are the individual differences seen in adults’ temperaments and personalities, the topic of the next section.

Temperament and Personality There is a huge range of individual variation in people’s reactivity to stressful events, as well as whether and how well they are able to control those reactions after a stressor has occurred (i.e., regulation). Individual differences in reactivity and regulation, which are believed to include biological bases, serve as the backbone of temperament, and also are key components of personality and psychopathology. Temperament includes components of physical activity, emotions, and attention that work together to produce part of the foundation of selfregulation (Posner and Rothbart, ; Rothbart and Bates, ). Temperament and self-regulation are involved in parenting stress and coping mechanisms. To illustrate in a simple way the notion of reactivity and regulation, consider an example of a potentially threatening event, like a friend who is upset with you. His face begins to flush as he raises his voice and points his finger at you while punctuating his speech, even as he is telling you that although he is angry he will get over it eventually. Because he is a friend and someone you trust and know well, you do not consciously think that he is going to leap and physically harm you. However, if you appraise the event as potentially threatening (a process that involves some very rapid automatic and unconscious thinking, as


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well as slower conscious thoughts), a physiological stress reaction will occur. Some people are more likely than others to have immediate and strong reactions to an experience like this. They rapidly become fearful and anxious, even though they may quickly realize that they are not actually being threatened. In contrast, other people have a reaction that is less severe, and still others may have little or no reaction to such an event. Now consider what happens after the friend has calmed down and returned to a normal conversation with you. Your body is still preparing for potential threats to survival, particularly if the reaction to this event was a strong one. Once the threatening experience has passed, your body needs to return to a state of normal functioning. Again, there are individual differences in the degree to which we can do this on our own, and do it quickly. Some who experience a typical reaction to such an event may find that it takes only a few minutes to return to a more normal physiological and psychological state, whereas others may remain distressed and agitated for hours if not a day or two. Reactivity and regulation aside, temperament includes specific perceptual, emotional, and behavioral content. There are several dimensions of individual differences to be considered, in addition to the temporal aspects of self-regulation just described. Rothbart’s theory emphasizes several dimensions that develop over infancy, childhood, adolescence, and into adulthood. These are stable attributes that are organized and expressed based on biological as well as environmental influences. In early and middle childhood, these dimensions include the following: extraversion/surgency (including sensation seeking, activity, less shyness, positive affect, and enjoyment of anticipation), negative affectivity (sadness, anger, discomfort, and difficulty in soothing), and effortful control (enjoyment of low-intensity stimulation, more sensitive perception, and better control of impulses and attention). In adulthood, an additional dimension of orienting sensitivity is found, a more elaborate and complex construct representing perceptual sensitivity to internal states (e.g., feelings) as well as external stimuli (e.g., sounds, odors). Rothbart’s theory and the research data point to two findings that are most relevant to the current discussion. First, individuals who are higher in effortful control are lower in negative affectivity, suggest-

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ing a link between cognitive and attentional components of self-control, and the frequency of negative emotional states. That is, people who are higher in negative affectivity tend to focus their attention and thoughts on things that promote feelings of fear, anxiety, or sadness, and have a more difficult time disengaging from this pattern (Derryberry and Reed, ). This may well extend to indicators of parenting stress, with more distressed parents having less effortful control and more negative affectivity. Second, there are likely to be strong connections between these dimensions of temperament and dimensions of personality described in detail next—between surgency and extraversion, negative affectivity and neuroticism, effortful control and lower neuroticism as well as higher conscientiousness, and orienting sensitivity and intellect/openness (Rothbart, Ahadi, and Evans, ). Personality. Personality theorists emphasize individuals’ stable traits as central to stress and coping processes. This notion is captured well by the statement that “there is no categorical difference between ineffective coping and psychological maladjustment” (Costa, Somerfield, and McCrae, , p. ). Personality attributes may operate by increasing or decreasing the likelihood that stressors are experienced in the first place, by influencing the cognitive and emotional experiences surrounding stress, by contributing to or depleting stores of resources needed for future coping, and by constraining the types of coping strategies that can be implemented. The dominant theory of personality distinguishes five dimensions: neuroticism, extraversion, openness, agreeableness, and conscientiousness (commonly referred to as “the big five”) (McCrae and John, ). These are thought to represent the fairly stable aspects of personality that individuals carry with them across most situations and over time. Neuroticism refers to the prevalence of negative affective states (e.g., fear, anxiety) and moodiness or irritability. Extraversion includes positive mood, assertiveness, and being outgoing. Openness refers to willingness to explore new experiences, imaginativeness, artistic qualities, and curiosity. Agreeableness refers to generosity, kindness, and trustworthiness. Conscientiousness includes efficiency, organization, planning, and reliability. There is a well-documented connection between neuroticism, being prone to stress, and ineffective coping. Neuroticism is most in-


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fluential in its systematic effects on self-regulation. These effects operate on the stress process in multiple ways, including influences on goal setting, beliefs, and appraisals (Matthews et al., ). Thus, among parents facing a serious stressor, those who are highest in neuroticism are more likely to experience increases in parenting stress. For example, one recent study of parents of children with cancer showed that adult trait anxiety (a construct that is closely related to neuroticism) was the best predictor of both mothers’ and fathers’ distress (Hoekstra-Weebers, Jasper, Kamps, and Klip, ). Links between stress and other aspects of personality are less clear, in part because they have not been studied nearly as often (Costa et al., ). Costa and colleagues speculate that individuals who are high in openness will be most willing to try new strategies, which is likely to be effective when current strategies are not working; that conscientious individuals will be more likely to use well-planned problemfocused strategies and actually attempt to carry them out; that agreeable individuals will be more effective at having access to and utilizing social support from others; and that extraverted individuals will be particularly adept at using forms of coping involving relationships (e.g., social support). Another way to conceptualize dispositions or traits is in terms of two independent dimensions—intolerance of uncertainty and intolerance of arousal. Both require active unconscious and conscious monitoring of psychological and physiological systems. As uncertainty increases in the environment, individuals who are less tolerant of ambiguity will become more vigilant by attending to those things going on around them. In the most extreme case, hypervigilance arises in those individuals who are unable to ever “let their guard down,” in fear that something potentially bad might happen. In contrast, individuals who are less able to tolerate the physiological arousal that accompanies a stressful experience are more likely to force themselves to not think about the stressor (i.e., cognitive avoidance). Those who are intolerant of both ambiguity and arousal are most likely to show heightened anxiety, and to use ineffective “fluctuating” coping. In contrast, those who are tolerant of uncertainty and arousal are the most likely to use effective “flexible” coping, and not to be anxious (Krohne, ). An example of this is found in research examining

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parents’ coping with their children’s brain cancer illnesses and treatments. One study showed that parents of cancer-stricken children differed from one another in their levels of parenting distress. More to the point, those who were most affected were the parents who perceived the greatest degree of uncertainty about the illness and treatments that lay ahead (Fuemmeler, Mullins, and Marx, ). Thus various components of individual differences between parents are systematically related to differences in parents’ experiences with their children. Certain aspects of temperament and personality may predispose parents to experience more stress and increase their vulnerability to the demands of parenthood through their impact on coping and mental health. There is little doubt that temperament and personality are implicated. However, individual differences in parents’ thoughts and beliefs regarding their own attributes also are important. I turn next to a description of some of these self-referent social cognitions.

Self-referent Social Cognitions Self-referent social cognitions include personal dispositions pertaining to the typical content of a parent’s thoughts regarding self and others, as well as the style or way of thinking about self and others. These include self-efficacy (belief that “I” can accomplish the goals that I set) and selfesteem (belief that “I” am worthwhile and valuable to others), as well as optimism or pessimism (positive versus negative expected outcomes). Other relevant attributes include self-consciousness (extent of thinking about self ), metacognitive style (typical types of self-appraisals such as those regarding controllability of behaviors and emotions), and worrying (Matthews et al., ). From the beginning of the book, I have emphasized the importance of the parents’ thinking to mechanisms underlying parenting stress and coping. Social cognitions ranging from appraisals to attitudes are as critical as other external factors like child illness or financial difficulties. For parenting stress, the social cognitions that matter most are likely to be those that involve the parenting self-concept— whether “I am a good parent” and whether “I am thoughtful and in control” in this very important relationship and role. The self-concept


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evolves from our tendency as humans to make comparisons between how we see ourselves (the “real”) and the standards that we have based on our perceptions of others or how we wish ourselves to be (the “ideal”) (Dibble and Cohen, ). Self-efficacy involves a coherent self-concept representing a set of beliefs such as “I am in control” and “I am a capable parent.” Closely related to this is self-esteem, a set of beliefs involving self-worth such as “I am a good person” who is worthy of others’ acceptance and love. We now understand that the connections between self-perceptions and beliefs about how one should be functioning as a parent are intimately tied to parenting stress and adaptation. Regardless of the circumstances or difficulties faced by the family, adults who see themselves as failing by comparison to how they think they ought to be functioning are more likely to be distressed. Parents who set and try to meet unattainably high standards in their personal lives (i.e., perfectionism) cannot possibly do so. The result is less self-efficacy and more parenting stress (Flett, Hewitt, Oliver, and Macdonald, ; Mitchelson and Burns, ). Parenting stress is minimized for those parents who are high in self-esteem and self-efficacy, even in the face of chronic and serious adversity (Aunola, Nurmi, Onatsu-Arvilommi, and Pulkkinen, ; Scheel and Rieckmann, ). For example, among single African American mothers living in poverty, or mothers of children with serious behavioral disorders, higher levels of parenting self-efficacy or control can break the link between parenting stress and depression and the link between parenting stress and children’s behavioral and emotional problems (Harrison and Sofronoff, ; Jackson and Huang, ). In addition, the connection between parenting stress and depression operates in part through parents’ thoughts of and feelings about being trapped by and having little control over the demands of the parenting role (Willner and Goldstein, ). The links between parental distress and self-efficacy are well exemplified in a classic study of maternal depression and self-concept (Dibble and Cohen, ). These researchers examined mothers’ “realideal mother” comparisons and their mental health. Mothers completed a questionnaire that listed parenting behaviors that included discipline strategies as well as other aspects of the parent-child rela-

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tionship, such as affection. Mothers first reported whether each behavior or strategy was true for themselves, and then reported whether each was typical for an ideal mother. The researchers then computed a difference score representing the size of the discrepancy between “real” and “ideal” for each mother. Mothers with the largest discrepancies between their idealized prototypes and their self-perceptions had the lowest self-esteem and were most prone to depression. There are other self-referent social cognitions, such as optimism and pessimism, that also matter. Individuals who are consistently pessimistic accumulate effects of stress in a downward spiral of events, thoughts, emotions, and physiological states. They are more likely to create stressful circumstances for themselves and others, and to lose resources by causing others to respond negatively to them and by making poor decisions that expose them to more stressors. In stark contrast is the process of coping with stress among those who are largely optimistic in their outlooks. These individuals manage to conserve resources and minimize exposure to new stressors, resulting in an upward spiral of coping (Aspinwall, ; Hobfoll et al., ). For example, one study of parents of children with cancer found that mothers and fathers who did not expect a good outcome were highly distressed. In contrast, those parents who remained optimistic about possible outcomes were more protected against stress, even in often dire circumstances over which the parents had little control (Grootenhuis and Last, ). But the typical parent is both optimistic and pessimistic at times, depending on the particular circumstances. Resilient coping in the face of parenting stress is more about the balance of optimistic versus pessimistic thinking—that is, whether the parent is predominantly encouraged or discouraged about the future. This is exemplified in a recent study of parents of children with developmental disabilities— children who require a great deal of care for many years (Trute and Hiebert-Murphy, ). This situation presents a number of challenges that undoubtedly influence parents’ self-perceptions and beliefs about their situations. However, the parents do not focus only on the down side of their children’s limitations or problems in their families (e.g., “My situation is horrible,” “This is my fault”). Many also are mindful of their children’s strengths and skills, and are proud of what


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their children and families have accomplished. These parents show that real psychological strength and happiness can come from succeeding in the face of challenges and adversity. In contrast, parenting stress is most likely to grow when parents’ negative views about themselves and their situations outweigh the positive views. In sum, self-referent social cognitions, including esteem, efficacy, and optimism, play critically important roles in parents’ minimization of stress and its effects. Most parents recognize this in the way they think about themselves, their children, and their families. Parents have articulated sets of beliefs about what they do and do not have control over, what they are and are not good at, and what they feel good about and do not feel good about. The adults who are most likely to cope well in parenthood are those who believe that they are effective and accepted by others (spouses or partners and children in particular) and who are more hopeful than not about the future.

Conclusion For most parents, some level of distress in their roles as caregivers is seen as part of the job. Although this is true, people differ markedly in their susceptibility to and coping with parenting stress and its effects. Age and gender may matter, though their effects are complex and research findings are mixed. More consistent is the evidence supporting a connection between various individual differences and parenting stress. Parents who are less reactive and more able to regulate their thoughts, emotions, and behaviors are able to adapt more readily in the face of minor or major parenting stressors. Given this link, it is not surprising that those suffering from serious disruptions in or disorders of psychological functioning (e.g., depression) are far more likely to be distressed as parents. Adaptation is tied to a host of individual differences in beliefs and ways of thinking, including self-referent social cognitions such as self-efficacy and self-esteem. Social cognitive comparisons between an idealized self and perceptions of the real or actual self arise as a result of ongoing cycles of forethought, behavior, and self-reflection. At the same time, being highly proactive in terms of goal setting, planning, and evaluating the effectiveness of one’s own coping strategies is linked

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with better self-regulation, which is adaptive for parents and children alike. In contrast, problems in adjustment are more likely if the parent does not set goals, does not plan, does not evaluate the effectiveness of attempts at coping, and instead relies on reactive self-other comparisons when making judgments about perceived distress. There are a number of factors that can contribute to these problems in regulation, including biological influences (e.g., temperament), lack of experience and motivation, serious disruptions in emotion systems and mood (e.g., depression, anxiety), and cognitive-perceptual impairments or biases (e.g., memory, attention). For any given parent who is not coping well with parenting stress, one, some, or all of these factors may be implicated (Zimmerman, ). Moving now from the parent’s own functioning, in the next two chapters I discuss the bridge between parenting stress and the child. This includes a focus on children’s physical, cognitive, and socialemotional development (chapter ), as well as parenting behaviors and parent-child relationship quality (chapter ).

3


Parental distress can affect children in powerful ways. These are described as “parent effects” on children’s behavior and development. At the same time, some children are more difficult to care for than others, and the “child effect” on parents and their parenting stress can be equally strong. Parenting stress and children’s development are connected through these bi-directional processes (parent influencing child, child influencing parent). Bi-directional processes evolve over time as the parent-child relationship develops; they are not always systematic, nor do they lend themselves to being easily observed. Children and parents alike can respond to others’ distress in a wide variety of ways that are sometimes adaptive and sometimes maladaptive. Much of the evidence that I will describe points to a link between parenting stress and problems in children’s development. However, it is important to bear in mind that many children of highly distressed parents show great resilience. Similarly, many parents of children who are facing severe difficulties manage to cope without becoming chronically distressed.

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Prematurity and Low Birth Weight The transition to parenthood is a challenge that involves new stressors, changes in family and marital relationships, and shifts in household management practices and division of labor, to name a just a few of the changes. Based on several decades of research, we know that adapting to this new role may be particularly hard for parents of preterm, lowbirth-weight babies. Many of these infants are born after difficult pregnancies and deliveries, and some of the children show lasting effects in their development, ranging from mild impairments to severe and chronic disabilities. The severity of medical complications prior to, during, and following birth does not operate alone in predicting the severity of children’s deficits and disabilities. Rather, these medical complications appear to work in tandem with parental attributes in their effects on children’s outcomes. As a group, medically compromised infants who have enriching home environments and who live with parents who are not distressed or ill themselves are least affected and often “catch up” to their more typical peers over the course of several years. In contrast, medically at-risk infants who live with distressed parents and who are in a family environment filled with conflict, rejection, and turmoil are more likely to show larger and longer lasting deleterious effects in their social-emotional and cognitive development (Pasamanick and Knobloch, ; Werner and Smith, ). Mothers of premature, low-birth-weight infants—especially those who have very serious life-threatening medical problems at birth—continue to show higher levels of depressive and anxious symptoms following delivery, an effect that probably operates for fathers as well (Moran and Pederson, ; Rimmerman and Sheran, ; Singer et al., ). At the same time, individual differences in parenting stress are stable even for this group of parents of high-risk infants. In other words, mothers who are highly distressed in the days following birth are likely to be more distressed two and four months later, compared to less distressed mothers (Busch-Rossnagal, Peters, and Daly, ; Thompson, Oehler, Catlett, and Johndrow, ). As for the long-term impact of a high-risk birth, some parents return to more typical levels of parenting stress as they adapt to the parenting


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role and the child’s health improves. However, long-lasting effects on parenting stress have been found in those families in which the child shows lasting and serious impairments, or where there are fewer socioeconomic resources (Cronin, Shapiro, Casiro, and Cheang, ; Patteson and Barnard, ; Stjernqvist, ; Tobey and Schraeder, ). The connection between problems in development arising from the child’s difficult early start in life, and subsequent psychological and health outcomes, is probably determined in part by the impact of these difficult circumstances on parenting stress and the quality of the parent-child relationship. On average, those children who have a more difficult time acquiring cognitive, motor, behavioral, and social skills are more likely to have parents who are more distressed, less warm and affectionate, and less stimulating (Miceli et al., ; Ong, Boo, and Chandran, ; Ong, Chandran, and Boo, ; Robson, ). When birth weight and term effects on mother-infant interactions are found, they generally favor full-term infant-mother pairs. Studies of medically at-risk infants and their mothers have shown that for some pairs the infants have less optimal interactions with their mothers. The most common problematic interaction patterns include maternal behavior that is less responsive and more intrusive or disruptive, and infant behaviors that include excessive fussiness, withdrawal, and distractibility. Over time, these mother-child pairs may develop lasting patterns of interaction involving irritability, poor control of emotions and behaviors, and intrusive or overcontrolling behaviors. This is particularly true for extremely low birth weight children and those who are chronically ill. This is unfortunate, because sensitive, warm, responsive parenting is optimal for children’s social, emotional, and cognitive development, particularly if the infants are born preterm and low birth weight (Beckwith and Rodning, ; Field, ; Lester, Hoffman, and Brazelton, ; Mitchell, ). One of the reasons that problematic patterns of interaction can become entrenched is that some parents develop biased views of their infants that predispose the parents to higher levels of parenting distress (i.e., vulnerable child syndrome). This can happen even if their infants are adapting well and the likelihood of death or lasting impairment is low. This effect is not limited to parents. Biased attitudes about and

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perceptions of premature, low-birth-weight infants’ abilities to interact “normally” extend to other adults, including parents of full-term healthy infants and even nonparents (Boyce, ; Estroff, Yando, Burke, and Synder, ; Gennaro and Stringer, ; Stern and Hildebrandt, ). There can be lingering effects of problems or disruptions in parent-child interactions and relationships in the longer term for medically compromised infants. The link between insensitive, nonresponsive, harsh, or neglectful parent behavior and a child’s emotional and behavioral difficulties may persist into the preschool and school-age years, even after the effects of the infant’s prior or ongoing medical problems are considered. Similar results have been found for children’s cognitive skills (Landry et al., ; Landry, Smith, Miller-Loncar, and Swank, ; Leonard et al., ; Magill-Evans and Harrison, ; Moore, Saylor, and Boyce, ). In sum, how well parents adapt to stress and care for their medically at-risk infants can influence those children’s outcomes. Although she or he is likely to face many challenges, a child who is born small and early can “catch up” in health and development, a result that can be influenced by parental involvement and sensitivity to the infant’s needs. Interventions designed to improve outcomes for high-risk newborns are most effective when parenting is sensitive and responsive. They are least effective when the parents are distressed and their parenting behavior is rejecting and inappropriate, given their children’s particular needs. Thus greater distress can be tied to a poorer prognosis for some of these infants, in part because of the impact of parenting stress on parenting behavior. However, this happens for some but by no means all of these families. In many instances, parental distress and behavior has little to do with the child’s progress and development. Regardless of any particular parent and child’s situation, it is important that recognition of a developmental process involving parenting stress and behavior not be equated with, or considered justification for, blaming parents for their medically at-risk children’s outcomes. On the contrary, the impetus should be to identify parents who most need assistance and provide services and support to them in a way that promotes coping and positive parenting experiences (Deater-Deckard and Bulkley, ).


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Child Illness Of the possible life events or circumstances that an adult can experience, losing a close family member, and a child in particular, ranks among the most difficult (Holmes and Rahe, ). Learning to cope as a parent of an ill or dying child is unlike any other stressful experience. It not only disrupts the daily lives of family members but threatens the most basic foundation of adults’ beliefs about their children and families—that they can protect their children from harm, that their family relationships will have years to grow and flourish, and that they will not outlive their own children. The connection between parenting stress and child illness extends well beyond infancy and early childhood, and it includes a variety of child illnesses and impairments (Hauenstein, ). Compared to parents of healthy children, those of children who are disabled, impaired, or critically ill are far more likely to be acutely or chronically distressed. Many studies have been conducted and the findings are not surprising. A selection of examples is provided in table . (and see the Appendix for an annotated bibliography of relevant studies). Although one of the needs for conducting research of this kind is to describe the impact of a child’s illness on parents, the research also is useful for developing an understanding of how a child’s disease or disability influences parental functioning and well-being, which in turn can feed back powerfully into the child’s improvements or decrements in health. Many illnesses and disabilities require lengthy if not lifelong therapies and medical procedures. One reason that it is difficult to cope when a child is ill or severely disabled is that the parent has little or no control over the symptoms or severity of the condition. The daunting prospects of coping in the long term with a child’s illness are compounded when they are accompanied by a parent’s own depression, anxiety, or chronic marital conflict. Furthermore, these experiences may be different for mothers and fathers. On average, women may be more susceptible to the maladaptive effects of coping with an ill child (Frank et al., ; Hauenstein, ; Mastroyannopoulou, Stallard, Lewis, and Lenton, ). The conventional wisdom is that parents who cope well will nec-

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Table 3.1. An Overview of the child illnesses, disabilities, and disorders that have been linked with higher levels of parenting stress Illness/Condition

Disability

Behavioral/Emotional Problems

Asthma

Developmental disability

Cancer

Physical disability

Attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder Autism, pervasive developmental disorder Conduct disorder (externalizing problems) Depression, anxiety (internalizing problems) Sleep problems and disorders Substance use

Cerebral palsy Congenital disease (heart disease) Diabetes Epilepsy HIV/AIDS Physical disability

Spina bifida Note: See the Appendix for an annotated bibliography of research studies on these topics.

essarily contribute only in positive ways to their children’s outcomes, and those who cope poorly may actually make their children’s illnesses worse. Whether this is true or not depends on the specific circumstances of the illness, the parents, and the family. There has been little in the way of systematic study of the temporal sequence of symptoms and parenting stress, diagnosis, treatment, and long-term outcomes, making it difficult to draw broad conclusions. For those illnesses or conditions that are not strongly influenced by parenting and the home environment, it is unlikely that parental stress and behavior have causal effects on the child’s symptoms or the effectiveness of medical treatment. Consider the example of childhood cancer. There are effective treatments available for many types of cancer, but most people realize that if the treatments are successful the odds are still better than even that the child will develop cancer again at some point in the future. In addition, there are many different types of cancer, and these diseases often are unpredictable in their response to known treatments. Parents have little at their disposal in terms of affecting the outcome of treatment—it usually occurs in hospitals, often


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requires surgery and extended periods of recovery, and severely disrupts daily life. Nonetheless, the parents are expected (by themselves and by others) to do their best to remain hopeful and to work with medical professionals to minimize the negative impact of treatment and maximize the child’s quality of life during and after treatment. It is no surprise that some parents remain highly distressed during their children’s cancer treatments. This predicts longer-term problems in parents’ own well-being, including higher levels of depression and anxiety (Kazak and Barakat, ). In contrast, consider a disease like childhood diabetes, the treatment of which depends heavily on parental involvement and behavior. Although it can be a devastating diagnosis to receive, most patients respond well to effective treatments that are widely available. Typically, the treatments involve careful monitoring and supervision of the child’s diet, blood sugar levels, and administration of insulin. Successful treatment that will last a lifetime requires family routines, parental supervision, and widely supported socialization of the child, who must learn to live with and treat her or his own diabetes. In those families in which stress and difficult circumstances escalate either in reaction to the illness or for other reasons, problems in family relationships and parenting can disrupt some or all of these components of treatment. Thus high levels of parenting stress and family difficulties are associated with greater dysfunction in diabetic children’s metabolism and immunology (Sepa, Frodi, and Ludvigsson, ; Viner, McGrath, and Trudinger, ). There also have been studies pointing to the lack of a connection, or mixed evidence for a connection, between parenting stress and child illness or disability (e.g., Phipps and Drotar, ; Tarbell and Kosmach, ). For example, although there are some data suggesting a link between parental distress and children’s sensory and communication impairments, conclusive evidence has not yet been established (Chaffee, Cunningham, Secord-Gilbert, Elbard, and Richards, ; Hanson and Hanline, ; Horsch, Weber, Bertram, and Detrois, ; Meadow-Orlans, ). Another more recent example is from a longitudinal study of epileptic children’s symptoms following dietary intervention, which showed that the treatment was effective at reducing dramatically the frequency and severity of seizures. However, over

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the year in which these children were followed, parenting stress did not change (Pulsifer, Gordon, Vining, and Freeman, ). These examples aside, a further consideration is that for some families of children with illnesses or disabilities parenting stress may be tied most strongly to financial difficulties and the lack of social support, rather than the child’s disability per se (Smith, Oliver, and Innocenti, ). To conclude, the link between parenting stress and child illness or disability is likely to depend on the specific pattern of symptoms or difficulties that the child and parents face. Therefore, straightforward associations between child impairment and parental distress may emerge in some but not all studies, because the effects may depend on the specific illness in question. Furthermore, child illness can be linked to increases in children’s problem behaviors (e.g., aggression, sleep disruption), but this is not always the case. The severity of a child’s illness and symptoms may be strongly associated with parents’ distress if the child also shows emotional disturbances or problems in self-control, but the illness may have less of an impact if the child otherwise is adjusting well and showing typical development (Goldberg et al., ). Most of the existing studies, though very important in the foundation that they provide, lack the detailed data required to test these possibilities. Research has relied on measures of parental stress and coping that do not address the specific stressors linked to children’s particular symptoms. Some attempts have been made to create new assessment tools that are more precise in identifying the specific aspects of the child’s illness or treatment that impact parenting stress. Such efforts will lead to better prediction of parents’ likely experiences and wellbeing (Streisand, Braniecki, Tercyak, and Kazak, ).

Developmental Disabilities and Disorders Developmental disabilities and disorders are identified when a child shows a lack of typical progression in acquisition of skills and competencies, or regression in skills and abilities. Examples include cognitive deficits and delays, autism, and pervasive developmental disorder. For any given child, problems often are found in multiple domains of functioning, ranging from the cognitive to the physical to the socialbehavioral to the emotional. Children who are diagnosed with one of


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these disabilities show moderate to severe impairment, and many of them require supervision in daily living. At the same time, many children respond well to a variety of interventions such as life skills training and intensive educational and occupational therapies. There are a number of types of developmental disabilities and disorders, and the severity and breadth of impairment varies widely from one child to the next (see table ., and the Appendix for annotated bibliography). Likewise, parents’ success at coping with the distress that arises from children’s impairments varies widely from one family to the next, as well as within the same family. In general, parents of children who have more disabling conditions that persist for longer periods of time show more signs of severe, chronic parenting stress. However, even among the subgroup of children with severe impairments or problems in development, parents often differ markedly from one another in their parenting stress, a point to which I return later. Individual differences in parents’ distress and successful coping are moderately stable over time. Just like parents of children who do not have developmental disabilities, the parents of disabled children who are more effective in their coping and less distressed when their children are young continue to show this pattern of adaptation later (Atkinson et al., ; Hatton, Knussen, Sloper, and Turner, ). However, there is a caveat to this general conclusion. Although this may be true on average, some parents experience remarkable decreases in distress over time as they discover new and more effective ways of coping. In contrast, others who begin the journey of parenthood by coping well come to find themselves highly distressed years later. There have been few longitudinal studies on parental adaptation in families with developmentally disabled children, let alone in families with typically developing children. One noteworthy exception is the ongoing research conducted by Hauser-Cram, Warfield, Shonkoff, and Krauss (). This team of researchers recently completed ten years of study involving the same group of mothers and fathers of children with Down syndrome or other forms of serious developmental delay. The research has provided insights that inform us not only about the nature and course of parental adaptation but also about some of the ways that others can help support families with developmentally de-

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layed or disabled children. It remains to be seen whether the same kinds of changes in and consequences of parenting stress are found in families with children who do not have disabilities. As time passed for the families in the study, there were increases in both child-domain and parent-domain areas of parenting stress. That is, over time, parents became gradually more distressed about their children’s development as well as their own health and functioning. In addition, child-domain stress was higher than parent-domain stress, even though both tended to increase over time. Furthermore, partners were similar in their patterns of change in parenting stress. On average, if the mother showed a steep increase in stress, so did the father. The researchers also found gender similarities as well as differences in patterns of adaptation. For example, although mothers and fathers showed increases in parenting stress over time, and the overall levels of stress were similar for men and women, increases in distress tended to occur most rapidly for fathers when their children were young, whereas increases were more gradual across the ten-year period for mothers. In addition, social support was most useful for coping among mothers, whereas problem-focused coping appeared to be most useful for fathers. The same study revealed another very clear finding. Children with more behavioral and emotional problems displayed at home or school had parents who reported greater distress. This result replicates one of the most consistent effects found in the research literature on parenting, and is the focus of the next section.

Behavioral and Emotional Problems Externalizing Problems Although the impact of child illness and developmental disabilities on parental adaptation is important, the majority of the research on child development and parenting stress has focused on children’s externalizing behaviors (i.e., distractibility and attention difficulties, aggression, conduct problems, and delinquency). This focus on externalizing problems is justified, given that the link with parenting stress appears to be strongest for this group of child problems. For some children, the persistence and severity of behavioral problems results in a diagnosis of


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conduct disorder (CD), oppositional defiant disorder (ODD), or attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Behavioral problems in childhood are fairly common; the prevalence of psychiatric disorders in childhood and adolescence varies from around  percent to as high as  percent, depending on the sampling and measurement approach that is used. Behavior problems can emerge early in development, and their presence is fairly stable within individuals over time. As children enter adolescence, aggressive behavioral problems become less common, and covert delinquent activities (e.g., stealing, drug use) become more common. These behavioral problems are not independent of children’s internalizing or emotional problems (i.e., anxiety, depression); children with more behavioral problems tend to have more emotional problems as well (Kazdin, ; Koot, ; Verhulst, ). There have been many studies on parenting stress and child behavioral and emotional problems; a selection of these is presented in table .. The connection between behavior problems and parenting stress can emerge as early as toddlerhood, and is firmly in place by three to four years of age, among those children who show early signs of externalizing problems (e.g., Breen and Barkley, ; Briggs-Gowan, Carter, Skuban, and Horwitz, ; Creasey and Jarvis, ; Wakschlag and Keenan, ). Furthermore, the overall severity of problem behavior matters. It is not the presence or absence of a behavioral disorder per se but the overall level of dysfunction or impairment that is associated with the degree of parenting stress found in the family. Even when the problems are not severe enough to result in a diagnosis, children with more severe externalizing problems tend to have parents who are more distressed. Among children who are referred to clinics for assessment and treatment, or who have received a diagnosis in the past, there is variation in parenting stress that is tied to severity of child symptoms. For instance, in families with children diagnosed with ADHD, parenting stress is greater if there is a larger disparity between the children’s potential achievement and adjustment (e.g., based on tests of cognitive performance) and actual achievement and adjustment (e.g., based on school grades). Also, among youth with conduct disorder symptoms (e.g., fighting, stealing), parenting stress and family dysfunction is greatest in those families in which the child or adolescent shows more

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extreme problems, such as physically assaulting other family members (Barkley et al., ; Nock and Kazdin, ). This variability in parenting stress within the population of families of children with behavioral disorders has implications for whether and how well children and parents respond to interventions that are designed to reduce problem behaviors. The effectiveness of treatment can be seriously compromised in families in which parenting stress is high (see chapter  for more on interventions and parenting stress). Children’s behavior difficulties that impact parenting stress and are themselves affected by parenting need not be limited to the realm of externalizing problems as just described. For example, consider children with severe sleep problems. Although many children with externalizing behavior problems also show problems in sleeping, there are children with sleep difficulties who show few if any signs of aggression or conduct problems. Children who resist going to bed and staying there, who are light sleepers and wake during the night, or have frequent nightmares or night terrors have parents who are more distressed. For these families, parenting stress can be reduced, and parentchild relationships can improve, with effective interventions that reduce or eliminate sleep difficulties (Gelman and King, ; Reid, Walter, and O’Leary, ).

Internalizing Problems Internalizing problems are distinct from externalizing problems, with an emphasis on disruptions or disturbance in emotions and moods. Internalizing problems include symptoms of anxiety, depression, and somatic complaints (e.g., body aches and pains). Though these problems are distinct from externalizing symptoms, many of the children who show signs of emotional difficulties also show signs of behavioral difficulties. Compared to behavior problems, the prevalence of anxiety and depression among children and adolescents is more difficult to ascertain, because these symptoms reflect children’s internal states, which cannot be easily detected or interpreted by others. A child can mask feelings of fear or despair so that parents, teachers, and mental health professionals have a more difficult time discerning that something is wrong. Nevertheless, epidemiological research indicates that internal-


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izing disorders are found in two to five percent of the population of children, with the prevalence increasing and gender differences emerging (females more so than males) in adolescence and into adulthood. Whereas there is a well-established link between parenting stress and children’s externalizing problems, there have been few studies of children’s internalizing symptoms that also have included assessments of parenting stress specifically. However, the research that does exist suggests that parenting stress is higher in families with children who have more symptoms of anxiety and depression (Goldberg et al., ; Mesman and Koot, ; Walker, ). A much larger research literature exists on the bridge between maternal and child depression. Few of the studies of parent and child internalizing problems have assessed directly parents’ self-reported perceptions of their distress in the parenting role. Nonetheless, there is a well-established connection between adult depression and parenting stress. The research on this varies in terms of the methods that were used (e.g. observations, questionnaires, clinical interviews) and the characteristics of the samples of study participants (e.g., children’s ages, socioeconomic factors, severity of parental depression). Even with this diversity in methods, these studies converge and show a link between parent and child internalizing problems that is accounted for, in part, by disruptions in parenting behaviors. For example, depressed parents are more likely to be reactive and hostile as well as overly intrusive and controlling in their interactions with their children. Others may avoid or withdraw from their family relationships altogether (Downey and Coyne, ; Langrock, Compas, Keller, Merchant, and Copeland, ; Goodman and Gotlib, ). Parenting stress plays a critical role in the link between parents’ symptoms of depression and children’s development. This was examined using data from the ongoing ALSPAC study, which includes a sample of over ten thousand women in western England and their children born during a twenty-one-month period. In the ALSPAC study, data were collected using mothers’ ratings in mailed questionnaires. Postnatal depression was assessed two months following the birth, parenting stress was measured at twenty-one months, and the child’s behavioral and emotional problems (e.g., aggression, anxiety) were assessed at four years of age. This study revealed that mothers who had

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more symptoms of postnatal depression also were higher in parenting stress nearly two years later, and had children who they rated four years later as higher in behavior problems. This link between postnatal depression symptoms and child behavior problems at age four was accounted for in part by the mothers’ parenting stress when the child was a toddler. This suggests that parenting stress may play a role in the mechanism that connects maternal depression to problems in children’s social and emotional development (Deater-Deckard and the ALSPAC Research Team, ).

Diagnosis, Stigma, and Blame My emphasis in the current chapter thus far has been on parenting stress and specific types of children’s illnesses, disabilities, and behavioral disorders. However, the connection between children’s problems or limitations and parenting stress is not restricted to those families in which disability or disorder occurs. Individual differences over a wide range of children’s cognitive, language, and social-behavioral skills are associated with parental distress, with greater child skill and ability associated with less stress (Magill-Evans and Harrison, ). The same effect is found within families in which diagnosed disabilities are found, whereby greater child impairment is accompanied by more parenting stress. For example, among children with physical disabilities, those with more severe motor impairments have parents who are more distressed. Also, among children with mental retardation, those with lower IQ scores have parents who are more distressed (O’Neil, Palisano, and Westcott, ; Ong, Chandran, and Peng, ). What matters most is the overall functioning of a particular child, regardless of disability “status.” At the same time, parenting a child with serious delays or disabilities (along with the tests, diagnoses, and treatments that accompany the experience) introduces additional stressors beyond those that arise from the child’s behavioral, emotional, or cognitive impairments and attributes. Testing prenatally or postnatally for child diseases, illnesses, syndromes, disabilities, and disorders is not taken lightly by anyone, in part because of its implications for stress and coping for parents. Parenting stress is likely to be acute at the time when assessment and diag-


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nosis are occurring, with parental adjustment improving over time for most (Mastroyannopoulou et al., ). The decisions regarding whether to have tests or assessments done, and how to interpret the results, ideally are made in collaboration with medical and psychological health professionals who can provide accurate information. This information allows parents to make correct and timely decisions at a time when they are highly distressed. But even under ideal conditions for such a stressful situation, there are risks. Few tests have perfect accuracy, so there is always the possibility of a misdiagnosis. This is a major concern, particularly if the intervention that is called for involves medication or surgery. In addition, there are risks attached to diagnosing a disease or disorder before the child is showing any symptoms. Such early diagnosis or misdiagnosis contributes to parenting stress in its own way, above and beyond the effects of the child’s illness or impairment (Baroni, Anderson, and Mischler, ). The impact of testing and diagnosis on parental stress and coping interacts with parents’ expectations about and explanations for the most likely outcomes. Consider for a moment the families of children who have serious, chronic illnesses or disabilities over which the parents have no control. For them, accepting the diagnosis is associated with better parental adjustment, whereas resistance to or denial of the diagnosis is more likely to result in greater distress in the long term. At the same time, when a misdiagnosis occurs, the parents must cope with this mistake, in addition to any illness or impairment that follows. In these situations, distress is more likely to persist if the parent blames someone else for the mistake. And regardless of the accuracy of diagnosis, parents often perceive a stigma attached to having a child with a disability or disorder. Parents’ expectations and experiences involving perceived and actual stigmatization of their children also are crucial (Hall, Bobrow, and Marteau, , ; Sheeran, Marvin, and Pianta, ). Stigmatization influences how the research, intervention, and social communities think about and attempt to help and support families. Rather than blaming parents, the realization that parental wellbeing is an integral part of a child’s long-term healthy outcome should spur us on to provide access to effective interventions for the families who need them. Some parents manage to cope well, but they all need

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support and help from time to time—help from medical professionals and therapists, from family, friends, and neighbors, and from the community. Parental functioning will most likely improve when the outcome of testing and diagnosis results in increased access to resources, ranging from information to social support to effective intervention and therapy. Ultimately, the goals of diagnosis and intervention are to accurately assess what needs to be done to minimize or eliminate deleterious effects, and to provide resources (including but not limited to treatments) that are necessary to achieve the desired outcomes for parents and children alike. When assessment and intervention work, it is in part because they meet the needs of the parents and family as well as those of the child.

Temperament I turn now to a discussion of typical individual differences between children that are associated with parenting stress. There are a number of dimensions of individual differences in children’s reactivity and selfregulation in different environments. These are referred to collectively as temperament. Differences between children in the extent to and ways in which they respond to their environments and experiences are detectable from early in life; these are fairly stable and are influenced by biological as well as environmental factors. Among young children, temperament includes predominant mood—both positive (e.g., pleasure, joy) and negative (e.g., fear, anger)—and the extent to which the individual exercises self-control, such as persisting with a task, regulating attention, and planning thoughts and actions (Rothbart and Bates, ). Infants and children who are in a fearful or angry mood more often than not, who are quick to react negatively and strongly and have difficulty calming down, and who have poor self-control are more likely to have parents that report higher levels of parenting stress (Beebe, Casey, and Pinto-Martin, ; Ostberg and Hagekull, ). This effect may be particularly pronounced for mothers who are struggling with depression (Gelfand et al., ), or for those with infants who are suffering from the lasting effects of severe birth complications (Field, ; Stiefel, Plunkett, and Meisels, ; Washington, Minde,


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and Goldberg, ). Consistent with a Parent-Child-Relationship or P-C-R theory of parenting stress, the link with child temperament is strongest for the child domain, which involves the degree to which the parent views the child as being overly demanding and hard to manage. However, the connection between child temperament and parenting stress is complex. Child temperament certainly matters, but its effects on subsequent child behavior and parenting stress depend in part on how parents respond to their children’s personal attributes (Bates, Pettit, Dodge, and Ridge, ). Consider for example the temperament and the development of conscience and self-control or regulation in early childhood (Kochanska, a). Fearful children are more likely to show optimal self-control and conscience (e.g., patience, resistance to temptation) if their mothers respond to misbehaviors using gentle discipline methods, rather than methods that are punitive and potentially frightening to the child. Among children who are bold and fearless, self-control and conscience are best promoted by warmth and closeness in the parent-child relationship rather than a softening of discipline. Furthermore, although certain child behaviors (e.g., poor selfcontrol, anger, fearfulness, fearlessness) may be more difficult for many parents to cope with and manage, parents react in different ways to the same characteristics. There are individual differences in parents’ own attributes that may make it easier or more difficult for them to adapt to a child who is behaviorally challenging. There also are cultural differences in parents’ attitudes about and interpretations of children’s behaviors (as I describe later in chapter ). In addition, the same parent can change over time in how she or he responds to the same child attributes. For children with temperaments that can put them at risk for behavioral and emotional problems (e.g., emotionally reactive, anxious, inattentive), the best outcomes are most likely to emerge in families in which the parent-child relationships are warm and supportive and the parents are effective and influential socializing agents.

Gender and Age When the goal has been to predict parenting stress from child characteristics, researchers have found that the child’s individual attributes,

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skills, limitations, and problems are far more influential than child age or gender. There does not appear to be a straightforward or robust association between parenting stress and child age. A number of studies focusing on parents of pre-adolescent children have reported more parenting stress among parents of younger children (e.g., DeaterDeckard and Scarr, ; Mash and Johnston, ; Tarbell and Kosmach, ). But not all studies show an association between child age and parenting stress, and when an effect is found it usually is small in magnitude or not linear (e.g., Orr, Cameron, Dobson, and Day, ). One of the few longitudinal studies of parenting stress in families of toddlers and preschoolers showed no changes over time in average levels of parenting stress, and individual differences in parenting stress were highly stable (Dyson, ). Nonetheless, child age matters enormously in terms of what it is that children do, and how those behaviors influence parental distress. Parents’ expectations for child compliance and self-control become more prominent as the child gets older, because they are aware of the child’s developing capabilities. This has implications for the kinds of appraisals that parents make about their children’s behaviors, which in turn can influence parental distress. In addition, the effects of age on parenting stress may lie not in a child’s chronological age per se but in the discrepancy between a child’s age and her or his cognitive, emotional, and behavioral maturity. An example of this is deficits in cognitive abilities. As already described, parenting stress is higher for those with children who are cognitively delayed or who have permanent deficits in cognitive skills that make their abilities to solve problems atypical compared to other children of the same age. With regard to child gender, there is evidence from many studies that parents behave differently toward their sons and daughters, particularly with respect to gender-stereotyped activities and the use of physical discipline (Lytton and Romney, ; Maccoby and Martin, ). Some studies have shown that parents of boys report more parenting stress (e.g., Tarbell and Kosmach, ). However, this does not necessarily imply that it is the child’s biological sex per se that is causally influencing parental distress. A more likely explanation is that this gender difference arises because boys are more likely than girls to


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exhibit behavioral problems (e.g., noncompliance, aggression, hyperactivity). Not all studies show robust child gender effects. In studies that rely on large samples of families drawn from their communities, child gender differences in parenting stress are rarely found. In addition, longitudinal studies have shown that child gender effects on parenting stress that may exist when children are young can dissipate over time (e.g., Hauser-Cram et al., ). Finally, the discrepancy between a child’s biological sex and her or his gender-typical behavior may be important. It could be that in some families parents become distressed when their children show gender atypical behaviors. This remains a question to be answered in future research.

Conclusion Children influence, and are influenced by, their parents’ distress and difficulties in parenting. The evidence from the studies reviewed in this and the previous chapter converges in several ways. Children who come into the world or acquire over time difficulties or problems in their health and development (physical or psychological in nature) have parents who are more distressed. In addition, parenting stress is greater in families with children who are more reactive and have poorer self-control, who are more aggressive and noncompliant, who are inattentive and hyperactive, and who are anxious or depressed. These aspects of children’s cognitions, emotions, and behaviors are not independent. Some children show problems in multiple domains of development, and their parents are likely to be the most distressed. Thus there remains little doubt regarding the “whether and what”— the existence of associations between parenting stress, parenting behavior, and parent and child adaptation. What does remain is the “how”—understanding the causal mechanisms that underlie these associations between parent and child adaptation. This question sets the stage for the next two chapters.

4

Parenting Behavior and the Parent-Child Relationship

The way parents feel about themselves, their situations, and their children goes hand in hand with the way parents behave toward their children. Several decades of research have shown a very consistent pattern of results. Stressful life circumstances and individual differences can operate to constrain parents’ opportunities to enjoy and be effective in their caregiving roles. The majority of the research has focused on distal, general indicators of stressors in the family, such as inadequate income or marital discord. However, more studies over the past few decades have begun to include assessments of the proximal psychological experiences pertaining to parents’ thoughts and feelings about their own parenting and about their children. Although parenting stress is assessed in different ways in these studies, the findings converge. Parents who report higher levels of stress in the parenting role are more likely to be harsher and more authoritarian in their parenting behavior, and to feel less involved in their children’s lives. Distressed parents also are less likely to provide the necessary stimulation that promotes their children’s optimal social-emotional and cognitive development (Adamakos, Ryan, Ullman, Pascoe, et al., ; Belsky, Woodworth, and Crnic, ; Conger, Patterson, and Ge, ; Crnic and Low, ; Deater-Deckard, ; McBride and Mills, ; Rodgers, ; Stoiber and Houghton, ). ▪ 74 ▪


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Parenting stress disrupts some of the psychological mechanisms that link parenting and children’s development. These disruptions affect emotional aspects of the parent-child relationship, the practices that parents use to socialize and teach their children, and parents’ thought processes (i.e., social cognitions). Parenting stress becomes a critical public health issue when it is severe enough to put the child at risk of being harmed.

The Parent-Child Relationship Humans have a basic need to feel accepted by their caregivers, and to feel safe and protected. Although parents may behave in very different ways when compared across families, communities, cultures, and nations, children’s perceptions and interpretations of their parents’ behaviors likely work in much the same way around the world. If the child feels rejected by her or his parents, that child is more likely to show problems in development and signs of maladjustment (Bowlby, ; Rohner, ).

Parent-Child “Co-regulation” The psychological mechanisms that link the emotions and behaviors of the child and parent play important functions in survival and adaptation by serving to optimize the physical, social, emotional, and cognitive development of the child. This set of mechanisms involves arousal and distress on the part of both the parent and the child. Parenting stress is a part of these systems. Adaptive parenting is a balancing act between the child and the parent. This does not always require conscious awareness but almost always involves emotions. Both the parent and child are motivated to maintain their own positive emotional states, but they differ in an important way. The child is not self-sufficient and requires assistance from the parent to have her own needs met. Younger children are highly dependent on their parents for meeting their own needs, including getting assistance with returning to a positive emotional state following some frustrating or upsetting experience. If you are an infant and you are frightened, hungry, cold, or angry, you can cry. If you are a

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four year old and your parent is busy but you want her attention, you can whine. If you are fourteen and you want your parents to know that they do not understand you, you can shout. In these instances, the parent may be striving to maintain his or her own positive emotional state (e.g., relaxation, contentment), but the child’s bids for attention interrupt and create new emotional states for the parent that are aversive (e.g., annoyance, anger, fear). The parent is motivated then to respond to the child’s bids for attention in some way, in order to reduce or eliminate these aversive emotions and return to a more comfortable emotional state. The parent is not being selfish, just as the child’s sometimes noxious behaviors typically are not intended to upset the parent. One of the reasons that dependency on caregivers is so prolonged is that our brains are complex. Brain growth takes time, and healthy functioning depends heavily on experience and stimulation. Pregnancy lasts long enough for the infant’s brain and other organ systems to be “ready enough” to face the world, without lasting so long that it destroys the mother’s body. Newborn infants are ill equipped for controlling their own environments in order to reduce or increase stimulation, avoid frightening or frustrating experiences, or soothe themselves when distressed. Parents are met with the task of responding to their infants’ changing emotions and behaviors within moments after the baby is born. Just as a child needs her parent to help her regulate or control her own emotional states, the parent needs for the child to become good at self-regulating these emotional states, because the vigilance and caregiving that is required is so demanding. If ten, fifteen, and twenty year olds needed as much soothing as two year olds, parenting as we know it would be wildly unpopular (and we would be in trouble as a species). The co-regulation (i.e., shared control) of emotional states between parent and child is a critical part of the parent-child relationship and the child’s social-emotional development (Field, ; Schore, ). In development, human interaction in predictable, long-lasting interpersonal relationships is an essential part of the implementation of psychological systems of self-control. As infants and young children, we have shared experiences with our parents and other people during these dyadic interactions. These experiences involve many aspects of the external world and aspects of our internal, mental world (i.e., ob-


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jects and events, attention, memory, knowledge, emotions). These are intersubjective experiences shared between parent and child, involving joint attention to the same experience, as well as joint thoughts, beliefs, and emotions. These experiences of shared or co-regulated internal states in the parent-child relationship have an impact beyond the moment. Over time, we come to internalize beliefs, rules, standards, and expectations, based in part on our understanding of what our parents think and feel (Demetriou, ). Attachment and acceptance. The clearest example of co-regulation in the family is the parent-child attachment system. Attachment promotes survival through the establishment and maintenance of an enduring emotional bond between the child and the parent. A parent must be attuned to the child’s needs in order to provide an optimal environment for that child’s health and development. The parent must be able to perceive when the child is in need, and must respond in a timely and appropriate way; this requires sensitivity and responsiveness. To do so, the parent must also be motivated to care for the child; this is the important role of love and warmth felt toward the child. The child’s needs are many and varied, including a need for soothing due to fear or some other negative emotion, for interaction and engagement, for food, and for protection. In turn, as the child comes to have her needs met in a consistent way, she will develop expectations and beliefs that other people are trustworthy and dependable—a secure “internal working model” of relationships. This is an essential developmental task not only for the child but for the parent-child dyad (Bowlby, ). Although nearly all children develop attachment relationships with their parents, the security of those attachment relationships differs widely within families as well as between families. Researchers are able to get some idea of the security of attachment within a parentchild dyad by observing interactions between the child and parent when they are reunited after a brief separation. Most young children become frightened and upset when separated from a parent, but most are relieved and easily soothed when reunited with the parent. However, a significant minority of young children shows behaviors that are indicative of an insecure attachment relationship. They may or may not become upset when separated from a parent, they may ignore or

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avoid the parent upon reunion, or they may be inconsolable even after the parent has attempted to soothe them. Still others may show inconsistent and unpredictable patterns of reactions to separation and reunion, suggesting more serious disruptions in their attachment relationships (Ainsworth, Blehar, Waters, and Wall, ). The emerging consensus based on many studies of attachment in infancy and early childhood is that security of attachment is important to the development of healthy, adaptive emotions and social behaviors. Parental sensitivity and responsiveness are important components of the attachment relationship, along with children’s attributes. Parenting stress increases the likelihood of disruptions in parental sensitivity and responsiveness, and the young child is more likely to show signs of insecurity in the attachment relationship. This link between parenting stress and insecure attachment is strongest in families in which the parent faces a number of other challenges, such as living in poverty or coping with family histories of violence, abuse, or neglect (Coyle, Roggman, and Newland, ; Crnic and Low, ; Douglas, ; Harmer et al., ; Jarvis and Creasey, ; Ostberg, ; Phelps, Belsky, and Crnic, ; Scher and Mayseless, ; Teti, Nakagawa, Das, and Wirth, ). By comparison, studies of more severely disrupted or disorganized attachment and maternal depression (one of the strongest correlates of parenting stress) have not been as conclusive. This is because there are subgroups of highly distressed parent-child pairs that show distinct patterns of interaction that may have different implications for parenting stress and children’s outcomes. For instance, some depressed mothers have a tendency to be hostile and harsh in their caregiving behavior, whereas others tend to exhibit fearful and helpless behaviors while interacting with their children. At the same time, some of the children of depressed mothers show behaviors indicative of an insecure attachment, whereas others may seem secure. This variability makes it more difficult to identify systematic effects linking parental distress and mental health with infant attachment security (Lyons-Ruth et al., ). The parent and child each have a job to do in the attachment relationship in order for it to function well. The child must express needs to the parent in a comprehensible and predictable way, and the parent


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must determine, attend to, and fulfill the child’s needs in a comprehensible and predictable way. At the same time, the parent must be able to allow the child to function on her own and to explore the world around her so that she can develop normally. This system works well for the majority of families because the child is able to place demands on the parent and the parent is able to detect and respond to those demands so that the child’s needs are met. This system works, in part, because of stress processes. To illustrate this idea, consider the role of crying in infancy. When an infant becomes frightened or hungry, he will cry; he does not yet have a spoken language to communicate his distress, but he does not need language for this purpose. Crying is very arousing and potentially distressing to those who hear it. The acoustic features of infant cries—particularly if the infants are at risk for problems in health and development—lead to a physiological stress reaction in adults. Crying works because it leads to arousal in parents. This emotional response provides the motivation for parents to meet the infant’s needs and thus improve chances of survival. Studies of adults’ subjective experiences of listening to crying infants have demonstrated that we are aware that listening to the cry is an unpleasant and potentially distressing experience (Zeskind et al., ). It is likely that for some parents persistent infant crying leads to longer lasting parenting stress. The role of infant crying in parent-infant communication is just one example of the numerous experiences in the daily lives of parents that can contribute to the development of parenting stress. Stress mechanisms are emotional mechanisms, and are a fundamental part of parenting and the parent-child relationship because they have been and continue to be fundamental to our survival. Thus individual differences in coping with parenting stress have been and continue to be a critical part of adjustment to child rearing.

Child-rearing Practices Warmth toward and acceptance of a child is conveyed through parents’ child-rearing practices. Parents who are themselves distressed and who report greater stress in the parenting role are more likely to be punitive, hostile, harsh, and rejecting in their behavior toward their children

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(Baker, Heller, and Henker, ; Calam, Bolton, and Roberts, ; Lovejoy, Weis, O’Hare, and Rubin, ; Peris and Baker, ). A number of studies across a variety of cultures and age groups point to a straightforward conclusion—children who interpret their parents’ behaviors as emotionally rejecting are at greater risk for developing behavioral and emotional problems, including various forms of psychopathology such as conduct disorder, substance abuse, and depression (Rohner and Britner, ). The day-to-day interactions between parents and their children convey messages about how those children are regarded by their parents. Daily stressors in the lives of families are known to disrupt patterns of parent-child interaction. With more parenting stress comes a host of planned and reactive parenting behaviors and practices that are harsher and less consistent, compared to the parenting seen in families in which stress is low. These hostile exchanges between parents and their children are especially common in families in which parenting stress is high and the children are showing early signs of escalations in aggressive behavioral problems (Crnic and Low, ; Patterson, ). Parenting style. Research spanning five decades has established a connection between parenting behaviors and children’s developmental outcomes (e.g., emotions, social behaviors, cognitive skills). These studies have relied on a variety of types of samples, ranging from large community samples to small samples of children and parents who use mental health clinics. This research has shown that children and adolescents who are more socially competent and emotionally welladjusted live in homes in which their parents are involved, supportive, consistent, and not harsh and reactive. Authoritative parenting is defined as supportive behavior coupled with firm and consistent establishment and enforcement of rules and standards of behavior. It has been linked to the most positive outcomes in the cognitive and social-emotional domains of human development. This happens, in part, because children of warm, involved parents are more likely to be open to their parents’ socialization influences, and because their parents model self-controlled and responsive ways of solving problems and interacting with others. In addition, children whose parents are invested, consistent, and caring are more likely to interpret their parents’ behaviors as being indicative of love


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and acceptance. Parenting that is more reactive and overly harsh (i.e., authoritarian) is more likely to be interpreted by children as rejection. It also teaches children problematic approaches to problem solving and social interaction (Baumrind, ; Maccoby and Martin, ; Rothbaum and Weisz, ; Patterson, ; Rohner, ). Authoritative parenting is, by definition, active engagement in the parenting role. This includes showing concern for and warmth toward the child, but also includes clearly communicating and frequently reinforcing expectations about how the child should behave. Thus, when the child does misbehave, there are consequences. However, authoritative parents also are quick to reward and reinforce their children’s appropriate and competent behaviors. In contrast, authoritarian parenting is typified by harsh, reactive, and sometimes inconsistent child-rearing practices. On average, parents who show authoritative approaches to child rearing have the least parenting stress, whereas those showing elevated levels of distress tend to be more authoritarian in their parenting behaviors (Aunola, Nurmi, Onatsu-Arvilommi, and Pulkkinen, ; Emery and Tuer, ; Ohan, Leung, and Johnston, ; Reitman, Currier, Hupp, Rhode, Murphy, and O’Callaghan, ). Although the findings just described are robust, it is noteworthy that there are likely cultural differences in the connections between parenting behavior and children’s developmental outcomes. The vast majority of the studies that have been done have focused on middleclass European Americans; a similarly large research literature on nonwhite families might yield different results. Furthermore, parenting practices interact with children’s own attributes (e.g., temperament) in causing the differences in children’s social, emotional, behavioral, and cognitive outcomes that we see. It is important to consider these transactions between cultural contexts, parenting environments, and children’s individual differences. Discipline practices. Much of the research on parents’ behaviors with their young children has focused on discipline. Discipline includes parenting behaviors that are used to punish a child for misbehaving and to reward a child for behaving appropriately. Although most research and theory have focused on the effectiveness of the various ways in which parents respond to child misbehavior, the importance of proactive parenting must also be considered. Proactive or pre-

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emptive strategies include parenting behaviors that are used before a child misbehaves, in order to reduce the likelihood of future misbehavior and maximize the likelihood of future appropriate behavior. Some parents carefully monitor the environment and attempt to circumvent potential child misbehavior by redirecting the child’s behavior and attention before the misbehavior can occur. Parents who do this tend to have children who are more self-controlled and well adjusted (Dishion and McMahon, ; Gardner, Sonuga-Barke, and Sayal, ; Kerr and Stattin, ). Timing of parental behaviors is important. To be effective, the proactive or reactive parenting behavior must occur in a way that makes clear to the child the contingent association between the behavior and the consequences. Discipline can be thought of as a planful set of strategies, but it also includes behaviors that represent parents’ unplanned reactions to their children’s actions. For example, a parent may respond to a child’s misbehavior by shouting first and then doing something else such as giving a “time out” or spanking. Or a parent may inadvertently laugh or smile at first when the child misbehaves, before stepping in to redirect or punish the child. Parents’ responses to children’s behaviors do not have to be planfully carried out in order to operate as powerful punishers or reinforcers. For instance, in families in which children show persistent or increasing levels of aggression and noncompliance, parent-child interactions typically include highly reactive parenting that is inconsistent and intermittently permissive and harsh. In addition, it is when parents react in anger and without self-control that physical abuse is most likely to occur—even if that intense reaction occurs as part of a planned response to a child’s behavior. Timing is important, but so are the parent’s emotions at the time that discipline is delivered (Deater-Deckard and Dodge, ; Patterson, ). As children mature, gain competencies, and become more autonomous, the strategies that most parents use to redirect or punish misbehavior become more verbal, with greater emphasis on reasoning and explanation. There are also big differences between parents in the types of proactive strategies and discipline methods they use, based on the parents’ values and beliefs, their knowledge about their children, and the information that they have about the effectiveness of various


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strategies (Holden, ; Kuczynski, Kochanska, Radke-Yarow, and Girnius-Brown, ). Of the many methods of child discipline, physical punishment has received the greatest attention because of its links with parental distress, child abuse potential, and child adjustment problems. Various forms of physical discipline (e.g., spanking, swatting, paddling) and restraint are most common during the toddler years. Physical punishment is widely used by parents, and the majority of adults in the United States believe that it is acceptable parenting behavior. Most parents in this country use physical punishment at least on occasion, and many of these do so on a regular basis (Milburn and Conrad, ; Socolar and Stein, ). A number of studies have demonstrated that physical punishment is used more frequently by African American parents compared to European American parents. However, the nature and consequences of this ethnic group difference remain largely unexplored, compared to the much larger body of research on discipline practices in middle-class European American households (e.g., Kelley, Power, and Wimbush, ). Some of our collaborative research has examined the links between stressful family circumstances, physical punishment, and children’s behavioral problems, with an emphasis on the exploration of ethnic group similarities and differences. We have investigated these processes as being part of multiple risks for aggressive behavior problems, ranging from children’s individual attributes (e.g., temperament) to peer environments, to family socioeconomic resources to parenting practices. Within this broader framework, we have focused specifically on identifying whether and how parental use of harsh physical discipline connects with the development of children’s aggression and conduct problems in middle childhood and adolescence (Deater-Deckard and Dodge, ; Lansford, Deater-Deckard, Dodge, Bates, and Pettit, in press). This research has been based on data from the ongoing Child Development Project or CDP, a longitudinal study of about six hundred youth and their families (Dodge, Pettit, and Bates, ). The study began when the children were four years old; they are now young adults. Prior to or during the first year of kindergarten, the children’s

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mothers were interviewed about a wide variety of potential risk factors for their children’s social and emotional development. Part of this interview included questions pertaining to the mother’s use of physical punishment and its frequency and severity. Mothers also answered questions regarding the child’s history of experiencing physical abuse. In addition to completing the interviews, mothers provided ratings on a number of questionnaires assessing their discipline behaviors and their children’s behavioral and emotional problems. In the school setting, teachers and peers provided reports of children’s social-emotional adjustment, and once the children were older, their own self-reported problems were gathered. The CDP study showed that children who were spanked more often and more severely were more likely to be rated by mothers, teachers, and other children as having more conduct problems and as being more aggressive. This finding is consistent with many prior studies (Gershoff, ; Straus, ). The magnitude of this effect was modest when the entire sample of children was considered. A different story emerged when we studied the African American and European American children separately. We found that among the African American families, children’s externalizing behavior problems and physical punishment were unrelated. In contrast, we found that more spanking was associated with more child behavior problems for European American children. This finding was consistent from middle childhood to late adolescence, and we have since found the same result in a different sample of African American and European American families. Others have found the same pattern for African American and European American families (for a review, see Deater-Deckard, Dodge, and Sorbring, in press). The most recent replication comes from the longitudinal Pittsburgh Youth Study (Farrington, Loeber, and Stouthamer-Loeber, ). In that study,  percent of the European American boys who were spanked showed violent behavior later, compared to  percent of the European American boys who were not spanked. In contrast, the prevalence of violent behavior among African American boys did not vary as a function of whether or not they had been spanked in childhood ( percent if spanked, versus  percent if not spanked). This pattern of ethnic group differences is not limited to parental physical punishment and children’s behavior problems. For


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instance, authoritative parents’ behaviors (e.g., encouraging achievement, using reasoning) may not be related to achievement motivation and academic success in the same ways for ethnic majority and minority children and adolescents (Basic Behavioral Science Task Force of the National Advisory Mental Health Council, ; Whaley, ). There are meaningful cultural group differences in the standards and beliefs that people hold regarding appropriate parenting practices. These norms influence what a child construes from his or her parents’ behaviors. Accordingly, it is the meaning that a child applies to physical discipline that is important in explaining the influences that this discipline strategy has on the child (Deater-Deckard and Dodge, ). If a child views this behavior as harsh and rejecting, then the behavior is more likely to have negative consequences for the child. It is when children perceive their parents’ discipline behaviors as harsh and rejecting that we find higher levels of child behavioral and emotional problems (Rohner, Kean, and Cournoyer, ). The emotional tone or quality of the parent-child relationship is a critical part of how children interpret their parents’ discipline behaviors. In the CDP study, higher amounts of physical punishment were linked with higher levels of child aggressive behavior only in those families in which mothers were observed to lack warmth in their interactions with their children. This was true regardless of ethnicity. The same result has been obtained in several other studies (e.g., McLoyd and Smith, ). It is likely that it is the combination of physical punishment and cold or harsh emotion that leads children to interpret such parental behavior as “rejection.” Consistent with this interpretation are data from several studies, including the CDP, showing that there are not ethnic group differences in the links between physical abuse and children’s behavioral problems. It is likely that abusive parenting is interpreted in much the same way across cultures, and is viewed by children around the world as indicative of parental rejection (Deater-Deckard et al., in press). A skeptic could argue that these findings are an artifact, whereby the most common measures of “positive” and “harsh” parenting are based on European middle-class views (Kelley et al., ), or that there are not any meaningful cultural group differences within the United States in the links between parenting and child behavior

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(Rowe, Vazsonyi, and Flannery, ). The answer is not yet clear; more research focusing on cultural variations in children’s perceptions of parenting behavior is needed before stronger conclusions can be drawn. Child abuse. Even though parents are given leeway in deciding how to rear their own children, communities and societies generally do not tolerate parents’ committing abuse or maltreatment. There is little tolerance for abusive parenting because the stakes are so high; children’s psychological and physical well-being are severely compromised. Abuse can result in disfigurement, long-lasting or permanent psychological damage, or death. Rather than reiterate the findings from the large literature on child maltreatment (see Cicchetti, Toth, and Maughan, ), I will instead focus on a few salient points regarding parenting stress specifically. Physical abuse involves restraining, striking, or otherwise punishing the child in a way that leads to physical harm. Authorities responsible for monitoring and preventing child abuse in their communities typically rely on evidence such as lasting bruises and abrasions, wounds, or broken bones, in addition to accounts from perpetrators, victims, and eyewitnesses. By comparison, psychological abuse is more widespread, though more difficult to detect. Whereas its effects are not as obvious, they may be more insidious than neglect or physical abuse. Sexual abuse is defined as any kind of sexual contact with a minor, regardless of whether it is accompanied by coercion or force (GershaterMolko, Lutzker, and Sherman, ). Parents or caregivers are sometimes the abusers, but this is not always the case. Furthermore, abuse comes in different forms, although many children who experience one form of abuse experience multiple forms because these different abusive behaviors often co-occur within the same family. For example, many children who are abused also are neglected, whereby their basic needs of comfort, shelter, food, and supervision are not met. Parenting stress is implicated as one of many factors leading up to incidents of abuse and maltreatment of children (Chan, ; Holden and Banez, ; Mash and Johnston, ). Parents who experience persistent negative emotions (e.g., fear, anger, sadness) and who have a difficult time controlling those negative emotions are at greater risk for carrying out child abuse when parenting stress is elevated. This con-


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nection between reactive anger, parenting stress, and child abuse has been found in a number of studies examining children of different ages and living in different cultures (Balge and Milner, ; Lam, ; Mammen, Kolko, and Pilkonis, ; Rodriguez and Green, ). Although parenting stress is usually present when an adult abuses a child, it is important to realize that stress is not a necessary precipitating factor on its own. Most parents experience parenting stress, but they do not abuse their children. On the other hand, child maltreatment can occur when the parent believes that what he or she is doing is appropriate and effective. The parent may have strongly held attitudes about how children should be treated and disciplined. Sometimes these values conflict with the prevailing beliefs of a culture, society, or community; such values sometimes include endorsement of practices that most regard as abusive. It is when beliefs about the appropriateness of harsh parenting practices are coupled with reactive anger and parenting stress that the likelihood of abuse is maximized (Crouch and Behl, ). Thus, reducing the incidence of child abuse is not only a matter of reducing parental distress. It also requires changes in parental attitudes and beliefs, and education about alternative methods of discipline.

Parents’ Social Cognitions Just as significant as the link between parenting stress and behavior is the parent’s perceptions, attitudes, and appraisals of possible responses to stressors (be they controlled or involuntary). Cognitions are an essential element of the parenting stress process, and they provide part of the foundation of the bridge between stress and parenting behavior. Much of the research on parents’ social cognitions emphasizes two related levels of thinking. The first is schematic or implicit cognition, which operates outside of conscious awareness. The second is event-dependent or explicit cognition, which works at the level of conscious awareness and involves reflection and manipulation of thoughts. A variety of types of cognitions are present at each level, such as the parent’s perceptions of her or his experiences, causal explanations for why things happen (e.g., attributions), and evaluations of whether things are as they should or could be (e.g., self-efficacy be-

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liefs). Individual differences in social cognitions have implications for the way parents respond to children’s behaviors and think about their own feelings about their children (Bugental and Johnston, ).

Knowledge, Goals, Attributions In parenting, knowledge really is power. Most parents accumulate this knowledge and apply it every day in their parenting, without being aware of it. Effective parenting that meets the needs of the child and leads to optimal developmental outcomes (e.g., social competence, mental health) is most likely to occur when the parent has detailed knowledge and understanding of his or her child’s attributes. Understanding a child also involves knowledge about the situations that are most likely to create problems for the child or parent, including an appreciation of how the child will react under particular conditions. Underlying knowledge about the child and the way in which that knowledge is applied as the parent responds to a child’s needs or difficulties may be as important as the types of parenting behaviors a parent shows (Grusec, Goodnow, and Kuczynski, ; Hastings and Grusec, ). Knowing about and understanding a particular child’s tendencies is no doubt informed by the parent’s more general knowledge about what is and is not “typical” for children of the same gender and age. Being well-prepared and being knowledgeable about parenthood and children’s development are linked with lower levels of hostile reactive parenting and better child social-emotional and cognitive outcomes. The impact of knowledge and preparation on effective parenting may be even stronger among groups of parents who are at heightened risk for experiencing parenting stress, such as teenage mothers (Dukewich, Borkowski, and Whitman, ; Miller, Miceli, Whitman, and Borkowski, ). Parents use knowledge about a child when they are noticing and making appraisals about a child’s behavior. Recall from the first chapter the description of the cognitive stress model (Lazarus, ), in which the individual must notice a potential stressor, use existing knowledge to ascertain whether this stressor is threatening or disturbing, and then invoke, evaluate, and modify coping strategies if a stress reaction occurs. Part of the appraisal process involves the formation of


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goals and assessment of whether attainment of those goals is being thwarted. For a parent, this goal may be a very specific one in the heat of the moment (e.g., “I’m going to get this child to stop crying”), or may be a very global one that unfolds over a long period of time (e.g., “I want my child to grow up to be happy and self-sufficient”). Does the parent form a goal that emphasizes the parent’s own needs, the child’s needs, or the need of maintaining a positive relationship with the child? The goal that is formed can strongly determine how it is that a parent responds to a child’s behavior (Hastings and Grusec, ). Distress can work to limit the individual’s ability to effectively control attention and conscious processing of information that is part and parcel of goal formation, appraisal, and regulation of the stress reaction (Aspinwall, ). Chronic parenting stress can constrain or bias a parent’s access to knowledge, thereby making it harder for the parent to accurately identify the cause of a stressor or to evaluate whether his or her attempts at coping are working. In addition, distressed parents are more likely to attend to and think about the stressor itself, as well as the upsetting emotions that accompany the stressor. They are more likely to place blame on their children or themselves when making attributions about why their children behave the way they do. Importantly, children of distressed parents also show these patterns in their social cognitions. For example, depressed parents may be modeling all sorts of counterproductive thought processes for their children, and their interactions with their children tend to be more conflicted and unpredictable—all of which may promote similar biases in their children’s ways of thinking about their worlds (Garber and Martin, ). There also may be genetic influences on social cognitions that are transmitted across generations, through biological constraints on attention and memory mechanisms. The most widely studied bias in parent thinking is the tendency to view children’s annoying or inappropriate behaviors as arising from within the children themselves. Over the course of a difficult interaction with their children, parents are more likely to infer that the children’s annoying behaviors are caused by a willful intention to misbehave. Parents who make such attributions are more likely to get angry and to use more reactive and harsh discipline strategies. They also may be more likely to have an external locus of control, whereby they view

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other people and events as being primarily responsible for the things that happen to them. In general, this research suggests that parents who rely on these types of thoughts (and particularly those who easily become angry) tend to be more harsh and reactive. They are less likely to ponder the possible situational factors (e.g., illness, tiredness) that could be causing their children’s noxious behaviors. They also are more likely to feel powerless as parents, a component of self-concept that can further promulgate negative feelings and harsh reactive parenting (Bugental and Johnston, ; Dix, , ; Gondoli and Silverberg, ; Slep and O’Leary, ). The connection between parents’ beliefs about their own effectiveness and attributions about the causes of their children’s misbehaviors arises in part from the parents’ own childhood experiences. Adults’ memories of how conflict was resolved when they were children and the security of their attachment relationships may be particularly salient (Grusec and Mammone, ). Data from the  children in the Child Development Project have been informative. These data have shown that family stress (measured broadly, including sociodemographic factors like single parenthood and stressful life events) accounted for the well-established link between low socioeconomic status (lower income, less education) and use of harsher discipline practices (Pinderhughes et al., ). More to the point, the connection between family stress and harsh parenting was explained by parents’ thoughts and emotions, including their hostile attributions about and perceptions of the child’s behavior (e.g., “Children misbehave to make their parents angry”) and their emotional distress. Parents with less education, less income, and fewer social resources tended to use harsher methods of discipline, in part because they experienced higher levels of chronic stress. Furthermore, this chronic stress contributed to negative emotions that, when accompanied by hostile beliefs about their children’s misbehaviors, promoted harsher parenting. The data from the CDP study demonstrate that stressors, emotions, social cognitions, and behaviors operate together in the parenting processes underlying the development of children’s problem behaviors. The link between low parental distress and optimal parenting behavior probably has its roots in maternal social cognitions that exist prior to the child’s birth. The way in which a parent thinks about the


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baby before birth is integral to the formation of a responsive and sensitive parent-child relationship. During the pregnancy, some parents think little about the individuality of the fetus or about the new relationship that is being formed with the child before birth. In contrast, some parents think of the fetus as someone who will arrive with her or his own distinctive attributes and characteristics. As it turns out, there is wide variation in the extent to which expectant mothers engage in thinking about the individuality of their babies. Furthermore, pregnant mothers who have concepts of their infants’ individualities are more likely to be sensitive and responsive in their caregiving, and to have infants with secure attachment relationships (Benoit, Parker, and Zeanah, ). A speculative hypothesis is that maternal distress during pregnancy interferes with the mother’s developing beliefs about her baby—interference that may increase the likelihood of problems arising in the mother-infant relationship after the baby is born. To sum up, harsh and punitive parenting behavior is more likely to occur when parenting stress is elevated. Distressed parents who also tend to become angry quickly and with little provocation are at greater risk of perpetrating child abuse, particularly if they endorse and frequently use harsh methods of discipline. Parenting stress is more likely to arise for parents who lack knowledge about child rearing, including the particular details about their children’s common and idiosyncratic needs and tendencies. In addition, parents who are distressed are more likely to believe that their children’s noxious behaviors are intentional, which further increases the likelihood that harsh parenting behavior will occur.

Biological Factors In this chapter, I have described the connection between parenting stress, child rearing, and children’s development by emphasizing some of the psychological aspects of family life—specifically, parents’ behaviors and social cognitions. Biological components also should be considered. Two areas of research that touch on some of the biological mechanisms involved in the link between parenting stress, parental functioning, and child adjustment and health are psychophysiology and genetic factors.

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Psychophysiology Recall from the first chapter the physiological aspects of the stress reaction. The autonomic nervous system or ANS ensures that we react to potentially dangerous or otherwise threatening information in a way that gets our attention and causes us to react to the stressor. The activity of the ANS can be represented in many ways, because numerous physiological systems (e.g., cardiovascular, endocrine) are involved. By way of illustration, I will focus on one area of research that I have described in some detail in this chapter—depression and parenting behavior. People who have more severe symptoms of depression are more likely to show greater brain activity in the right frontal lobe of the cerebral cortex, relative to the activity in the left frontal lobe. This is a part of the brain that is involved in negative emotions (such as fear and sadness), which are linked to social withdrawal and inhibition. In contrast, people who are not experiencing symptoms of depression show more activity in the left frontal lobe, that part of the brain involved in controlling motivation to approach new things and people. More generally, these frontal regions of the brain include neural systems that are involved in the control of perceptions, cognitions, emotions, and behaviors. These systems are thought to develop in part based on experience, whereby environmental influences constrain the connections between neurons. These connections probably become less malleable as we grow older (Ashman and Dawson, ). On average, depressed parents are less able to optimally model emotional expression and ways of regulating emotions. This is especially apparent in their interactions with their children. In studies examining the face-to-face interactions between mothers and their infants, researchers have found that depressive symptoms can disrupt typical interpersonal dynamics. The parent is more likely to show negative emotions, to withdraw from interaction, to be overly intrusive and stimulating, and to be less predictable and responsive to the infant. The infant is more likely to be irritable, to withdraw from the interaction, and to soothe herself even though self-soothing strategies are not well developed at this young age. Disruptions in interactions help account for mother-infant similarity in patterns of brain activity and


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physiological stress response. Thus children with highly distressed parents may be more likely to be exposed to parenting environments that are not optimal for the child’s developing physiological systems involved in the self-regulation of emotions, cognitions, and behaviors (Ashman and Dawson, ; Field, ). As important as parent-infant interaction influences may be, the physiological underpinnings of distress and self-regulation begin operating when the infant is still developing in the womb. In the short term, newborns of depressed mothers show signs of heightened psychophysiological stress reactivity (e.g., higher cortisol, lower vagal tone) that are similar to the same indicators in their mothers prior to delivery, in the second and third trimesters of their pregnancies. In addition, while in the womb, the babies of depressed expectant mothers are more physically active and reactive, perhaps because maternal stress-related biochemistry acts to create a lower threshold for stimulation in the infants. The mechanisms are not well understood yet, but this research suggests that maternal distress during pregnancy may have influences on the developing infant and thereby increase the baby’s vulnerability to stress after birth and later in childhood (Field, ). Mother-infant similarity in physiological systems also implicates genetic factors. The connections between parenting stress, parenting behaviors, and child behaviors emerge in part as a function of the parent’s individual attributes. As discussed in chapter , the individual attributes that pertain most directly to parenting stress, such as self-regulation, depressive symptoms, and personality traits, are associated with parenting behavior in predictable ways. As described in the current chapter, parents who have poorer self-regulation, who experience more frequent and reactive negative emotions, and who have a tendency to become depressed or hostile when distressed are more likely to be withdrawn or reactive in their parenting. Several decades of behavioral genetics research (based on studies of humans and animals) provides clear evidence of genetic influences on these and other aspects of individuality (Plomin, ), as do several more recent studies that examined specific parenting behaviors such as warmth, hostility, and approaches to controlling children (Kendler, ; Losoya, Callor, Rowe, and Goldsmith, ; Neiderheiser et al., ).

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In most families, parents and children share genes as well as environments. These genetic influences operate in conjunction with environmental factors to produce the wide variation that we see in children’s stable and changeable characteristics. Recognizing that genes and family environments are confounded and that genes and environments interact to produce these individual differences has implications for the way that scientists think about the bridge between parental distress and child functioning, as will be considered in detail in the next chapter.

Conclusion Parenting behavior and the stress of parenthood influence each other. When parenting stress is high, parental cognitions and behaviors change and problems in parenting and the parent-child relationship can arise or grow. In turn, these difficulties (such as harsh and reactive or cold and withdrawn parenting) can create more stressors for the parent and family. Parenting is often thought of as the behavior that a parent directs toward a child and that the child “receives.” However, parenting is not that simple, because children influence the feelings, thoughts, and behaviors of their parents as well (Bell and Chapman, ). Through daily exchanges and interactions with a child, a parent learns how it is that the child is likely to respond to various parenting behaviors, in much the same way that a child gradually learns about his or her parents. In the next chapter, I focus in more detail on the bi-directional parent-to-child and child-to-parent effects that operate within parentchild relationships and interactions.

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Parent and Child Effects The thing that impresses me most about America is the way parents obey their children. King Edward VIII (Duke of Windsor), March , , in Look magazine

Most of the past theorizing and empirical research on parenting has emphasized the impact of parents on their children. However, children also influence their parents, as the Duke of Windsor observed whimsically nearly fifty years ago (though I doubt that this is a uniquely American phenomenon). Parenting stress is a process, and it develops and changes over time within an enduring parent-child relationship—a relationship in which the parent and child are co-contributors. Youngsters are not passive recipients of their experiences or of their own development. The connection between parents’ and children’s behaviors is bi-directional, with each partner influencing the other (Bell and Chapman, ). The idea of co-occurring parent and child effects is integral to current theories. A comprehensive framework for defining parenting stress and examining its causes and consequences is provided by Parent-Child-Relationship or P-C-R theory, which includes at least three separate domains that operate together (Abidin, ; see chapter ). The parent domain comprises those aspects of parental distress that are tied to the parent’s own self-concept, emotions, and experiences, and includes low self-worth and feelings of depression and anxiety that ▪ 95 ▪

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Parent and Child Effects

arise from or are linked to the parenting role. The child domain includes attributes of the child (from illness to disabilities to behavioral and emotional difficulties) that contribute to parental distress. Child effects may become more pronounced and predictable as children and their parent-child relationships develop. This is because children’s temperaments and personalities, strengths and weaknesses, and aversions and preferences all are becoming more stable and clearer to their parents, at the same time that the children are gaining autonomy and competencies (Maccoby, ; Scarr and McCartney, ). The third domain of P-C-R theory, parent-child dysfunction, represents problems in the parent-child relationship and their interactions, and includes conflict and hostility, as well as beliefs that the relationship is unrewarding and not meeting expectations. The parent, child, and parentchild relationship domains operate together as part of a stress and coping process within a broader family system of individuals and relationships.

Bi-directionality and Causality Up to this point, I have described theories and research findings pertaining to parenting stress and its connections with parental functioning, child functioning, and the parent-child relationship. Theories about the determinants of parenting behavior usually include the explicit statement that parents who are more distressed are more likely to be less effective, if not downright inept, in their parenting behaviors. This deterioration in the quality of parenting behavior leads to problems in children’s emotional, behavioral, cognitive, and physical development. At the same time, parenting stress arises, in part, in response to children’s attributes and behaviors (Abidin, ; Belsky, ; DeaterDeckard, ). Does the way that parents behave toward their children form the causal link from parenting stress to children’s developmental outcomes? And do children’s behaviors causally influence the experiences of parenthood for their parents? Nearly all of the evidence pertaining to the nature, causes, and consequences of parenting stress is based on correlational data, in which patterns of associations, but not causation, can be discerned. These research findings demonstrate that there are


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indeed associations between parenting stress, parenting behavior, and children’s developmental outcomes. Correlational evidence is important and noteworthy, because it informs us about how things may be operating in the real world. However, on their own, correlational data cannot provide conclusive evidence of causal, bi-directional parent and child effects. In the current chapter, I review tests of potential causal influences, based on longitudinal studies (in which the temporal order of effects can be tested), experiments, and quasi-experimental designs.

Longitudinal Studies Longitudinal studies involve repeated assessments of the same factors for the same individuals over time. By reassessing children’s attributes and indicators of parents’ distress and coping, it is possible to examine whether child effects at an initial time point predict later parenting stress, or whether prior parenting stress predicts later child behavioral or emotional difficulties. Parent effects. Longitudinal research has provided evidence that prior levels of parenting stress predict subsequent increases in children’s behavioral and emotional problems (i.e., parent effects). In the four-year Child Care and Family Project, or CCFP, we examined whether several indicators of parenting stress and lack of social support were associated with school-age children’s behavioral and emotional problems, as reported by mothers and teachers. Parenting stress at the time of the first assessment was one of the strongest predictors of increases in mothers’ reports of their children’s externalizing problems (e.g., aggression, conduct problems) and internalizing problems (e.g., depressive and anxious symptoms) over the four-year period. In contrast, parenting stress was only modestly associated with teachers’ ratings of children’s adjustment problems (Deater-Deckard et al., ). It should not be too surprising that parenting stress (which is a component of the child’s home environment) was unrelated to the child’s behavioral and emotional problems at daycare or school. These are different settings. A mother’s and a teacher’s report of the same child captures different aspects of that child’s behavioral and emotional development. Most researchers find only modest agreement be-

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tween parents’ and teachers’ ratings of the same children. This happens for at least two reasons. First, children behave differently in different settings and situations. Second, parents and teachers have different reference groups in mind when they complete their ratings of children’s behaviors and emotions. A childcare provider or teacher often has spent years interacting with children of a certain age, and has a different understanding of what is “typical” compared to most parents. By comparison, a parent usually has less experience interacting with and observing many children, but knows her or his children very well, having watched them grow up and change over a number of years. Though they capture different information, both mothers’ and teachers’ ratings are reliable and valid representations of children’s development and well-being. Over the four-year period of the CCFP study, individual differences in mothers’ and teachers’ reports of children’s behavioral and emotional difficulties were comparably stable. Furthermore, mothers’ reports of their children’s problem behaviors at the time of the initial assessment were predictive of teachers’ reports of the same children’s behaviors four years later. In addition, the overall strength of the statistical prediction of children’s behavioral and emotional problems, from indicators of the family environment such as socioeconomic status and parents’ use of harsh discipline, was similar for mothers’ and teachers’ reports. It is noteworthy that there was any stability in or statistical prediction of teachers’ ratings over the four-year period, given that all of the children had changed schools (from preschool to elementary), were rated by different teachers, and that four years had passed. Another lesson from the results just described is that the most important psychological experience pertaining to parents’ distress may well be parents’ interpretations of their children’s behaviors and attributes. It is the way that the parent perceives the child’s behavior (“He’s aggressive” or “He’s docile”) and the way those perceptions of child behavior are interpreted (“She’s a typical toddler” or “She’s a terror”) that matter most to our understanding of why it is that a parent becomes chronically distressed in the parenting role. Interestingly, parents can and typically do hold in mind different appraisals of their sibling children; they do not simply view all of their children in the same way. Child effects. Longitudinal studies also have provided evidence


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that children’s attributes, assessed at a particular point in time, influence subsequent increases in parenting stress. In one study, scientists examined the impact of preschoolers’ behavior problems on changes in subsequent levels of parenting stress for mothers and fathers of a diverse group of children, some of whom had developmental delays or Down syndrome (Hauser-Cram et al., ). In families in which mothers reported that their three-year-old children were high in behavior problems (e.g., aggression, noncompliance), child-domain parenting stress continuously increased over the following six years of the study for both mothers and fathers. In contrast, there were no increases in child-domain parenting stress among parents of children who were low in behavioral problems at three years. The same pattern was found for mothers’ parent-domain stress when preschool caregivers’ reports of child behavior problems at three years of age were examined. This result was obtained even after controlling statistically for effects of the parents’ own attributes and coping strategies, including education, marital status, problem-focused coping skills, effectiveness of social support, and measures of problems and strengths in family relationships. It also is noteworthy that the patterns of change in adults’ parent-domain parenting stress scores were different from those found for their child-domain stress scores, lending further credence to the distinction between these two domains of parenting stress. Other longitudinal studies demonstrate how parent and child effects work in combination. This is exemplified in studies that highlight the moment-to-moment sequences of behaviors that occur during parent-child interactions. Although this approach has not been used to examine parenting stress per se, it has been used extensively to examine parent and child effects on various aspects and qualities of the parentchild relationship that are known to be related to parenting stress (Abidin, ). There is evidence from these types of studies of children’s influences on parental behavior and parents’ influences on children’s behavior, from early in children’s lives. Before turning to the research literature, however, consider as an example the sequential parent-child behaviors found in face-to-face playful interactions between a parent and his or her infant. In these interactions, the parent often will place the baby in her lap, and get close to the baby’s face. Each partner in this exchange will take turns making

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smiles, silly and surprising facial expressions, playful frowns, and frequent vocalizations. In many cases, the infant already seems to know that a parent is a fun playmate who will respond and mimic faces and sounds. The parent also realizes that her part in this game not only involves making faces and sounds, but also requires paying close attention to what her baby is doing and then responding in kind. If the baby becomes upset, the parent usually realizes that it is time to try something else. Scientists who have studied face-to-face exchanges between infants and their mothers have discovered that these interactions are an important part of their developing relationships (Cohn and Tronick, ; Jaffe et al., ). When the parent does not attend to or respond sensitively to the infant’s behavioral suggestions (e.g., smiling, fussing, looking away to avoid eye contact), the interaction is not as rewarding for either partner and may cause both to feel distressed. Parent effects are demonstrated most powerfully in the “still face” procedure, in which the parent freezes and stops interacting with the infant. This tends to quickly distress even very young infants (Field, ). Some infants are not responsive to their parents’ attempts to interact. Such infant behavior can result in interactions that are viewed by the parent as unrewarding. For example, infants who have medical problems or are recovering from problems at birth are less able to engage in these coherent face-to-face interactions. Thus, for some parentchild pairs, there is a lack of organization in the structure of their interactions that arises from both parent and child effects. These difficulties in interaction are associated with a number of factors, including maternal depression, premature birth, and low birth weight (Lester, Hoffman, and Brazelton, ; Lundy, Field, and Pickens, ).

Experiments Longitudinal studies are useful because they allow researchers to examine changes in parenting stress and children’s developmental outcomes over time, and then test whether temporal sequences involving changes in parents’ and children’s attributes are predictable. However, in order to draw stronger conclusions about likely causality, experimental designs are needed in which specific factors or variables are in-


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tentionally manipulated in order to see how these changes affect a specified outcome. Parent effects. The experimental design has been instrumental in demonstrating parent effects on children. A number of studies conducted decades ago exemplify this. In these experiments, children were given the opportunity to see or play with novel and engaging toys, but then were prohibited by an adult from touching or playing with the toys while the adult left the room. Although there was considerable variation in the extent to which children were able to comply with this request (due to temperament and other factors), these studies showed that the firmness and extent of restrictive control shown by the adult before leaving the room had a demonstrable impact on whether children complied or misbehaved and played with the toy. Thus experimental manipulation of what the adults said and did influenced children’s behavior in this tempting situation. Previous research also has shown that children readily model adults’ aggressive behaviors (Maccoby and Martin, ). More recently, parenting intervention studies have provided compelling evidence of parent effects on children. Some interventions change parents with respect to the way they think and feel about, and behave toward, their children—and these changes in parenting produce changes in children’s behaviors. These intervention studies are described in detail in Chapter . Child effects. With respect to evidence for child effects, laboratory experiments have shown that various aspects of children’s behavior (e.g., dependence, attentiveness, and activity level) reliably predict how parents or other adults will behave during interactions with them. One example involved a “round robin” procedure whereby boys were observed interacting with their own as well as other boys’ mothers. Some of the boys were aggressive and oppositional, but others were more typically prosocial in their behavior. Observations showed that it was the child’s conduct-problem status that predicted antagonism in the adult-child interactions, not the status of the mother (i.e., being a mother of son with or without a behavioral disorder). This study was taken as evidence that the higher levels of conflict that occur in parentchild interactions of antisocial youth are causally influenced by the child (Anderson, Lytton, and Romney, ).

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Intervention studies also can be interpreted as showing evidence of child effects on parents. Many of the interventions that have been designed to reduce children’s behavioral and emotional problems target the children with a variety of therapies (e.g., drugs, education, and social skills training). Interestingly, these interventions, when effective, lead not only to reductions in children’s difficult behaviors such as hyperactivity and inattention, but cause the parents to become less distressed and show less harsh, reactive parenting. This can happen even when parenting behavior is not the target of the intervention (e.g., Hinshaw et al., ; Wells et al., ). When experimentally induced improvements in children’s behaviors are shown to promote improvements in parenting, this is strong evidence of a causal child effect.

Quasi-experimental Designs Just as there are limitations to longitudinal studies, there are limitations to experiments. Many of the questions being addressed in psychological research do not lend themselves readily to experimental manipulation. By virtue of the fact that we are studying people, there are moral and ethical constraints to what we can do in terms of experimentation. Thank goodness. (Imagine randomly assigning newborn children to parents!) Ecological validity is a less obvious but similarly problematic concern. Although experimentally altering the research participant’s experience is very useful for making inferences about causality, often these manipulations do not represent what happens in the real world, or it may be impossible to discern whether the manipulation mimics a real world experience. For these reasons, quasi-experimental research designs are another useful tool for examining bi-directional parent and child effects as they occur in families. Quasi-experimental designs tend to utilize real-world or naturalistic settings and experiences, and do not involve intentional manipulation of variables by the experimenter. These designs make use of natural experiments involving factors that are thought to be of causal importance. They have some of the advantages and limitations of experimental designs, and some of the advantages and limitations of correlational and longitudinal designs. For example, behavioral genetic studies (e.g., adoption and twin studies) constitute an area of quasi-


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experimental research that has been used to identify potential bi-directional mechanisms in parent-child relationships. Not only is this example useful for demonstrating quasi-experimental research designs, but it also addresses the question of how it is that biology and environment work together in children’s development. Sibling and behavioral genetic studies. Although still correlational in nature, sibling studies are informative because they allow for the testing of potential child effects in a way that is not permitted by traditional family studies, which include only one child per family. If it is true that sibling differences in children’s attributes are associated with differences in parenting stress within the same parent, then this would be evidence that children’s behaviors or situations may be causally impacting parenting. On the other hand, if parenting stress is much the same for a parent regardless of which child in the family is being considered, then this suggests that child effects may not be all that important in the link between parenting stress and children’s developmental outcomes. Most families include multiple children. In spite of living together and sharing the same parent or parents, siblings differ from each other in their characteristics and behaviors. Furthermore, sibling differences are associated with differences in the children’s relationships with the same parent. Thus, within the same family, the child who is better adjusted, does better in school, and who is more socially and emotionally competent tends to have a warmer and more supportive parent-child relationship. In addition, behavioral genetic studies indicate that most environmental influences are nonshared. Nonshared environmental influences are those that cause sibling differences in children’s attributes, rather than sibling similarities (Dunn and Plomin, ). This raises an intriguing question. Do parents have different levels of distress associated with different children within the same family? This is a real possibility, in light of a P-C-R theory (Abidin, ) that highlights separate domains of distress that are tied to the parent’s own attributes (e.g., depression, anxiety) and the child’s attributes or situation (e.g., behavior problems, disability). It also is an interesting question in light of theory and research regarding the role of parents’ social cognitions in parenting stress and behavior—specifically, the

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types of attributions that parents make regarding how their child-rearing practices influence their children’s behaviors and experiences. Parents who have only one child (who therefore are not able to see firsthand how remarkably different siblings can be) are more likely to believe that their parenting practices are responsible for how their children behave, think, and feel (Himelstein, Graham, and Weiner, ). In our research, we examine some of the ways in which sibling differences in children’s characteristics or behaviors map onto sibling differences in parenting environments by using several types of study designs. Typically, we assess a number of aspects of the parent-child relationship through parents’ reports and our own observations, as well as measuring each child’s cognitive, emotional, and behavioral development. In all of these studies, we attempt to isolate those aspects of the parenting environment that are specific to each child in the same family. For example, we interview parents of sibling children about their use of various discipline strategies, and whether those strategies differ for their two children. Recall Evelyn, the mother I described in the opening chapter. She felt torn because she knew that her two children required very different forms of discipline, even though it made her feel terrible because she believed that treating her sons so differently was unfair. Clearly, her sons were having different experiences with their mother. Assessing these “child specific” parenting environments within families has been a challenge, because most existing procedures and measures were not designed to be sensitive to within-family differences in parenting, let alone child-specific components of parenting stress within the head of the same parent. A parent holds in mind perceptions of his or her children’s attributes and behaviors, and these perceptions can be very different depending on the particular child in question. When given the opportunity to talk or write about their children’s personalities, behaviors, or skills, parents readily describe what they see as differences in their children. At the same time, there is wide variation across parents in the extent to which they see their sibling children as being different from one another. These perceptions of sibling differences in behaviors are strongly and consistently associated with differences in those same parents’ feelings about their children. A parent who sees one of her chil-


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dren as being far more demanding, intrusive, aggressive, or emotionally unpredictable compared to that child’s sibling also is likely to feel warmer and closer to the more “well-behaved” child. Although differences in feelings about sibling children often translate into differences in the parent’s behavior toward those children, there is by no means a one-to-one correspondence. Certain components of parenting behavior appear to be readily differentiated and linked to a particular child in the family. However, the degree of differentiation depends on the specific aspect of parenting in question. This is illustrated in the results of the Childcare and Family Project (CCFP). In the second wave of this four-year study, we visited the homes of about one hundred families with two or more children who were between four and ten years of age, and interviewed the mothers and fathers about their discipline strategies, as well as their perceptions of and feelings about each child. Parents reported that their children differed in behaviors such as aggression and activity level, as well as predominant emotions such as fearfulness and irritability. More to the point, we found that parents were making a link between their sibling children’s differences in behaviors and attributes and differences in their own feelings about their children. In general, the child who was regarded by the parent as being more cooperative and less aggressive or happier and less irritable also was regarded with more warmth and less negativity than his or her sibling. This effect was found for the parent-child dysfunction scale of the Parenting Stress Index (Abidin, ), suggesting that certain aspects of parenting stress do differ within the mind of the same parent (Deater-Deckard, ). It is important to emphasize that the associations between sibling differences in attributes and sibling differences in parenting environments were weaker when we examined indicators of parents’ strategies for managing or punishing their children’s misbehaviors (i.e., parental control strategies, including discipline). If a parent reported that she tended to rely on physical punishment and restraint when disciplining one child, she was more likely to do so with the other child, even if she perceived the children to be quite different from one another. In other words, indicators of parents’ warmth and hostility toward their sibling

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children were more likely to be differentiated than were measures of parental control of those children, a pattern that has been found in other studies (Plomin, ). There is no need to rely exclusively on parents to tell us about differences in their sibling children’s behaviors, or differences in the ways that parents behave toward their children. These differences also can be easily observed. In a series of studies in-home assessments of parentchild interactions and relationships were conducted using a simple procedure. The mother and child sit together in a comfortable place, and they are given a game or task to complete. They are filmed (the camera is in full view), but they are left for a while (typically about fifteen minutes in total). The same parent is filmed twice, interacting once with each child. Even under these circumstances, where it is clear that they are being observed, parents behave differently with their two children. In the first study, we viewed archived films from the s and s of mother-child interactions in about one hundred families who were participants in the ongoing Colorado Adoption Project, or CAP (Plomin and DeFries, ). The parents had two children in the study who were two years apart in age on average. About half of these were adoptive parents who were not related to either of their two children, and the siblings were not biologically related to each other. The other half of the sample of families included nonadoptive biological parents who were related to both of their children (i.e., full siblings). During the visit to the home, the mother was observed playing with each child when that child was three years old. Thus, for any given family, the observations of each child were conducted about two years apart, because the siblings were usually about two years apart in age. The mother and child were given several things to do, including using modeling clay to make a dog and playing together with a toy picnic set. These observations were brief, typically lasting from eight to twelve minutes in total (Dunn and Plomin, ). In a second and more recent study called TRACKS, we filmed twenty minutes of mother-child interaction in the homes of  mothers of .-year-old twins (Deater-Deckard et al., ). Half were genetically identical twins and half were same-sex fraternal twins. Unlike the CAP study described above, the mothers were observed interacting separately with their twins on the same day. For about ten minutes, the


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mother and child were filmed playing with a toy or game that they chose. During the second ten-minute segment, they were asked to cooperate to draw some pictures using an Etch-A-Sketch drawing toy. Following filming, we derived data from the observed interactions using the Parent-Child Interaction System or PARCHISY, a coding system that we developed for these studies. We assessed several aspects of the child’s behavior, including the prevalence of noncompliance (e.g., refusing to do what he is told), negative affect (e.g., anger), positive affect (e.g., joy), independence, “on task” behavior and persistence, verbosity, and responsiveness to the mother. Similarly, we assessed the mother’s negative and positive affect, persistence, verbosity, and responsiveness to the child, as well as her use of positive or supportive control strategies (e.g., encouragement and praise of child) and negative or restrictive control strategies (e.g., criticism, physical restraint, or manipulation). In addition, we measured conflict and cooperation, as well as the overall level of emotional reciprocity (shared positive affect, eye contact, well-integrated interaction). We focused on the reciprocal, responsive exchange between the mother and child. We called this dyadic mutuality (based on previous research by Kochanska, b). We found that the same mother showed different levels of mutuality with each of her two children, and this was closely tied to the child’s responsiveness to the mother. Furthermore, some of this child effect on mother-child interaction was due to genetically influenced child attributes. On a related point, in more recent research we have found that the dyadic mutuality between mother and child is easily observed in families with older children, in father-child as well as mother-child dyads, in poorer and more affluent households, and in different ethnic groups (Deater-Deckard, AtzabaPoria, and Pike, in press). Evocative gene-environment correlation. Behavioral genetic sibling studies permit the examination of transactions between genetic and environmental factors. In so doing, they also go further toward providing evidence of bi-directional parent-child effects. Decades of behavioral genetics research (e.g., twin and adoption studies) have provided clear evidence that siblings who are more similar genetically tend to be more similar in their behaviors, emotions, cognitive skills, and mental health outcomes. This has implications for the relationships that chil-

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dren have with their parents, and that parents have with their children. Children can behave in ways that elicit particular responses from their parents and from other people inside and outside of the home. To the extent that these eliciting behaviors are genetically influenced, this is said to represent evocative gene-environment correlation, whereby a genetic influence on behavior also influences the environments to which the individual is exposed. When detected through a child genetic design in which families differ in the degree of sibling genetic similarity (e.g., comparing identical and fraternal twins), genetic influences on the way a parent behaves toward the sibling children is evidence of a child effect (Plomin, ). In the studies just described, we have found such evidence for a variety of dimensions of parenting and the mother-child relationship (Deater-Deckard and O’Connor, ). For mothers’ reports of their own warmth toward their sibling children, as well as for objective observers’ ratings of mother-child dyadic mutuality, it is clear that the more similar the siblings are to each other genetically, the more similar are their experiences with the same mother. Identical twins had very similar levels of dyadic mutuality with the same mother. In contrast, fraternal twins and non-twin full siblings (who share some genes but are not genetically identical) were moderately similar in their dyadic mutuality with the same mother. Perhaps most striking was the finding for the genetically unrelated adoptive siblings, who showed no similarity whatsoever in their dyadic mutuality with the same adoptive mother. Sibling genetic similarity accounted for sibling similarity in responsiveness and emotional reciprocity with the same mother, which itself was associated with sibling similarity in mother-child responsiveness and emotional reciprocity. Similar results have been obtained using both parents’ reports and observers’ ratings, based on samples of school-age children as well as adolescents (e.g., Leve, Winebarger, Fagot, Reid, and Goldsmith, ; Reiss, Neiderhiser, Hetherington, and Plomin, ). Nonshared environment. Siblings can have very different relationships with the same parent, even after age, gender, and genetic effects are controlled. This is referred to as a nonshared environmental influence, one that leads to the development of sibling differences above and beyond differences that arise from genetic factors (Plomin, ).


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We have explored potential nonshared environmental influences by comparing genetically identical twins in the twin study described above. This approach is particularly useful because differences between identical twins must have some environmental source. If identical twin differences can be measured, it is plausible to identify those aspects of the environment that account for these differences. Using ratings based on the observations of mother-child interactions described above, as well as various parents’ self-reports and interviewer ratings, we derived two sets of scores representing differences between identical twins by subtracting the second-born twin’s score from the first-born twin’s score. First, we computed identical twin differences in behaviors of the twins themselves, such as differences in their behavioral and emotional problems, and differences in their negative affect (e.g., anger), noncompliant behavior, positive affect (e.g., happiness), and “on task” behavior (e.g., persistence). Second, we computed identical twin differences in the parenting to which they were exposed, such as interviewers’ ratings of maternal harsh physical discipline and observers’ ratings of the mother’s negative and positive affect and positive and supportive control strategies (e.g., encouragement, praise). Then we computed estimates of the strength of association between these difference scores. We found differences in the same mother’s feelings and behaviors toward her identical twin children. It was clear that the mother had a different relationship with each of her twins; she regarded each as a distinct individual and behaved differently when interacting with them separately. In addition, within each family, one identical twin typically showed more signs of behavioral and emotional difficulties, and more negative and less positive affect, compared to her or his sibling. These twin differences were very small for some pairs, moderate for others, and quite large for still others. More importantly, we found that within each family identical twin differences in behaviors and emotions were associated with differences in their relationships with the same mother, in predictable ways. The twin who was exposed to higher levels of maternal negative emotions and harsh discipline, and lower levels of maternal warmth and supportive control strategies, tended to show more behavioral and emotional problems, more negative affect and less positive affect, more

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noncompliance, and less “on task” persistent behavior. These links ultimately must be influenced via the environment, because differences between identical twins are not due to differences in genes. However, the data are not conclusive regarding causality; these differentiation effects may be due to child effects, parent effects, or both. Passive gene-environment correlation. Up to this point, I have described several ways in which genetic and environmental influences may work together and influence the parent-child relationship and parenting stress. However, there is another possibility. Simply by sharing some of their genes, a parent and child are likely to resemble each other in their behaviors, emotions, and cognitions. Consider the host of adult individual attributes that are likely to influence, and be influenced by, the adult’s parenting behaviors and experiences. These might include skills and abilities (e.g., cognitive skills), physical and mental health, temperament, and personality (to name a few). Decades of research have led scientists to the conclusion that there are often clear connections between adults’ individual attributes and their parenting behaviors. Parents who experience fewer anxiety and depressive symptoms, who are less reactive emotionally, and who are better at planning and regulating their own thoughts, emotions, and behaviors, are more likely to be parents that are more patient, warm, and supportive and less reactive, harsh, or withdrawn in their interactions with their children (Gotlib and Goodman, ; Patterson, ). Experiences influence these adult attributes, but biology also matters. A number of twin and adoption studies have demonstrated that there are genetic influences on personality, mental health, and cognitive skills, and molecular geneticists are striving to identify specific genes that are associated with a variety of complex human traits in adults and children alike. Genetic influences also play a role in parenting behaviors and qualities of the parent-child relationship. Parentchild similarity in attributes and behaviors toward each other corresponds with parent-child genetic similarity. In most families, parents pass on their genes as well as provide a home environment to their children. This is referred to as passive gene-environment correlation (Plomin, ). Accordingly, what may appear to be environmentally transmit-


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ted from parent to child or vice versa may in fact be transmitted in part or even entirely through shared genetic influences. For example, consider a family where both parents have relatively poor self-control and are often irritable and hostile toward others. One or both parents may be experiencing serious symptoms of depression or anxiety. As noted above, these personal attributes are influenced in part by genetic factors. Compared to other parents, these are more likely to be reactive and harsh in their parenting and to have children who show poor selfregulation and problems in social-emotional adjustment. The parents and children share relationships, but they also share genes. The genes that are influencing these aspects of emotion and behavior in the parents also are likely to be influencing similar aspects of emotion and behavior in the children. In the CAP and TRACKS studies described above, we found some evidence of passive gene-environment correlation in the observations of mothers and children working together on some games and tasks. For this analysis, we focused on the child’s and mother’s engagement and involvement with the tasks. Parenting stress is known to be greater among parents of children who themselves are more easily distressed, including youngsters who tend to be distractible and overactive (i.e., frequently “off task”). This connection between parent and child behavior could be due in part to overlapping genes in parents and children (Fischer, ). In the CAP and TRACKS observational studies, the mother and child were genetically related in most of the families. In the adoptive families, the parent and child were not even biological relatives. We were not surprised to find that, overall, mothers who were more involved in and engaged with the tasks (i.e., verbose, constructive in their guidance, responsive to the child’s questions and requests) had children who were more involved in and engaged with the tasks. We found the strongest evidence of parent-child similarity in task engagement in the genetically related mother-child pairs. In contrast, adoptive mothers and children showed no similarity in their individual engagement with the tasks. This suggests that shared genes between parents and children helped account for some of the parent-child similarity that we observed in task engagement (Deater-Deckard, Petrill, Hwang, Cutting, and Plomin, ).

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The same sort of passive gene-environment genetic mechanisms are likely to be operating for many of the various components of individual adaptation and parent-child interaction described throughout this book. For example, part of the connection between parents’ levels of distress and their children’s levels of distress appears to operate via parental modeling of maladaptive thought processes (e.g., self-blame). However, what may appear to be modeled ways of thinking by children may in fact reflect parent-child genetic similarity in those genes that influence cognitive mechanisms (Garber and Martin, ). Few studies have rigorously tested for passive gene-environment correlation effects, but some progress is being made through research involving adoptive parents and children. These studies provide information about how parenting and children’s behaviors are linked, aside from effects that arise due to parent-child genetic similarity. Such connections are referred to as shared environmental mechanisms, environmental influences that lead to family member similarity in outcomes, after genetic similarity has been controlled. For example, consider research on parent-child attachment in adoptive and fostering families. Recent studies suggest that the security of mother-infant attachment includes moderate to substantial shared environmental influences. Dozier and colleagues demonstrated that there was similarity between foster mother and foster infant or toddler attachment security, an effect that could not be attributed to shared genetic influences because the foster mothers and children were genetically unrelated (Dozier, Stovall, Albus, and Bates, ). This finding is consistent with data from the TRACKS twin study (O’Connor and Croft, ). Furthermore, there is evidence that adopted children’s attachment security is associated with their adoptive parents’ parenting stress (Chisholm, ). These findings converge to suggest that the connection between parenting stress and child attachment security that is often found in studies of biologically related parents and children does not merely reflect passive gene-environment correlation effects. In closing, it is important to bear in mind the limitations of quasi-experiment designs. The data are still correlational, and the researcher is not able to manipulate the factors that are expected to be causally important to the emergence of parenting distress and behav-


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ior. In addition, because quasi-experimental designs do not use random assignment of participants to different conditions, and special populations are used (e.g., twins, adoptees), questions arise regarding how broadly we can apply results obtained from these studies to families in general. Quasi-experimental approaches are best used as complementary tools, to be included along with experimental and correlational methods, when evaluating the evidence for causal parent and child effects.

Conclusion Imagine a healthy, happy child who is suddenly and without warning immersed in a world of hospitalizations, surgeries, and prolonged recuperation because she is struck by a car while riding her bicycle on the sidewalk. Consider the many effects of this single event on the child’s parents, who beforehand were content and coping well with the dayto-day stressors that life was throwing at them. Instantly, and for months or years after, the parents are probably going to experience parenting stress arising not only from the accident itself but also its lasting effects on their child’s health and well-being. It is easy to understand that this awful event and its effects on the child caused the increase in parenting stress. Now imagine a hundred children and their parents who experience the same type of event. Before the accident, the adults already differ in the extent to which they are distressed in the parenting role. In addition, the parents respond differently to the accident. Some adapt well, but others do not. Some might even become ill and depressed. The differences in parenting stress before and after the accident may or may not influence the children’s outcomes. Even for what seems like a straightforward example of a single event that has little or nothing to do with the attributes of the parents or children involved, there are complex causal effects linking how parents, children, and the entire family cope and adapt. Consider how much more complex these bidirectional influences are when the stressors are not single events but many events stemming from many sources, including the child and the parent. Parents who are distressed are more likely to have children facing

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minor to very serious challenges—challenges in their behaviors and emotions, skills and competencies, and physical and mental health. On average, the parent-child relationships in these families show signs of, and further contribute to, distress and difficulties for parents and children alike. Parents and children influence each other and their relationships via bi-directional parent and child effects. Through these interpersonal transactions, genetic and environmental influences work together in complex ways to produce the wide range of individual variations in stress and adaptation that we see in families.

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Parenting does not occur in a vacuum, and as a result some important questions arise regarding the connection between the family and the larger community. To what extent should individuals and institutions outside of the family be directly or indirectly involved in supporting or controlling adults in their roles as parents? How does parenting stress operate within each parent, in light of the fact that each parent lives in a family, community, and broader culture? The family exists within an ever-changing social, political, economic, and cultural milieu, all of which influence child rearing. The importance of considering these other influences when studying the family, parenting, and child development, cannot be overstated. This “socioecological” framework places the individual child at the center of an extended series of concentric spheres of influences. The microsystem includes those domains of influence with which the child has direct contact, such as parents, siblings, and peers. The mesosystem represents the bridges between the environments that directly affect the child, such as the links between home, school, and the child’s network of friends. Macrosystem influences include environments or contexts that influence the child indirectly through the parents, siblings, or friends. ▪ 115 ▪

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Stress in the parent’s workplace and its effects on parenting are an example. Further out in the layers of contextual influences are exosystem factors that arise from the cultural group, nation, socioeconomic situation, and political system into which the child is born and raised. Finally, the chronosystem represents the idea that these contextual influences and all of the complex connections between them are changing over time (Bronfenbrenner, ). Multiple, co-occurring stressors across the different layers of environments accumulate and can work to further propagate problems in the parenting role. At the same time, these other contexts provide many potential resources for coping with stress in parenting. Resilient parenting in the face of many distressing circumstances involves parents’ individual attributes as well as access to and use of support from other people in the family and community. Furthermore, families differ in their structures and cultures, as do communities and political entities. All of these factors may matter in determining how parenting stress unfolds over time, and how it can be minimized (Hammen, ).

Parents as Partners The quality of a parent’s relationship with her or his partner is a key aspect of parenting stress and coping. For most parents, this relationship serves as a primary source of comfort and support in facing the daily challenges of child rearing. Lower levels of parenting stress are found for women and men who report greater satisfaction in their marriages. On the other hand, a marital or cohabiting relationship also serves as a major source of distress if there is disagreement, conflict, or disengagement. Relationship satisfaction not only has direct effects on parenting stress, but also helps to protect the parent-child relationship against some of the deleterious effects of parental distress (Belsky, Rovine, and Fish, ; Goldberg, ; Grych and Clark, ; Kazui, ). These effects appear to operate within the typical range of interpartner conflict, as well as in households in which the conflict between partners is extreme and involves domestic violence (Levendosky and GrahamBermann, ).


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Partner similarity in child-rearing attitudes and behaviors is another consideration. Parents who are more similar in their child-rearing philosophies and parenting behaviors have more satisfying and less conflicted marital relationships, have less parenting stress, are more responsive in their parenting, and have children who are more socially competent. This agreement in child-rearing philosophies and practices likely arises in part from selection of partners who share some attributes, and in part from consensus building through effective communication. Such communication is most common in partnerships that are warm and supportive (Harvey, ; Lindsey and Mize, ). However, partner similarity also can create problems for parents and children. Recall from chapter  that spouses tend to be similar in their levels of parenting stress and depressive symptoms. This means that a highly distressed parent is less likely than a well-adjusted parent to have access to a supportive, nondistressed partner. It also means that in two-parent households, if children have one parent who is highly distressed, they are likely to have two parents who are distressed. It is easy to see how problems in the parents’ relationship with each other and difficulties in parenting might feed into each other and create stress throughout the family (Deater-Deckard and Scarr, ; Goodman and Gotlib, ; Hauser-Cram et al., ). Parents’ relationships with each other also can be challenged by child-domain parenting stress arising from their children’s attributes or situations (e.g., illness, disability). For example, children with behavioral disorders tend to have parents with more distressed marriages (Johnston and Mash, ). Although the evidence from most studies is not conclusive regarding the causal influence of the child’s behavioral difficulty on the marriage, evidence from intervention studies suggests that when children’s behavior problems are reduced, family relationships (including marriages) improve (Kazdin and Wassell, ; see chapter ). Marital relationships also can be affected when children face serious illnesses. One study showed that parents’ marriages suffered during the first year following diagnosis and initiation of treatment. The impact of their children’s illnesses on marital relationship quality, in turn, was associated with poorer parental mental health and adjust-

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ment for mothers and fathers alike. Marital difficulties were greatest in those pairs who showed the largest differences in their reactions to their children’s illnesses (Hoekstra-Weebers et al., ).

Parent Gender Examination of parenting stress and marriage also requires consideration of parent gender differences. Men may be more likely than women to withdraw from family relationships or to become more reactive and negative when faced with parenting or family stress arising from serious child illness or marital difficulties. In contrast, women may be more likely to try to compensate in their parenting when their marriages are distressed, in an effort to minimize the effects of marital discord on their children. Thus among highly conflicted couples the connection between parenting stress and harsh parenting may be stronger for fathers and weaker for mothers. It also may be the case that men’s parenting stress is tied most strongly to their satisfaction in their partnerships, whereas women’s parenting stress is tied most strongly to the attributes of their children (Deater-Deckard and Scarr, ; Frank et al., ; Gable, Belsky, and Crnic, ; Stoneman, Brody, and Burke, ). This is consistent with current theories of gender differences in stress and coping. Women may be more likely than men to respond to distressing circumstances by turning toward rather than away from their social networks, including relationships with children and other family members (Taylor et al., ). Gender differences and marital relations impact parenting stress in conjunction with work and career stressors. In two-career families, child rearing and household tasks are still largely the responsibility of the mother, even if she works full-time outside the home. Although men are becoming more involved in child rearing and household chores, fathers still tend to experience less conflict between demands of work and family, and less distress as a result, when compared to working mothers. Although fathers, on average, work more hours than working mothers, men are more likely to have higher-status jobs over which they have more control. These factors contribute to a more difficult balancing of demands of work and family for many women.


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Also, conflict over household division of labor is common and is tied strongly to marital relationship satisfaction. Thus contentment with the household division of labor in the transition to parenthood and throughout the child-rearing period is a key to adult adaptation and coping (Fredriksen-Goldsen and Scharlach, ; Wicki, ). These effects are stronger for women because they face more ambiguity in their roles in the workplace. One longitudinal study of middle-class European American families that included mothers who did and did not work outside the home showed clear links between role overload for mothers (i.e., having too much to do at home and work) and dissatisfaction with their marriages. Role overload was defined as having to work more hours outside the home and being unhappy with the current state of affairs in the household in terms of division of labor between spouses. However, new working mothers who had just had their first children were less satisfied with their marriages if they were worried about their childcare arrangements; role overload was not as important to them, compared to working mothers of multiple children. This suggests that the worries and stressors of parenthood, and their impact on the marriage, depend in part on previous parenting experience and the number of children in the household (Hyde et al., ). However, more generally, marital satisfaction, parent-child warmth, and well-balanced work and family roles appear to go hand in hand for most working parents (Marks, Huston, Johnson, and MacDermid, ). Parents’ romantic relationships sometimes do not last, leading to periods of single parenthood and new relationships. These changes often lead to the formation of families that include children from previous relationships. At the same time, there are many different kinds of family structures that have little or nothing to do with partner conflict, or divorce and remarriage.

Family Structures and Types There are different family structures and types of families, including single-parent and stepparent families, gay or lesbian parent families, adoptive and foster families, and families with grandparents as parents.

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There are likely to be some similarities and some differences between different family types, in terms of how and when parenting stress develops and influences children’s development. Family structure and marital transitions. Single and remarried parents are more likely to report having problems in their own adjustment and well-being, and to have more difficulties in their personal relationships with their partners and children (Buchanan, Maccoby, and Dornbusch, ; Hetherington and Clingempeel, ). This is shown most dramatically in data on the rates of assaults on children and infanticide, which are markedly higher in stepfather families compared to other types of families (Daly and Wilson, ). However, most studies of divorce and remarriage have not examined parenting stress specifically, or the impact of family structure on parenting stress. Do parents who have experienced these partner transitions have higher rates of parenting stress? We tried to answer this question using data from the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (ALSPAC), an ongoing study that began with about thirteen thousand women who had live births in Avon County, England, in – (Golding, ). Five family types were identified at the time of the child’s birth: “intact” couple families having their first child (primaparous; n ,  percent of sample) or with multiple children (multiparous; n ,  percent); two kinds of stepfamilies, including stepfather families (n ,  percent), stepmother families (n ,  percent), and single-mother families (n ,  percent). The mothers completed mailed surveys prior to and following the birth of the child. When the child was nearly two years old, mothers completed a questionnaire regarding their distress and enjoyment of the parenting role. We found these two scores to be only modestly associated with each other. This means that many of the women reporting moderate or even high levels of parenting stress also reported finding at least some enjoyment in parenting, and many women reporting low amounts of enjoyment of parenting also reported low levels of parenting stress. Single mothers had the highest levels of parenting stress and the lowest levels of parenting enjoyment, compared to the women with resident partners (married or cohabiting). They also had the lowest incomes, fewest years of education, and highest number of stressful life events (e.g., job loss, moving, divorce) as a group. In ad-


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dition, single mothers and their nonresident romantic partners had the highest levels of depressive symptoms compared to married or cohabiting mothers, followed by stepmothers. Symptoms of depression, stressful life events, and fewer socioeconomic resources were linked with higher levels of parenting stress and lower levels of enjoyment of parenting. These links with parenting stress and enjoyment operated in the same way in the different family structures that we examined (Deater-Deckard and ALSPAC Research Team, ). These results are consistent with other recent studies of stress and coping in remarried and single-parent families (e.g., Hilton and Desrochers, ; Hilton, Desrochers, and Devall, ; O’Brien and DeLongis, ). Thus, regardless of family structure or parents’ histories of changes in their relationships, parenting stress is associated with the same factors in the same ways. Although most of us tend to think of family structure in a categorical way, things are not that simple. Consider single-mother families as an example. Some single mothers have partners, and some of these partners live in the households some of the time. Still other single mothers do not have any romantic partners but have other adults living with them who share the tasks of child rearing. The same kind of variation in situations is found in stepfamily households, some of which include parents who are co-parenting with their ex-partners and some of which include parents with no contact with their ex-partners. It is likely that what matters most, in terms of predicting lower parenting stress and better child outcomes, are the same aspects of partner communication and support in parenting that promote optimal outcomes for children in nondivorced families. Parents and children alike benefit from good communication and loving, involved parenting, whether the parents are co-resident, married or cohabiting, divorced, remarried, or single. At the same time, having two resident parents, or having contact with a nonresident father or mother, can result in more distress and poorer child outcomes, if it means that the parent and child are exposed to more conflict or other risk factors (Arditti and Madden-Derdich, ; Jackson, ; O’Leary, Franzoni, Brack, and Zirps, ). Nearly all of the research on parenting stress has focused on traditional two-parent or single-parent households. However, there are

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many different kinds of families, including divorced and remarried parent families, adoptive families, and gay or lesbian parent families. There has been little research on parenting stress in the many types of families that exist, so it is difficult to draw anything but a speculative conclusion at this time. The few studies that have been done suggest that parenting stress and the factors that reduce and increase it operate in much the same way in many alternative family structures (Chan, Raboy, and Patterson, ; Colpin et al., ; Mainemer, Gilman, and Ames, ; McCarty, Waterman, Burge, and Edelstein, ; McGlone, Santos, Kazama, Fong, and Mueller, ; Tasker and Golombok, ).

Grandparents as Parents In some families, grandparents are the primary caregivers, usually because the children’s parents have passed away or are not able to care for their children. There has not been much research examining parenting stress in this population of caregivers, but that is changing as more scientists recognize the importance of grandparents in the lives of children around the world. The impact of distress arising from this role is most powerful in those families in which grandparents are the sole and primary caregivers of their grandchildren. Overall, the processes connecting grandparents’ resources, children’s attributes and situations, and grandparent distress appear to operate in much the same way as they do for parents. Nearly all of the research has focused on grandmothers, whose child-rearing stress is highest when accompanied by lower income and poorer housing, less social support, and more depressive symptoms and health problems. Also consistent with research on parents is the finding that greater grandmother child-rearing distress is linked with more child behavioral and emotional problems, and more difficulties in caregiving such as harsh, reactive discipline (Bowers and Myers, ; Daly and Glenwick, ; Emick and Hayslip, ; Hayslip, Emick, Henderson, and Elias, ; Kelley, Whitley, Sipe, and Yorker, ; Musil, ; Rodgers-Farmer, ). In chapter , I briefly described a study examining parenting stress among two groups of grandmothers in Kenya (Oburu, ). In


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one group, the grandmothers were caring for their own grandchildren because the children’s parents had died of AIDS. This group of grandmothers was compared to a group of nonfostering grandmothers. The participants were a diverse group of women; half of the grandmothers had received schooling, half were or had been in polygamous marriages, and half were widowed. The fostering grandmothers were distressed by the demanding role of caring for their grandchildren. They had concerns about restrictions in their roles because they were now parenting their grandchildren (thus ruling out typical grandparentgrandchild relationships). In addition, the grandmothers were concerned that they would not be able to carry out their parenting duties. They would often use severe forms of physical punishment to discipline the children, in part to demonstrate to the children, the extended family, and the community that they were taking the parenting role seriously. This Kenyan study also highlights a more general point about grandparents as caregivers. There can be distress that arises from the daily care of grandchildren, but there also can be distress arising from bereavement or concern about the grandchildren’s parents’ deaths, illnesses, or personal difficulties. Parenting stress does not necessarily end when children grow up and move out of the home; it can be part of a parent’s experience until the end of her or his own life.

Community as Culture The family’s cultural context is an element of the community that exists inside and outside of the home. Cultural influences can operate in a number of ways in the stress process. Socialized values and conventional norms for child-rearing beliefs and behaviors (e.g., what is acceptable as a discipline strategy) can affect the kinds of stressful circumstances that parents face, the appraisals that parents make about stressors, and the resources that parents bring to bear in their attempts to cope (Aldwin, ). One of the most common distinctions made between cultural groups is the relative importance of collectivism (i.e., orientation of the individual toward the needs of the family and community) versus individualism (i.e., orientation of the individual toward self-maximization and autonomy from others). Beyond the collectivist-individualist di-

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mension, there are differences between and within cultural groups in the links between parents’ child-rearing practices, their attitudes and attributions about parenting and their children, and children’s developmental outcomes. For example, in some cultures parents who are more controlling with their young children are also less warm, whereas in other cultures, control and warmth are connected in a different way (Jose, Huntsinger, Huntsinger, and Liaw, ; Rudy and Grusec, ). There also are cultural differences in parents’ expectations about what constitutes developmentally appropriate child behaviors and skills. For example, there are cultural differences in adults’ beliefs regarding when children should be able to feed and clothe themselves, when they should be able to control their emotions, and whether and when certain behaviors (such as assertiveness) or emotions (such as anger) should be expressed (Joshi and MacLean, ; Olson, Kashiwagi, and Crystal, ; Schulze, Harwood, and Schoelmerich, ). Furthermore, cultural groups vary in the extent to which parents view their children, themselves, or their situations as being most influential in determining how it is that children behave. For instance, Chinese mothers are more likely to attribute children’s prosocial and compliant behaviors to situational causes, compared to mothers in the United States, who are more likely to regard these appropriate behaviors as arising from children’s temperaments or dispositions. Chinese mothers also are more likely than U.S. mothers to view themselves as being primarily responsible for their children’s academic achievement (Chao, ; Chiang, Caplovitz-Barrett, and Nunez, ). Possible cultural differences in the connections between the family and institutions in the community also are worth considering. For example, the bridge between parenting stress and workplace stress may operate differently across cultural groups. One recent study found that European Americans reported higher levels of work-family role strain (i.e., conflict between the demands of work and demands of family) compared to African Americans and Hispanics. This was true even though the European American workers had higher incomes, more help with childcare, and more control over and flexibility in their jobs (Fredriksen-Goldsen and Scharlach, ). Other institutions and factors matter as well, such as access to and use of same- or different-culture schools, as well as language use. Their effects can be seen in stud-


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ies of parenting stress and acculturation among nonwhite immigrant families in the United States. There is some evidence that more acculturation in the United States (e.g., use of English, having more English-speaking friends) among Spanish-speaking parents is associated with less parental distress (Blacher, Shapiro, Lopez, and Diaz, ). However, these acculturation effects are complex and depend on the specific situations in question (e.g., culture of origin, family structure). This complexity is exemplified in one study of Puerto Rican adolescent mothers that showed that social support from the teens’ own mothers (i.e., the infant’s grandmother) was associated with lower parenting stress. This was not surprising. What was surprising was that this positive link with social support was limited to families that were less acculturated, suggesting different mechanisms linking stress and support depending on the degree to which family members have assimilated the predominant culture (Contreras, Lopez, Rivera-Mosquera, Raymond-Smith, and Rothstein, ). In sum, the links between parenting stress and culture are complex. Consideration of cultural group similarities and differences in the structure, causes, and effects of parenting stress requires evidence that parenting stress is the same thing in different groups, and that it can be measured in the same way (Prelow, Tein, Roosa, and Wood, ). We need more research examining cultural group equivalence in the instruments that social scientists use to assess parenting stress. There is some work suggesting that it can be measured in the same way in different cultural groups, using the Parenting Stress Index in particular. Also, a growing body of research indicates that the factors influencing parenting stress (including poverty, child behavioral problems, and role overload and strain) are similar in a number of cultural groups (see the relevant studies in the Appendix). Nonetheless, more research needs to be conducted before strong conclusions can be made about whether parenting stress processes are generally similar or different across cultural contexts.

Community as Workplace One of the most dramatic changes in family life in many cultural groups and nations over the past century (and the past four decades in

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particular) is in the bridge between work and family life. This includes shifts in the composition of the labor force, with more women and parents of young children working; shifts in the kinds of jobs and work available; fewer extended families living in close proximity; dramatic changes in who is working, with only modest changes in gender and family role attitudes and division of labor in child-rearing tasks; and changes in neighborhoods and communities. There are about seventy million American parents with children under eighteen years of age, and about  percent of these are employed at least part-time, so that working parents make up close to half of all paid workers in the United States. We have witnessed, especially in the s and s, dramatic increases in the number of mothers of young children (those under five years old) who work outside the home. Today the majority of mothers return to work within the first year following their children’s births. The fastest growing segment of employment for working mothers includes part-time and temporary jobs. Although these types of jobs may suit many families who are seeking flexibility in employment for one or both parents, these types of positions generally pay less and have fewer (if any) benefits such as insurance or pension plans. More importantly, regardless of the type of employment or career path chosen, there is almost always tension between meeting the competing demands of work and parenthood. Although there are clear economic and psychological benefits to families when mothers work outside the home, there also are a host of potential risks to individual well-being, parenting, and family functioning (Fredriksen-Goldsen and Scharlach, ). Working women who also are mothers show more signs of distress than do those who are childless. This suggests probable additive or interactive work-family role conflict and stress “spillover” effects for working mothers, arising from stressors that are not as prevalent for women without children. Spillover of stress is common and operates in both directions (from family to work, and work to family). It can include ongoing global stressors, such as having a job or marriage that the parent wishes to end, as well as the daily problems—for instance, having an argument with a supervisor at work, or having an argument with a partner or a child after work. Problems (e.g., stress, workload) and interpersonal conflicts in one arena influence the likelihood of


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having interpersonal conflicts in the other arena (Bolger, DeLongis, Kessler, and Wethington, ; Kazui, ; Marks et al., ; Ostberg and Hagekull, ; Warfield, ). There are other demands that have more to do with the strain or conflict between the adult’s roles as parent and worker. For instance, many working mothers at times wonder whether their career pursuits interfere with or actually harm their relationships with their children, or whether having a family is holding them back from opportunities for advancement and personal fulfillment at work. Although there are role conflicts and work-family spillover effects for men as well as women, these effects tend to be larger and more consistent for women, regardless of whether they are in blue- or white-collar jobs (Bromet, Dew, and Parkinson, ; Eckenrode and Gore, ). A number of studies conducted in the s and s suggested that on average mothers who did not work outside the home were apt to have more symptoms of depression and anxiety. However, this pattern was not found in every study, and the effect may be dissipating as more women with young children continue to enter the work force. Another pattern found in past studies that also may be changing is that fathers whose wives work outside the home are more likely to be distressed compared to men whose wives do not work. This appears to be particularly true for men who have traditional, gender-stereotyped sex role attitudes. Men are less likely than women to divulge to their partners the concerns that they are having about problems at work. The idea that a man should “keep work at the office” still rings true as a goal for many working fathers. This means that they must find other means of coping with day-to-day stressors at work and home, in order to minimize the spillover of stress between roles and settings (Weiss, ). There have been a variety of theoretical approaches used to answer the question of how balancing the demands of parenthood and work influences the health and functioning of the family, the individual parent and child, and colleagues in the workplace. Most recently, a demand and resource framework has been proposed in order to integrate these perspectives (Fredriksen-Goldsen and Scharlach, ). This framework incorporates various factors, including individual and family background characteristics (e.g., education level), the specific demands of work and family (e.g., time required, stressors experienced

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such as child illness or other problems), the specific resources in the workplace and home (e.g., social support, control over and flexibility of work), and accommodations made by the parent to strike the workfamily balance (e.g., missing work, spending less time with family/ spouse). Higher levels of work and family-related stress are found for women compared to men for those in clerical positions, those who have poor health, those with younger children, those who experience problems with finding reliable childcare, and those who work more hours in jobs where there is constant pressure to produce and perform. At the same time, research demonstrates that stress is lower for those with more instrumental and social support from colleagues and bosses and for those with more personal control over their jobs. One of the most powerful ways in which work-related stress can spill over and influence parenting and children is through its effects on parent-child interaction. This is exemplified in a study of dual-earner married couples that showed that mothers responded to higher levels of work-related stress by being less available to their children when they came home (Repetti and Wood, ). The mothers were more likely to withdraw from their children and use other strategies for minimizing interaction. In an analysis of brief ten-minute observations of mother-child interaction, these researchers found that the children responded to their mothers’ withdrawal by decreasing their aversive behaviors (e.g., whining, misbehaving) and increasing their bids for attention from their mothers. There also were signs that the children became less happy over the course of the ten-minute interactions. However, these working mothers also responded to their children’s dissipating positive moods by increasing their own positive emotions and statements directed at their children, in attempts to increase engagement. By responding in this way, the mothers were inadvertently terminating their coping strategy—the minimization of social interaction after a hard day at work (a strategy that is typically associated with stressed working fathers). The authors of that study suggest that for working mothers withdrawing from interacting with their children is a preemptive coping strategy. They are attempting to avoid interactions because they find that doing so reduces the odds that their children will become increasingly annoying to them late in the day and early in the evening. How-


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ever, this strategy competes with mothers’ needs to regulate their own negative feelings following their difficult workdays. Over time, for those mothers who withdraw more and more as work-related stress continues, their children are likely to engage in behaviors that cause more and more conflict in family interactions. Although effective in the short term, behavioral withdrawal may actually create more problems over time by leading to increases in parenting stress and marital conflict (Repetti and Wood, ). Another influential factor is the impact of maternal employment on division of labor in the household, and the internal and interpersonal conflict that can arise from this. On average, fathers in dualearner households (compared to those in single-earner households) do not do much more of the household chores, mundane child-rearing tasks, and taking responsibility for their children’s appointments. This is usually interpreted as indicating that working fathers are being pragmatic (“As long as it gets done by someone I don’t care who does it”), or that they simply do not think about household tasks very much. It also is possible that in some households women are maintaining control in part because they hold very high standards and expectations about how things should be done. If unrelenting high standards are coupled with the belief that “I can do it all” (the “superwoman” mindset; Emmons, Biernat, Tiedje, Lang, and Wortman, ), working mothers are more likely to become distressed. This is not surprising, given that several studies show higher parenting stress and poorer coping among mothers who are perfectionists (Flett et al., ; Mitchelson and Burns, ). It also is important to consider the individual parent’s personality when examining the connection between stress and coping in one domain such as work, with stress and coping in another domain such as parenting and family life. The majority of the studies on work-family stress spillover and role conflict have used correlational data, from which cause and effect cannot be determined. Nonetheless, these studies usually are interpreted to suggest either (a) that stressors in the home cause difficulties and distress at work to increase, or (b) stressors at work cause increases in difficulties at home. In contrast, few studies have tested the possibility that individuals who are predisposed to distress have personality attributes that increase the likelihood that they

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will experience problems in most of their roles—at home, at work, and elsewhere (Bolger et al., ). In sum, the good news is that many families are able to balance the demands and rewards of simultaneous employment and child rearing, and men and women alike typically enjoy some benefits of working and raising children. However, doing so can be difficult; the best intentions and a concerted effort do not guarantee happy results. Striking it rich when seeking personal fulfillment at home and at work also requires having reliable and satisfying relationships with partners, children, and colleagues, as well as having at least some control over work and family demands. There is no perfect solution for the vast majority of working parents. Most are and will always be faced with conflicting demands of work and family and must find ways to effectively meet this challenge. Navigating through these challenges also involves the employment conditions and social policies that directly influence (often powerfully) the psychological and material resources in the household. In the next section, I turn to a discussion of maternity leave and childcare benefit policies that vary across states and nations.

Community as Nation Variation in parenting stress across communities is likely to be vast, because the resources that are known to make life less demanding for parents (e.g., well-paying and stable jobs, safe housing and neighborhoods, accessible and affordable childcare, economic and public services infrastructure) differ from one place to another. For instance, there are large differences across nations and across states within this country in the types of instrumental support (usually economic) provided to households with children. A number of European countries have laws that are designed to maximize the health of parents and children and minimize the risks of distress in parenting. These include things like publicly funded healthcare, maternity and paternity leave, and childcare. Such supports are not available in most countries of the world, because they are so expensive. They require a substantial economic base as well as existing structures for mandating and carrying out redistribution of resources. Variation in these supports to families is wide even within the subgroup of affluent industrial nations, with


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the United States generally having the fewest legally mandated supports in place (Kamerman, ). This is exemplified in my own experience as a first-time parent. My wife Keirsten and I are Americans. For several years we lived and worked in Britain, where our first daughter was born. Once it was clear to us and our physician that a baby was on the way, a whole system of community supports was set in motion that included healthcare and visits to a prenatal clinic, classes to help us prepare, and a range of choices for labor and delivery. When our daughter was born, I was able to take two weeks off using combined paternal leave and vacation time, and Keirsten had half a year of paid maternity leave. During the first week or so following the delivery, a nurse midwife visited us at home to make sure that all was well. As anxious first-time parents, we found this aspect of the experience to be particularly helpful, especially since we had no family around to help us. In doing my research for this book, I was not surprised to learn that home visiting and counseling from health professionals are related to lower levels of parenting stress (Armstrong, Fraser, Dadds, and Morris, ; Davis and Spurr, ). In addition, we received a monthly allowance from the British government to help offset the costs of caring for a child. These were benefits that we received simply because we legally resided in Britain (none of us was a British citizen)—benefits that we would not have received had we lived in the United States when our daughter was born. There was no question that this allowance and Keirsten’s paid maternity leave made a big difference in our daily lives; it helped offset many of the costs of having a child and made it feasible for Keirsten to stay at home with our baby (which was what she preferred to do). Although we paid nothing out of pocket, as workers we paid taxes that exceeded what we would have paid in taxes in the United States. There were a number of things that we did not experience that we would have if we had been in the United States. Paid parental leave would not have been available to us, and my paternity leave almost certainly would have been shorter unless I chose to take an unpaid leave of absence (a luxury afforded in only a few professions in this country). There were few visits with a doctor during the pregnancy, and a physician was not present when our daughter was born. Instead, nurses and midwives provided nearly all of the care prior to, during, and after the

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delivery. Keirsten had very few prenatal tests, but did have frequent prenatal visits with a health nurse. We did not have a private room; within an hour of delivery, we were in a new but very basic hospital ward with eight other mothers and their babies. We did not have access to an obstetrician or a pediatrician for getting answers to our many questions, although we were told that we would have had such contact with doctors if there had been problems. We were strongly encouraged to go home as soon as we wanted, so we left twenty hours after we arrived. We noticed during our health nurse appointments and community prenatal classes that the very same services were being offered to a wide variety of people from many different backgrounds. It was clear that access to prenatal care was widespread and considered by everyone we met to be part of what the community was supposed to be doing, and we appreciated that fact. At the same time, the reality of the expense of such communitywide support systems came home every month, in the form of large deductions from our paychecks and high sales taxes on just about everything. Thus the crux of the issue is whether we as communities choose to provide the most basic supports to the largest number of people, or greater access to the very best resources to a smaller number of people. The answer in this debate lies in how it is that the community chooses to redistribute economic resources.

Socioeconomic Resources Parenting stress is higher among parents who have fewer socioeconomic resources. Families facing the challenges of insufficient or dangerous housing, crowding inside the home and in the neighborhood, and unfulfilled basic needs due to poverty and lack of education are more likely to have parents showing signs of chronic stress that directly influence mental and physical health. Adults in these distressing environments also are more likely to show reactive parenting that is less predictable, more harsh, and less stimulating and supportive of children’s health and learning (Baum, Garofalo, and Yali, ; Bradley and Corwyn, ; Pianta and Egeland, ). Chronic poverty is particularly detrimental because its effects


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accumulate and grow over time. The effects of chronic poverty on children’s developmental outcomes operate in part through higher levels of parenting stress and inept, harsh parenting behavior (Coyle et al., ; Lyons-Ruth et al., ; Repetti and Wood, ). The connections between poverty, harsh parenting, and children’s behavioral and emotional problems function partly through certain aspects of mothers’ social cognitions, including the tendency to view children’s behavior as intentionally hostile and the lack of proactive problem-focused coping strategies (Klebanov, Brooks-Gunn, and Duncan, ; Pinderhughes et al., ). Like their more educated and affluent peers, poor parents want what is best for their children, and they want to be able to work and earn enough money to support their families. The mid- to late-s was a time of remarkable change in the welfare support system for poor families in the United States. As a result of these changes, many more poor mothers who previously would have received income while not working now receive income for going to work. There is and will continue to be interest in whether and how “welfare to work” programs are effective in the long term at reducing rates of poverty and reducing stress for families. Being employed has mental health benefits for poor parents, as long as the income is sufficient and the workplace is not dangerous or highly stressful. Thus it is likely that income support alone is not sufficient for reducing parenting stress and improving outcomes for parents and children; it is the combination of income support and employment that may be most effective. Nonetheless, the period of transition surrounding job training and entry into employment is a stressful time for poor mothers. Furthermore, there are challenges faced by working poor mothers involving the need for safe and reliable childcare. All working parents have this concern. However, it is an acute stressor if you are living and working in a neighborhood that is unhealthy and dangerous, a more likely scenario for many working poor parents (Brooks-Gunn, Klebanov, Smith, and Lee, ; Dumka, Gonzales, Wood, and Formoso, ; Gyamfi, Brooks-Gunn, and Jackson, ). The bridge between parenting stress and insufficient socioeconomic resources is demonstrated most clearly in longitudinal studies

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that examine the impact of real-world events on family income and parents’ functioning. Such studies are expensive and difficult to conduct, if for no other reason than that the timing and severity of stressors are often unpredictable and idiosyncratic. This makes studies of large samples of families more difficult. Nonetheless, it is possible, and those who have carried out such research find strong evidence for a causal connection between deteriorations in economic resources, increases in parenting stress, increases in hostile and inconsistent parenting, and increases in children’s social-emotional maladjustment. One study followed a group of families in a Midwest farming community during the collapse of the agricultural industry in the s (Conger et al., ). As the economic climate changed and more men lost their sources of income and work roles, family relationships suffered. Marriages crumbled, and fathers became harsher in their parenting. Their children, in turn, showed deteriorations in social behavior and emotional well-being, indicated by increases in antisocial behaviors and symptoms of depression and anxiety. A related study focused on differences between families in the effects of the duration of fathers’ unemployment (Liem and Liem, ). It showed that the longer the period of unemployment, the more distress and more problems in family relationships were found. The couples who were most affected by the fathers’ unemployment already were showing early signs of marital dissatisfaction and exposure to more stressful life events. This suggests that parental adaptation in the face of socioeconomic loss follows in part from parental adaptation and coping prior to the changes in economic and social status. Poverty and lack of access to education and employment opportunities are community problems that require solutions involving the creation and shifting of resources. Changes in industry and technology have allowed widespread redistribution of socioeconomic resources. The advent of public education for all and cash assistance to the poor, both of which emerged on a global scale in the twentieth century, fundamentally changed the landscape of daily life in families. More recently, legislative efforts have shifted emphasis to family leave and childcare policies. Family leave and childcare. In , the U.S. Family and Medical Leave Act, or FMLA, was enacted into law. This legislation mandates


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up to twelve weeks per annum of unpaid job-protected leave for employees who must care for babies, children, other family members, or themselves (in the case of prolonged illness). In addition to protecting the person’s job, this policy requires that health insurance be maintained during the leave. Although without question an essential step toward providing needed support to families, there are some limitations to the FMLA. First, the policy applies only to businesses with fifty or more employees. Second, surveys have shown that many working parents are not aware of this benefit, and many businesses have not fully implemented the policy. Third, few are able to make full use of the policy even when they need to, because the family is not able to afford the temporary loss of income associated with the unpaid leave. In some cases, the parents are legitimately concerned about being seen by their bosses and coworkers as being less committed or less capable at work if they take leave. Fourth, the policy does not apply to part-time and temporary workers, which is the segment of the labor force that includes by far the largest representation of working mothers (Fredriksen-Goldsen and Scharlach, ). By comparison, most European nations include more extensive family leave that also includes pay while the parent is not working. The family leave social policy in Europe has been driven not only by legislators’ concerns about the well-being of parents and children, but also by concerns about dwindling birth rates and the long-term effects of this on national and regional economies (Hwang, ). Paid leave may one day exist throughout the United States. At the time I was writing this book, California was planning to initiate the first paid family leave legislation in the country. This leave is funded from employee payments into the state’s existing disability insurance system. The benefit includes up to six weeks of paid leave per year (up to the lesser amount of  percent of salary or $ per week) to care for a child or an ailing family member. This would be used as part of the twelveweek job-protected leave guaranteed by the FMLA. Other states will follow suit if the test case in California reveals that hidden costs to employers or families are outweighed by the economic and psychological benefits to families, and the economic benefit to employers. How effective is parental leave, with respect to reducing or minimizing parental distress? Research has shown that a mother’s anxiety is

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higher the more she works following the birth of her child. However, studies in the United States have not shown straightforward effects of longer parental leaves on maternal psychological well-being after delivery. This is probably because the effects of having some time away from work depend in large measure on the individual woman’s goals and attitudes. Having a longer leave will not be beneficial if the mother wants to be at work. Having a shorter leave will be problematic if the mother is not ready to return to work, or if she or her baby has health problems. Despite this variation in mothers’ goals and attitudes, the majority of working mothers believe that their maternity leaves are not long enough, and financial pressure is one of the most common reasons for returning to work (Hyde et al., ; Klein, Hyde, Essex, and Clark, ). A related matter is the provision of more opportunities for a fair and equitable division of labor in the household. As noted previously, parents’ conflict over the division of labor in the household is a primary factor in relationship dissatisfaction in families with young children. One approach to reducing conflict over division of labor is to increase incentives and remove disincentives for men to become more involved in the day-to-day care of their children. Some European nations (e.g., Sweden) have begun to require fathers to take part of the parental leave offered to each family; if the father does not take his portion of the leave, the family loses that leave time. This specification was made within the existing family leave law because fathers were not making use of the parental leave that was being made available to them. It remains to be seen whether such legislation will have an impact on fathers’ utilization of parental leave, and how increases in paternity leave use will influence families and parenting stress. It may be that having more opportunities for choice—in particular, eliminating some of the financial pressure to return to work when the mother is not yet ready physically or psychologically—will reduce parenting stress. Another related matter is access to affordable childcare. In the United States, most working parents also struggle to find quality childcare that meets their needs. In addition, childcare arrangements tend to change, because the turnover rate of employees in childcare settings is high. Finding good childcare is difficult, but finding good childcare that is stable is even harder. Not surprisingly, worries about childcare represent a significant contributing factor to distress among working


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parents. The minimum standards for childcare quality (ranging from caregiver-to-child ratios to training requirements for providers) vary from state to state, as does enforcement of those standards. Although the number of available childcare options has increased over the years (many more families are now choosing center-based childcare), the cost of high-quality care is high. In most cases, working parents pay nearly all of the costs, although federal policies (and policies in some states) provide tax reduction benefits to working parents, welfare-towork programs give financial support for purchasing childcare, and Head Start centers provide subsidized care to millions of low-income children. This system is different from many European nations, in which something closer to universally available, public childcare is provided, along with other benefits such as paid maternal and paternal leave (Fredriksen-Goldsen and Scharlach, ). So what is the end result of these national variations in supports to families? Are American parents more or less stressed in their parenting roles, compared to families in industrial and developing nations elsewhere? There is not a definitive answer to this question, because national comparisons of objective indicators of parenting stress specifically have not been conducted. What is clear from the existing research is that the range of parenting stress is very wide within every population that has been studied. This variation in parenting stress within each community or nation very likely exceeds the differences between populations in average levels of parenting stress. Nonetheless, some families clearly do need socioeconomic support, particularly young families headed by working or unemployed poor parents. The dilemma for nations like the United States is to develop methods of supporting families with children without creating disincentives for existing employers or new economic growth, or implementing policies that strongly restrict parents’ choices. Whether and how national differences in family support policies lead to increases or decreases in parenting stress remains a wide-open question for future research.

Conclusion Socioeconomic and other stressors may be most influential in their impact on individual adaptation during times of rapid social change

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(Lazarus, ). Over the past few decades, changes in the structure and organization of families and neighborhoods have accompanied changes in the labor market and workplace. More women with young children are working, so fewer parents are around and in the neighborhood during the day. More families are moving, and they are doing so more frequently. There is less involvement in civic activities and community organizations. These changes have been accompanied by changes in the risk of social isolation and loss of access to parenting resources (Fredriksen-Goldsen and Scharlach, ). Although national and community social policies powerfully impact the lives of parents, the informal community resources involving social interaction and instrumental or emotional support are most important in determining how well parents cope and adjust to the demands of parenthood. Parental distress and harsh parenting are less prevalent in households in which the parents are not isolated but instead have frequent contact with other people in settings outside of the home. Providing such community contacts and support to parents in need (e.g., respite childcare) can work to reduce parenting stress (Chan, ; Cowen, ; Cowen, ; Cowen and Reed, ; Mullins, Aniol, Boyd, Page, and Chaney, ). Access to and utilization of these social resources is one of many aspects of coping. Successful coping, and interventions for parents who need help, are the topics of the next and final chapter.

7

Coping and Intervention

We are surrounded by messages telling us how to adapt to life’s challenges—to “just do it” or to “pick ourselves up” (usually by our bootstraps, and often followed by dusting ourselves off). Ideally, we should be able to identify what needs to be done to fix a problem and then go out there and make it right. These messages directly pertain to how we approach problem solving, including coping with stressful events or circumstances. In this book I have described several theories and numerous research studies that address how parenting stress arises and how it affects parenting and children’s development. I now turn to successful coping, the remaining part of the parenting stress equation. Adaptation and coping with parenting stress involve a number of psychological processes. It turns out that for parents in many situations, identifying problems and striving to solve them can be highly effective; in this sense, picking yourself up and just doing it can work. However, it is overly simplistic to say that those who use this approach are the most effective and well-adjusted people. Coping with parenting stress is more complex than that. Furthermore, sometimes parents and their children need help to adapt to life’s challenges. A number of interven▪ 139 ▪

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tions (even some that were not intended to affect parenting stress) have been shown to reduce parent and child distress, to improve family relationships, and to optimize children’s developmental outcomes. Parenting stress is as much about coping as it is about distress— distress that ranges from dealing with persistent daily hassles to facing serious difficulties that can accompany parenthood. People are not able to function well if they are constantly distressed. Thus effective coping is essential to mental and physical health and well-being. Furthermore, we can benefit from managing stress well, even when the circumstances are intense and severe. Having the experience of facing distress and successfully coping with it promotes resiliency, so that the parent is better able to handle stressors that arise in the future. Successful adaptation in the face of stress can also lead to personal growth in self-esteem and feelings of competence (Holohan, Moos, and Schaefer, ; Sandler and Mistretta, ). In the fields of behavioral medicine and psychiatry, there is a vast amount of research on coping with acute and chronic stressors. By comparison, we know little about the effectiveness of coping with parenting stress. However, the research that has been done strongly suggests that the effects of coping found for other domains of stress, such as work-related stress, illness, or difficult life circumstances, appear to operate in much the same way with respect to reducing levels of parenting stress. My aim in this chapter is to integrate theory and research on coping with stress, and to connect that work with what we know about parenting stress specifically. Successful coping emerges from a broad and diverse repertoire of strategies used to reduce or eliminate altogether the negative consequences of the stresses of parenting. The more strategies a parent has, and the more able he or she is to apply those strategies efficiently and appropriately, the more likely it is that coping will be successful. There are many personal, cultural, and situational constraints on the repertoire of possible strategies, such as personality, social conventions (e.g., cultural norms regarding the acceptability of talking about emotions), and the nature of the stressors (e.g., severity, chronicity). In addition, at times a parent’s own approaches to coping are not sufficient, and intervention is needed.


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What Is Coping? Following decades of research in many fields of biology and psychology, there is an evolving consensus regarding the criteria used to determine whether a particular coping strategy is effective at reducing distress. These include: whether the stressor is removed, whether the physiological stress reaction or subjective experience of distress is reduced or eliminated, whether the individual is able to function normally (based in part on social norms of behavior, thoughts, and emotions), whether activities that are interrupted by the stressor are resumed, whether physical and subjective well-being improve, whether self-esteem is maintained, and whether coping is deemed effective by the individual (Zeidner and Saklofske, ). While scientists generally agree on what effective coping looks like, there is less agreement about how best to define and describe the particular strategies people use, and whether particular strategies are more effective than others.

Categories of Coping Strategies The most common definition of coping strategies involves a distinction between emotion- and problem-focused approaches and between approach toward or avoidance of the problem or stressor. These are not mutually exclusive coping strategies; parents often apply multiple types of strategies simultaneously, and together these can promote adaptation or make matters worse, depending on the situation. Less common but just as important is the distinction between effortful and involuntary responses to stressors. Although nearly all of the research has emphasized effortful use of coping strategies, involuntary responses to stress over which we have little control (e.g., intrusive thoughts) may exert powerful influences on our abilities to plan and use voluntary strategies (Compas, Connor, Osowiecki, and Welch, ). Problem- and emotion-focused coping. The majority of research on coping has emphasized two particular categories of coping strategies— emotion-focused and problem-focused (Lazarus, ). Importantly, these methods can occur simultaneously, and together can promote adaptation or worsen the effects of stress.

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Emotion-focused coping strategies are effective because they alter the emotional experience of stress, rather than altering or eliminating the source of stress. These strategies are more likely to be invoked if the individual believes that the stressor is out of her or his own control. Often, the mechanics of emotion-focused coping operate to regulate emotions through conscious thought processes. For example, consider a father who finds life at home with his toddler to be extremely challenging, because he simply does not like young children’s lack of selfcontrol. The father may come to believe that his parenting stress is arising, in good measure, from his dislike of young children—something he had not realized until he had become a father himself. He is likely to believe that he has little personal control, because he knows that he cannot make his two-year-old daughter behave like an eight year old. He realizes in time that in order to cope he must wait out the situation. In response, he attempts to reduce his distress by minimizing the time that he spends with his daughter (to avoid getting angry), by thinking about the times that she makes him happy, and by striving to force negative feelings and thoughts about his daughter from his mind. Problem-focused coping strategies are more likely to be invoked if the stressor is thought to be under some degree of personal control. Problem solving is carried out in an attempt to remove the stressor or somehow alter its effects, through the avenues of personal control that the person believes she or he has in that situation. For example, a mother who is attempting to cope with a child whose behavior presents constant challenges may conduct many assessments of her child’s behavior throughout each day, in an attempt to circumvent escalations in problem behaviors. This involves careful observation of the objects, people, and events that seem to “set off ” the child’s misbehaviors, and structuring the day in order to reduce the likelihood that the child has those experiences. This may or may not be effective. The point is that the parent who uses such problem-focused coping strategies in these situations believes that she has some personal control and makes attempts to cope with her parenting stress by exercising personal control in a targeted and more effective way. Approach vs. avoidant coping. Another distinction is made between approach and avoidant cognitive and behavioral coping strategies (Holohan et al., ). An example of a cognitive approach strat-


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egy is positive reappraisal or reframing. This is when the person thinks about a stressor or problem in a way that emphasizes the potential positive aspects or outcomes, and tries to consider the stressor in the grand scheme of things. Thus a parent may ponder her child’s noxious behavior, telling herself that although she often feels annoyed, at least her child is healthy and happy most of the time. An example of a behavioral approach strategy is strategic problem solving, in which the person makes a plan of action and carries it out in an effort to remove or minimize the effects of a stressor. For instance, couples can talk and work together as “co-parents” to derive and carry out strategies to reduce the frequency of their child’s misbehaviors and increase the frequency of prosocial behaviors (Russell and Russell, ). Another example is found in research on working mothers, who show less parenting stress when they are able to plan their days and tasks and effectively delegate to other adults and children some of the household tasks. This allows them to strike a healthier and more reasonable balance of demands at home and at work (Emmons et al., ). In contrast to approach strategies, avoidance strategies involve withdrawal from the problem. Denial is a cognitive avoidance strategy, involving active attempts to forget about a stressor. For example, a parent with a terminally ill child may come to cope by trying to forget that the child is dying, in an attempt to enjoy each day that they have together. An example of a behavioral avoidance strategy is catharsis or emotional discharge, in which the parent does something such as shouting while sitting alone in the car or vigorously exercising in an attempt to reduce distress, anger, or other aversive feelings. What works? Conclusively labeling the effectiveness of particular coping strategies is difficult. However, some generalizations can be made about the typical effectiveness of the various categories. Cognitive and behavioral problem-focused and approach coping strategies often are associated with better adaptation and healthier outcomes, particularly when there is some degree of actual and perceived personal control over the stressful circumstances (Aldwin, ; Kohn, ; Stansbury and Gunnar, ). For example, research on mothers of dangerously ill newborns (including premature or low-birth-weight babies) shows that those who believe that they have some degree of control over their situations are better able to cope with their distress

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(Affleck, Tennen, and Gershman, ; Feldman-Reichman, Miller, Gordon, and Hendricks-Munoz, ). Consider some examples from research on the effectiveness of behavioral approach coping strategies. In a recent longitudinal study of mothers and fathers of children with developmental disabilities (e.g., cognitive, communicative, or motor skill deficits), researchers followed the families over the children’s first decade of life. They discovered that parenting stress gradually increased, on average. However, those parents who engaged in problem-focused coping strategies, in which they effectively identified the sources of their stressors and were able to generate solutions to those problems, were least likely to show these increases in parenting stress over time. This buffering effect was particularly salient for fathers (Hauser-Cram et al., ). A second example comes from studies of parents of physically disabled children. For many of these parents, emotion-focused coping is linked with increased distress over time, while problem-focused coping is linked with decreased distress (Miller et al., ). Cognitive approach strategies also can be very effective at reducing parenting stress. Recall that one type of cognitive approach strategy is positive reappraisal or reframing of a problem. With this strategy, the parent thinks about the problem at hand in a fundamentally different way that emphasizes a rewarding goal that can be obtained. The emphasis of this coping strategy is on reframing the parent’s own thoughts about the problem. That is, past and current thoughts are negative and distressing, so new thoughts that are positive, problem-focused, and comforting are implemented. Consider the example of a parent of a child who is very difficult to manage because he is usually overactive, does not sleep or eat well, rarely does as he is told without a battle, and performs poorly at school because he has difficulty concentrating. As we have seen, such children tend to have parents who experience more parenting stress, and their parenting tends to be more reactive, harsh, and less effective at gaining compliance from the child. At the same time, there is wide variation in parenting stress and contentment among parents of behaviorally difficult children. Some manage to cope very effectively using positive reframing. They think about difficulties as challenges to be overcome, rather than as sources of anger that originate from the child’s behaviors


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over which the parent has little direct control. Consistent with this idea is research showing that among parents of children diagnosed with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, those who regard parenting as a set of challenges that they can and will be able to handle are the parents who are most content (Podolski and Nigg, ). The use of positive reappraisal also reduces the likelihood that parenting stress will disrupt the developing parent-child attachment relationship in early childhood (Jarvis and Creasey, ). At the same time, approach strategies like the use of positive reframing are not universally effective. It is possible that reframing a problem will not work to reduce distress, or may make the parent more distressed, if the use of this or some other problem-focused strategy interferes with problem solving or leads to complete avoidance of negative feelings that invariably arise from time to time. The overall effectiveness of problem-focused and approach coping strategies can be contrasted with the general ineffectiveness of emotion-focused and avoidant strategies, which are associated with physical and psychological maladjustment as well as parenting stress (Barnett et al., ). This appears to be true particularly if these passive and avoidant coping strategies are accompanied by illness and serious problems in the marriage (Compas et al., ; Holohan et al., ). Nonetheless, avoidant and emotion-focused coping strategies can be effective in some circumstances, especially when the individual truly has no control over the stressors or situation (Aldwin, ; Kohn, ). For example, parents facing a potentially terminal child illness over which they have no control often must come to cope with their distress by invoking more passive coping methods that do not involve problem-focused strategies (e.g., Douglas, Hulson, and Trompeter, ). There is not a “one size fits all” strategy, because people and the situations they face are simply too variable.

Relationship-focused Coping: Social Support Successful adaptation in parenting has many ingredients. One of the most important is the availability and accessibility of instrumental (i.e., practical) and emotional support from others. Coping rarely resides only within the individual. In addition to problem- and emotion-

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focused strategies, there are efforts to cope that involve the use and preservation of our most important social relationships. Like problem- and emotion-focused strategies, relationshipfocused strategies are not independent or exclusive of other strategies; they work in tandem with other coping mechanisms (O’Brien and DeLongis, ). There is evidence that women are more likely than men to focus on nurturing their young and strengthening their ties to others when faced with stressors, although this does not mean that men do not do so, or that social support is effective only for women (Taylor et al., ). When it is effective, social support operates in a number of ways, probably at every stage of the stress and coping process. A parent has his or her own perceptions of available support from others, which may or may not correspond with the actual support that occurs within close relationships. These perceptions and the utilization of social support within close personal relationships stem in part from beliefs about self-worth and the trustworthiness of others. Broader networks of social support also are important, such as the collection of intimate as well as more distant relationships within an immediate or extended family. Those who believe that social support is accessible and who have intimate relationships within close and supportive families show better adaptation to stress. They experience fewer stressors, are able to engage multiple effective coping strategies, and are more likely to call on others for support when it is needed (Pierce, Sarason, and Sarason, ). Emotional support. Imagine a mother and father who are coping with chronic parenting stress because they have a child with an ongoing life-threatening illness. There is no real escape from the strain that this experience produces, as long as the child’s life remains in danger. Nonetheless, if their relationship is strong and supportive, they come to rely heavily on one another to give and receive help with the day-today care of the child (through instrumental support, described below). They also talk about their experiences and the emotions surrounding their shared situation. Although by no means a perfect solution to their predicament, emotional support of one another can greatly reduce the persistence and magnitude of their feelings of fear and sadness.


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Emotional support between “co-parents” does not minimize or eliminate the presence of stressors, but it works to ameliorate some of the effects of stressors on the parents’ functioning, by altering their emotional experiences. One of the reasons that happy marriages, lower parenting stress, more effective and rewarding parent-child relationships, and better child social-emotional adjustment all seem to go together is that the adults in such families are partners in parenthood. They frequently discuss, evaluate, and reevaluate their own and each other’s coping strategies, child-rearing beliefs, and parenting behaviors. In supportive families, well-organized stories or “narratives” about the stress and joy of parenting and family life are built and shared within those families. These coherent narratives are an important (though often overlooked) part of healthy adult functioning (Fiese et al., ). Emotional social support reduces aversive emotions that accompany parenting stress. By communicating with others who can understand, a distressed parent can learn that she or he is coping with difficulties faced by many others (Hintermair, ; Kerr and McIntosh, ; Lowes and Lyne, ). This normalizing process is an essential aspect of adjustment in parenting, because with few exceptions there is little in the way of prior experience that can prepare anyone for the stressful demands of parenthood, particularly if those stressors are chronic or acute. Emotional support also helps a distressed parent reduce negative feelings through the sharing of emotions with a trusted friend. For some parents, it helps to “vent” or “let off steam” by talking to a partner or friend. The process of putting feelings into words has an effect on the emotional experience surrounding the stress. It can increase or decrease distress, depending in part on how the listener responds. A confidant can reassure or help a parent deal with a potentially distressing experience, or can help the parent take others’ perspectives as a means of generating a wider variety of potential solutions to problems. Through these emotionally supportive interactions and ongoing relationships, the provider of support is able to give invaluable information to the parent about her or his own competence, and about whether current and planned coping strategies are effective (Aspinwall, ). Conversations and advice (some of it unsolicited and not

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welcomed initially) can lead to new realizations about what is and is not working. Instrumental support. In contrast to emotional support, instrumental support involves practical assistance provided by others in the family and community. This may or may not accompany emotional support. Consider the common experience of many parents who receive instrumental support every day from their spouses and their own parents. For example, a mother who has ample instrumental support in caring for her children is able to call on these other trusted adults to step in and help her. She is able to hand over some caregiving tasks to her husband and her own parents when she needs a rest or when there are other demands on her time and attention. In contrast, in the case of social isolation, a mother may truly have access to no one, or a mother may not be able to trust the adults who are available to help. All else being equal, a parent with sufficient instrumental social support will experience fewer and less serious daily hassles in child rearing, and will be more able to cope with the stressors that do arise because she or he is not solely responsible for caring for the children. The sources of practical support usually are family members, close friends, and neighbors, although people and institutions out in the community also can provide instrumental support. This is exemplified by the research showing that the availability and use of respite childcare services for distressed parents are linked with lower parenting stress and fewer incidences of child maltreatment (Cowen, ). Instrumental social support works because it reduces the number and intensity of stressors faced by parents. The demands of child rearing are distributed over a larger number of capable adults who are motivated to care for the child. Practical social support also allows the parent to focus more of his or her attention on the parent-child relationship, as opposed to being occupied by the mundane and less rewarding demands of childcare and maintaining a household. The importance of empathy. The key to the success of relationshipfocused coping strategies, and emotional support in particular, is empathic coping. This includes perspective taking, social referencing of emotional states, and emotional communication—perceiving and interpreting accurately others’ emotions and needs for support, and clearly communicating concern for the individual in need. Empathic


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coping can happen between any two people. When it is effective at reducing stress, empathic coping works because it aids the individual by providing co-regulation (i.e., between two people) of emotional distress. At times, we all need another person whom we trust who can empathize and soothe us when we are experiencing distress. To be effective, empathic coping requires accurate empathy. In order to know how to help, a person who is attempting to provide social support must be able to read correctly the stressed parent’s emotions and understand the circumstances surrounding the distress. When empathy is accurate, the supportive partner or friend can provide instrumental and emotional support in a highly effective way. However, empathic accuracy comes at a price. It taxes the attention and thoughts of the empathizer, and focusing on empathy can interfere with the provision of other more instrumental modes of support (Hodges and Wegner, ). Knowing how much energy to expend when attempting to accurately perceive and understand another person’s thoughts and feelings requires active perspective taking that consumes most of the empathizer’s conscious effort. Even though empathic support usually comes from people who know us well, having shared experiences does not necessarily mean that empathy will occur or will be accurate. What appears to matter most is whether the person providing support is sufficiently motivated to be accurate. This motivation varies widely across individuals and relationships, and can be influenced by past experiences or anticipated future experiences (Hodges, Klein, and Veach, ). When empathy between partners or friends is inaccurate, emotional support delivered with the best of intentions can be ineffective or even damaging, particularly if it leads to conflict in the relationship (O’Brien and DeLongis, ). An example of this is found in the dynamics of shared problem solving in some couples. A parent may divulge to her partner some of the bad feelings and worries that she has about their child, but her partner may want to solve the problem and minimize the stressor as soon as possible. Therefore, he will avoid discussing her feelings about the problem, because that is seen as a distraction from the more problem-focused approach that is required. This is sometimes called dismissive problem solving; it is more common among males in married couples, and is often ineffective (Weiss, ).

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What works? There is a clear link between lower levels of parenting stress and access to and use of social support from family members, friends, and members of the community. Although all parents benefit from having instrumental and social support that is appropriate and useful, social support is particularly important for parents who are more likely to develop problems in parenting. These include parents who are teenagers, those who have little education and are living in poverty, those who have babies born too early and weighing too little or children with chronic or terminal illnesses, or those who are facing simultaneous stressful life events such as moving, separation or divorce, and job loss (Adamakos et al., ; Deater-Deckard, ; Frank et al., ; Koeske and Koeske, ; Quittner et al., ; Richardson et al., ; Roggman, Moe, Hart, and Forthum, ). When effective, social support not only is associated with lower levels of parenting stress, it also can break the connection between stress and the harsh parenting behavior that often accompanies distress (Kazui, ; Hauser-Cram et al., ; Nakagawa, Teti, and Lamb, ; Rodgers, , ; Uno, Florsheim, and Uchino, ). However, like problem-focused and approach coping strategies, social support is not a panacea. There have been studies that show no link between support and parenting stress (e.g., Farel and Hooper, ; Ostberg and Hagekull, ). In addition, the presence of support can sometimes make matters worse. For instance, residing with their own parents may have many advantages for adolescent mothers. However, it may not always protect these young mothers from distress in parenting. Greater involvement by their own parents may actually create problems, if there is conflict over how the babies should be cared for and treated (Kalil and Danziger, ; Spencer, Kalil, Larson, Spieker, and Gilchrist, ). Social support that is not wanted or appropriate for a particular situation is not helpful, and can be harmful if it leads to further distress (Lepore, ). This is exemplified in the experiences of some women following childbirth. Among those women who have uncomplicated pregnancies and deliveries and whose babies are born full-term and healthy, having a large network of family and friends who can offer emotional and instrumental support appears to be welcomed by most new mothers. This support helps them cope with the normal difficul-


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ties surrounding this transition. However, if the infant is born prematurely with a very low birth weight, an extensive network of family and friends can, at times, serve to undermine a mother’s efforts to cope. She may end up spending too much time talking with well-intended family members, many of whom themselves are distressed about the baby’s health and prognosis (Zarling, Hirsch, and Landry, ). At times, she may find herself counseling other family members, when it is she who needs counsel most. Lastly, understanding the effects of social support on parental coping is complicated by the fact that stress and coping are dynamic, and these changes in support over time can differ markedly for parents, depending on their particular situations. One recent longitudinal study demonstrated the waxing and waning of support that was offered to and utilized by mothers and fathers of children diagnosed with cancer. Although social support was high at the time of diagnosis in nearly every case, it tended to dissipate over time. Although those parents who received more support deemed as appropriate and useful were coping better early in the cancer diagnosis and treatment process, growing dissatisfaction with social support was tied to poorer parental adaptation. Interestingly, this study also revealed no lasting effects of support on parental adjustment (Hoekstra-Weebers et al., ). In contrast, another study that investigated support for parents of chronically ill children found that social support increased over the year following diagnosis, and was an important contributor to parental adjustment (Patterson, Garwick, Bennett, and Blum, ). Ideally, this changeable quality arises from flexibility in the parents’ networks of support, whereby they are able to make use of helpful support when they need it. To summarize, perhaps the most important lesson from decades of research on coping and social support is that empathy is the key. As members of families and communities in our neighborhoods, at school, at work, and in our towns and cities, we can provide muchneeded emotional and instrumental help to parents. However, for it to work well, we need to be able to deliver support in a way that is appropriate to those parents’ situations, in terms of its content and timing. The most effective way to match the support we have to offer to the needs of parents is to accurately empathize with the parents and to try

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to understand their situations. Similarly, as parents who seek support from others in order to adapt to the stressors of parenthood, the most effective way to get the support we need is to clearly communicate our feelings and desires, so that those who want to help can more readily know what to do and when to do it. This is difficult and it requires effort (especially when we are already distressed), but when it works, the effects of social support on parental coping and adaptation are remarkably powerful.

How Does Coping Work? In Chapter , I described a social-cognitive theoretical framework that has been used to define and explain the effects of coping on reducing parenting stress. According to this framework, coping strategies are used, evaluated, and altered as the individual attempts to reduce distress, conserve resources, and minimize the likelihood that additional stressors will be encountered. To do this successfully, the parent must be an efficient and effective processor of social information. This is the key to parents’ self-control or regulation of their sensations, emotions, thoughts, and behaviors (Costa, Somerfield, and McCrae, ). Having a broad array of coping strategies available and knowing how and when to invoke a particular strategy is only half the battle. The distressed parent must also be able to figure out when a coping strategy is not working, in order to replace it with a more effective strategy. This is most likely to occur when the parent proactively sets goals and plans actions, and then evaluates and alters them based on accurate assessments of whether particular coping strategies are working (Zimmerman, ). These cycles of planning, carrying out, and evaluating coping strategies involve attention, memory, emotions, preferences, and beliefs or attitudes (Boekaerts, )—the nuts and bolts of information processing. The more automatic or streamlined the information processing is, the more available are cognitive resources (like attention and memory) that can be used for further evaluation and implementation of alternative coping strategies (Aspinwall and Taylor, ). Unfortunately, the very same distress that a parent is trying to reduce or eradicate acts to undermine the effectiveness of her or his in-


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formation processing. This is because distress creates global impairments in cognitive resources. For example, fear or anxiety can bias attention in such a way that the individual has a more difficult time not thinking about the stressor and his or her own shortcomings (Matthews and Wells, ). This “negativity bias” serves to further increase distress. Individual differences. Although there may not be a perfect coping strategy, some parents consistently cope more effectively than others. As just described, successfully adapting in the face of parenting stress has much to do with the particular stressors involved and the parent’s ability to utilize and alter their coping strategies. But stress and coping is not only about transactions between experiences, thoughts, and emotions. There are a variety of personal attributes, some of which can be thought of as stable intrapersonal traits, that can influence coping mechanisms. These may include goals, attitudes about the self and about others and the world, and resources that people have access to and do or do not make use of, such as intelligence, optimism, social capital, and support from others (Lazarus, ). It is impossible to think about stable individual differences between parents in the effectiveness of their coping without simultaneously thinking about stable individual differences in proneness to distress, as discussed in chapter . An additional aspect of individual differences in coping is preemptive coping. For many reasons, some parents are more able to cope with the stressors of parenthood because they come into the role more prepared (physically and psychologically) for the challenges ahead. Proactive information gathering and beliefs about the child’s individuality are important. Parents who are knowledgeable about child development and parenting have information at their fingertips that is accurate and applicable in their daily lives. In addition, parents who come to think of their children as individuals with their own characteristics are more likely to have warmer, more rewarding parent-child relationships (Benoit et al., ). This in turn can serve to minimize the number and severity of stressors that the parent will have to face. Having sufficient knowledge about parenthood and about a particular child (her or his likes and dislikes, temperament, and so forth) can lead to more accurate and realistic expectations (Grusec et al., ). Hav-

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ing this knowledge and being prepared may be particularly important for those parents who are at greater risk for experiencing acute and chronic parenting stress, such as teenage mothers (Dukewich et al., ). Preemptive coping need not involve the intentional use of a particular strategy that is designed to reduce parenting stress. Ongoing lifestyle habits exemplify this. Adults who habitually get sufficient sleep and appropriate nutrition and who enjoy plenty of physical activity are less likely to be distressed when they make the transition to parenthood (Walker, Fleschler, and Heaman, ). Good health habits have added benefits to individual and family functioning once children arrive. To summarize, there is no single formula for defining effective coping, because there is not a universally effective coping strategy that always works. It is inaccurate to think of a distressed parent as someone with limited coping strategies that are applied in the same way in every stressful situation. Real coping is more flexible than that, and more complicated to understand as a result. Coping mechanisms operate as part of an ongoing process of stress and adaptation. Most people use a variety of strategies, often simultaneously, in their voluntary and involuntary reactions to stressors. When appraisals indicate that coping strategies are not working, most people are able to change strategies. Those attempts may or may not be successful. There is not a universally effective coping strategy, because people, situations, and stress processes vary so much (Lazarus, ). Sometimes this variation is systematic and predictable, but sometimes it can be seemingly random. Whether a coping strategy works at reducing stress depends on how it is linked to a salient and meaningful outcome, such as the mental health or well-being of the parent or the child. The positive or negative effects of any given coping strategy are not necessarily robust in all situations or over time; a strategy’s effectiveness can be sporadic and unpredictable, because the coping process is so dynamic. In addition, the types of strategies that people use vary widely across situations and individuals. Furthermore, people use multiple strategies simultaneously (consciously and unconsciously), making it difficult at times to discern the effectiveness of any single strategy. It also is difficult to determine the effectiveness of a coping strat-


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egy based on its apparent features alone (e.g., problem focused or emotion focused). Consider withdrawal from social interaction as an example. This is a coping strategy that some parents use when they need to minimize their own distress during their interactions with their children (e.g., Repetti and Wood, ). At first glance, this seems like an obviously effective strategy for a parent who otherwise would become more angry and hostile. On the other hand, this can seem like an obviously ineffective strategy that only delays the inevitable and makes matters worse by driving a wedge in the relationship between the parent and the child. Both viewpoints probably are correct. This strategy of avoiding interaction is likely to be effective in the short term at reducing physiological arousal (e.g., lowering blood pressure and heart rate) and subjective negative emotions such as annoyance and anger. However, in the longer term, the establishment of a pattern of withdrawal from social interaction may lead to entrenched problems in parent-child interaction that actually create more stressors for the parent. Thus the same coping strategy may have both positive and negative consequences on parenting stress, depending on a number of factors that vary over time and across parents and families. Although there is no single universally effective coping strategy, those who have more strategies at their disposal are more likely to cope well with a wider variety of stressors (Lazarus, ; Strack and Feifel, ; Zeidner and Saklofske, ).

Intervening to Reduce Parenting Stress Most parents are able to cope well with the minor to severe stressors that arise. However, some do not cope well, and they can benefit from clinical interventions that promote adaptation and reduce distress in the parenting role. The large research literature on parenting interventions is beyond the scope of this book; there are many studies consisting of numerous types of treatments and techniques for evaluating intervention effectiveness. However, common across most of the interventions is the induction (intentional or not) of changes in the experience of parenthood. This may involve a variety of intervention methods, such as expanding and reorienting the repertoire of child-rearing behaviors (e.g., discipline strategies, displays of emotion, communica-

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tion), or teaching new ways for the parent to think about children’s behaviors and thus making possible more accurate and effective problem solving. High levels of parenting stress can be reduced, in some cases substantially, through well-designed and well-implemented clinical and community interventions. Many of these interventions require cognitive and behavioral skills training. This training provides parents with information and strategies that allow them to think about and behave toward their children in ways that promote coherently organized and rewarding interactions (Anastopoulos, Shelton, DuPaul, and Guevremont, ; Cohen, Lojkasek, Muir, Muir, and Parker, ; Dihoff et al., ; Ducharme, Atkinson, and Poulton, ; Pisterman et al., ; Telleen, Herzog, and Kilbane, ). To create long-term effects of reduced distress and increased satisfaction in parenting, the intervention must lead to new ways of thinking that create a lasting change in the parents’ self-efficacy and use of effective coping strategies (Matthews and Wells, ). Based on theories of stress and social information processing, interventions that work are more likely to involve a number of steps that require the parent to exercise considerable effort and motivation. This might include teaching the parent to set specific goals, think about the task at hand and the availability of resources, organize a plan and select strategies, watch and monitor whether those selected strategies are working, change strategies when they are not working, and draw some conclusions from the experience that can inform future problem solving (Weinstein, Husman, and Dierking, ). This is a lot of work, particularly for those parents who are not used to thinking about and planning their parenting behavior, or for those with cognitive skill deficits. In reality, most interventions target only a few of these components, because changing all of these steps at once is not feasible. In addition, interventions that address the needs and concerns of the family as a unit (as opposed to focusing only on one child or one parent) are more likely to be successful. This is exemplified by research on interventions for mothers of premature or low-birth-weight newborns. These interventions can be effective at reducing the potentially deleterious effects of this experience on maternal stress and health. In our own review of intervention studies that used random assignment


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of mothers to treatment and control groups, we identified twelve published papers that reported results pertaining to parenting stress and behavior. These interventions are effective at reducing maternal distress, promoting more responsive and sensitive parenting, and helping build a warm and supportive parent-child relationship. The most successful programs involve ongoing contact with the family beyond the first month or two of the infant’s life, and they are family focused (as opposed to infant focused). That is, a lasting relationship between the intervention team (e.g., doctor, clinician, therapist) and the family is established, and the treatment approach focuses on addressing the needs of the parents as well as the child (Deater-Deckard and Bulkley, ).

Different Ways to Intervene Interventions that reduce parenting stress need not target parenting specifically. According to theories of parenting stress and coping, and the evidence for these theories described throughout this book, any number of changes in a family’s situation, a parent’s own health and functioning, or a child’s behavior could lead to reductions in parenting stress. This means that there are many potential “targets” for intervention efforts. That being said, the most obvious source of potential change is the parent. A recent meta-analysis of parenting interventions that used group treatments designed to improve parenting effectiveness showed that the interventions also lead to at least short-term reductions in parental distress—and depressive symptoms in particular. The interventions also lead to improvements in self-esteem and marital relationships (Barlow, Coren, and Stewart-Brown, ). It is important to emphasize that because it is so expensive to do so, few of the intervention studies that have been carried out are able to test for longlasting improvements in parents’ experiences and well-being. However, there is some evidence for long-term effectiveness, and it suggests that lasting change involves influences on parents’ self-esteem and perceived competence in the parenting role (e.g., Armstrong et al., , ; Feldman and Werner, ; Schuhmann, Foote, Eyberg, Boggs, and Algina, ; Tucker, Gross, Fogg, Delaney, and Lapporte, ). Interventions that create permanent improvements in parents’ feelings

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of confidence and effectiveness are more likely to lead to lasting improvements in parents’ well-being. Treatments that target children’s problem behaviors or deficits in cognitive and social skills also can cause improvements in parents’ coping and enjoyment of parenting. For example, interventions designed to treat child and adolescent delinquency, aggression, and attention problems can enhance parents’ own positive moods and relationships with their children, as well as reduce parenting stress (e.g., Barkley, Edwards, Laneri, Fletcher, and Metevia, ). Another example comes from an intervention that led to reductions in children’s sleep problems, thereby having positive effects on parents’ well-being (Reid, Walter, and O’Leary, ). In general, the degree of improvement in children’s behaviors arising from these child-centered interventions is tied to the degree of reduction of parenting stress (Kazdin and Wassell, ; Sanders and McFarland, ). Other interventions serve to reduce parenting stress by increasing the number of opportunities that the parent and child have for well-organized and enjoyable interactions. For many distressed parents, the happy and playful interactions that occur in families are rare or absent. Thus treatments that involve teaching parents new ways to play and interact with their children can promote satisfaction and reduce distress in the parenting role (Chau and Landreth, ; Huebner, ; Jang, ). Even simple interventions that provide only the most basic instrumental support to the family in crisis (very little training is required) have the potential to reduce parenting stress, sometimes dramatically. An example of these kinds of effects is found in studies of community-based respite care programs. These programs are designed for parents who face a number of very demanding child-rearing tasks, such as caring for children with developmental disabilities. Typically, respite childcare involves a short period of time (from one to several days) during which childcare providers care for children so that their parents can have a break. Evaluations of respite caregiving programs have yielded evidence suggesting that parenting stress is reduced, as are the rates of child abuse and maltreatment in the distressed families (Cowen, ; Cowen and Reed, ). However, there is a caveat to the findings just described. Al-


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though there is clear evidence of effectiveness of clinical interventions based on published evaluation studies, many interventions create only small, short-term gains (several weeks to months following completion of treatment), and still others simply fail. Thus the literature on intervention effects includes mixed results with respect to reducing parenting stress (Anastopoulos et al., ; Beckman, ; Fraser, Armstrong, Morris, and Dadds, ; Hogan, Linden, and Najarian, ; Telleen et al., ; Winton, ; Warfield, Hauser-Cram, Krauss, Shonkoff, and Upshur, ). Furthermore, it is difficult to know how many intervention studies actually have been done, given the likely bias toward disseminating and publishing results that support, rather than refute, experimental effects. Finally, although intervention may well be essential for some families, others who receive intervention may very well have adapted and improved on their own.

Parenting Stress as an Impediment to Intervention Reducing parenting stress and increasing opportunities for enjoyment in parenting are worthwhile goals in themselves. In addition, they aid the effectiveness of interventions designed to create improvements in children’s developmental outcomes. More precisely, reducing parenting stress can have the added benefit of improving interventions that are designed to facilitate positive and effective parenting behavior, improve the quality of family relationships, and reduce children’s behavioral and emotional problems. Whether it is by design or not, addressing parenting stress is a key part of most clinical interventions that are designed to produce improvements in children’s emotional, behavioral, cognitive, or physical outcomes. While there are obvious immediate benefits to the parent when parenting stress decreases or dissipates, there are also benefits to the child, via improvements in parenting skills and the overall quality of the parent-child relationship (Kazdin, ). Typically, in a group of families who have participated in a clinical intervention some benefit and some do not. A number of studies have examined subgroups of participants in order to determine which factors promote or impede effectiveness. These studies have shown that families with distressed parents and troubled parent-child relationships are the least likely to benefit from interventions (Hipke,

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Wolchik, Sandler, and Braver, ; Hoza et al., ; Kazdin, Holland, Crowley, and Breton, ; Kazdin and Wassell, ; Macias, Clifford, Saylor, and Kreh, ). Parenting stress can interfere with interventions in a variety of ways, including practical issues such as scheduling and attending planned meetings with interventions specialists (e.g., Calam, Bolton, and Roberts, ). Distressed parents are more likely to miss their appointments. There also are psychological factors to consider. For instance, at the time that an intervention is being used, a distressed parent may lack the attention, motivation, and cognitive resources required to learn new ways of coping and interacting with their children (Mabe, Turner, and Josephson, ). In sum, interventions that focus on the needs of the family and that strive to create lasting change in the way parents think about and solve the challenges that arise generally show the most promising effects. A number of studies have focused on reducing parenting stress in families that are deemed to be at risk. Examples include those in which the parents or children have been diagnosed with emotional or behavioral disorders, or where parenting and coping skills are thought to be ineffective and potentially dangerous. Parenting stress can be an impediment to effective treatment of children’s emotional and behavioral problems. A parent who is highly distressed may reach a point at which he or she loses motivation to address the challenges faced by his or her child and family.

Conclusion Although throughout this book I have emphasized the problems and difficulties that can arise in parenting, an equally important part of the message is that the majority of parents cope well with the day-to-day demands of child rearing, as well as the infrequent yet more severe stressful situations that can arise. Parents use a wide variety of cognitive, emotional, and behavioral strategies—often involving other supportive people in the process—and change these strategies over time in their attempts to cope. Although it appears that some strategies (such as problem-focused coping) are more effective in many situations, there is no perfect formula because individuals and their situations are so remarkably different. Some parents consistently cope better than


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others with the demands of parenthood, sometimes by relying on a host of preemptive coping strategies that are not even intended to minimize parenting stress. For those parents and children who may need help, there are interventions available that can and do work, as long as parental distress is not so great that it prevents parents and families from benefiting. When it does not overwhelm a parent’s ability to cope, successfully navigating through stressful times and circumstances can actually be beneficial. In fact, stress plays an important role in healthy functioning and development throughout the entire lifespan. Stress processes strengthen the organism, forcing it to build mechanisms of defense in preparation for those periods when stress may become acute and severe. There is mounting empirical evidence from studies of physiological development (e.g., neuroendocrine and immune systems) suggesting that stress and successful coping promotes optimal functioning. There is also evidence from studies of psychological wellbeing suggesting that individuals reap benefits from coping successfully with stressful experiences (Aldwin, ).

Closing Comments Many of us are fascinated by parenthood, particularly when it goes wrong. The image or metaphor of the flawed mother and father are among the most common in art and religion. Imperfect deities are parents to their mortal children. Ancient folk tales and contemporary fiction alike depict the sins of fathers and mothers being revisited on sons and daughters with such frequency that it is surprising that we do not get bored with the stories. In addition, research on parenting and lineage—and in particular the impact of problems in parenting on the next generation—is one of the most common areas of inquiry in developmental psychology, if not in the social sciences. The field of psychology that has emerged and evolved over the past century has incorporated many theoretical ideas about the seemingly incredible power of parents to influence their children’s personalities, skills, and mental health outcomes. And there is the inevitable necessity of parents; they are the key to our very existence and survival as biological beings.

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Parenting stress involves thoughts, emotions, and behaviors, all of which arise from a combination of environmental and biological components. Parenting stress is connected to adult functioning, to the quality of parent-child relationships, and to child health and development. Distress in the parenting role is distinct from stress in other roles and situations; its effects can be measured separately from more global assessments of stressful circumstances or problems in adjustment. Although parents differ in the attributes and resources that influence their levels of stress, all experience parenting stress to some degree at one time or another. Furthermore, there are both parent and child effects on parenting stress, and the levels of parenting stress differ within the family as well as between families. Two parents in the same household can differ in their levels of stress. The same parent can have different levels of distress depending on which one of several children in the family is in question. Parenthood presents many rewards and challenges that are unique to the role. The advantages of being a parent seem so obvious to those who are parents and to those who plan to be parents that few stop to consider why they or others have children. When I present the question to undergraduate students—“Why do we become parents?”— the conversation turns quickly to the biological necessity of reproduction. That is, children arrive as a by-product of sex, the motivation for which most do not need to consider very deeply. The biological advantage of parenthood is fairly straightforward, whereby an individual’s success is defined by his or her ability to produce offspring who themselves live to produce offspring. Related to this are the economics of parenthood, in which the costs and benefits of having children (in terms of money as well as many other material or intangible resources) are weighed against the costs and benefits of not having children. But we are not simply biological beings who are guided, blindly or otherwise, by our urges to reproduce and survive. As Dora Russell wrote in Hypatia (, p. ), “We want better reasons for having children than not knowing how to prevent them.” Though not to be considered independent of the biology or economics of child rearing, the psychology of parenthood provides additional and essential information about the “whys” and “hows” of parenting and children’s development. There are many important and meaningful reasons for having


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children, some of them universal and some specific to each individual (describing them would require another book). Parenting stress and its effects on parents and children should be considered in light of the wide variety of motivations and experiences—both challenging and rewarding—that converge in the lives of families.

Appendix: Selected Studies

Child Illnesses, Conditions, and Disabilities (see table .) Asthma (Carson and Schauer, ) Cancer (Kazak and Barakat, ) Cerebral Palsy (Button, Pianta, and Marvin, ) Congenital diseases, e.g., heart disease, cystic fibrosis (Crist et al., ; Darke and Goldberg, ; Goldberg et al., ; Quittner, DiGirolamo, Michel, and Eigen, ) Developmental disability, e.g., mental retardation (Atkinson et al., ; Fuller and Rankin, ; Hatton, Knussen, Sloper, and Turner, ; HauserCram et al., ; Innocenti, Huh, and Boyce, ; Orr et al., ; Pearson and Chan, ; Singer, Song, Hill, and Jaffe, ) Diabetes (Powers et al., ; Sepa et al., ; Viner et al., ) Epilepsy (Camfield, Breau, and Camfield, ) HIV/AIDS (Wiener, Vasquez, and Battles, ) Physical disability (Beckman, ; Dyson, ; Dyson, Edgar, and Crnic, ; Miller et al., ; O’Neil et al., ) Spina bifida (Holmbeck et al., ) Behavioral and Emotional Problems and Disorders (see table .) Attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (Anastopoulos et al., ; Baker and McCall, ; Fischer, ; Harrison and Sofronoff, ; Johnston and Mash, ; Kaplan, Crawford, Fisher, and Dewey, ; Podolski and Nigg, ; Ross, Blanc, McNeil, Eyberg, and Hembree-Kigin, ) Autism and/or pervasive developmental disorder (Donenberg and Baker, ; Dumas, Wolf, Fisman, and Culligan, ; Hoppes and Harris, ; Tobing and Glenwick, ) Conduct disorder and externalizing problems (Briggs-Gowan et al., ; Campbell, ; Creasey and Jarvis, ; Creasey and Reese, ; DeaterDeckard et al., ; Donenberg and Baker, ; Dumas et al., ; Eyberg et al., ; Mesman and Koot, ; Wakschlag and Keenan, ) Depression, anxiety, and internalizing problems (Deater-Deckard et al., ; Goldberg et al., ; Mesman and Koot, ; Walker, ) Sleep problems (Gelman and King, ; Reid et al., ) Substance use (Donohue, DeCato, Azrin, and Teichner, )

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Cross-Cultural Research China: psychometric properties of parenting stress questionnaires (Cheung, ; Yeh, Chen, Li, and Chuang, ) Europe: child cognitive deficits (Sarimski, ); parenting style and self-esteem (Aunola et al., ) Hong Kong: child abuse and community contact (Chan, ); child behavior problems and parental role restriction (Kwok and Wong, ); parental anger (Lam, ) International: child chronic illness (Krulik et al., ) Israel: infant insecure attachment (Scher and Mayseless, ); pre- and perinatal risk factors (Rimmerman and Sheran, ) Italy: parental role restriction (Forgays, Ottaway, Guarino, and D’Alessio, ) Japan: parental role restriction and infant attachment (Kazui, ) Malaysia: pre- and peri-natal risk factors (Ong et al., , a, b) New Zealand: child abuse potential and parental anger (Rodriguez and Green, ) Nigeria: polygamous family structure and sickle cell disease (Olley, Grieger, and Olley, ) Sweden: child behavior problems and parental responsiveness (Ostberg, ); child behavior problems and social support (Ostberg and Hagekull, ); psychometric properties of parenting stress questionnaires (Ostberg, Hagekull, and Wettergren, ) United States African Americans: psychometric properties of parenting stress questionnaires (Reitman, Currier, and Stickle, ); self-efficacy and depression (Jackson, ; Jackson and Huang, ); teen pregnancy (Bendell et al., ); work-family stress spillover (Beale, ) Hispanics: acculturation and psychometric properties of parenting stress questionnaire (Solis, ; Solis and Abidin, ); poverty (Planos, Zayas, and Busch-Rossnagel, ; Uno et al., )

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Washington, J., Minde, K., and Goldberg, S. (). Temperament in preterm infants: Style and stability. Journal of the American Academy of Child Psychiatry, , –. Webster-Stratton, C. (). Stress: A potential disrupter of parent perceptions and family interactions. Journal of Clinical Child Psychology, , – . Weinstein, C. E., Husman, J., and Dierking, D. R. (). Self-regulation interventions with a focus on learning strategies. In M. Boekaerts, P. R. Pintrich, and M. Zeidner (Eds.), Handbook of self-regulation (pp. –). New York: Academic Press. Weiss, R. S. (). Bringing work stress home. In J. Eckenrode and S. Gore (Eds.), Stress between work and family (pp. – ). New York: Plenum. Wells, K. C., Epstein, J. N., Hinshaw, S. P., Conners, C. K., Klaric, J., Abikoff, H. B., Abramowitz, A., Arnold, L. E., Elliott, G., Greenhill, L. L., Hechtman, L., Hoza, B., Jensen, P. S., March, J. S., Pelham, W., Pfiffner, L., Severe, J., Swanson, J. M., Vitiello, B., and Wigal, T. (). Parenting and family stress treatment outcomes in Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD): An empirical analysis in the MTA study. Journal of Abnormal Child Psychology, , –. Werner, E. E., and Smith, R. S. (). Vulnerable but invincible: A longitudinal study of resilient children and youth. New York: McGraw-Hill. Whaley, A. L. (). Sociocultural differences in the developmental consequences of the use of physical discipline during childhood for African Americans. Cultural Diversity and Ethnic Minority Psychology, , –. Wheaton, B. (). The nature of chronic stress. In M. Zeidner and N. S. Endler (Eds.), Handbook of coping: Theory, research, and applications (pp. – ). New York: Wiley. Wicki, W. (). The impact of financial resources and satisfaction with division of labour on coping and worries after the birth of the first child. International Journal of Behavioral Development, , –. Wiener, L. S., Vasquez, M. P., and Battles, H. B. (). Fathering a child with HIV/AIDS: Psychosocial adjustment and parenting stress. Journal of Pediatric Psychology, ,  –. Willner, P., and Goldstein, R. C. (). Mediation of depression by perceptions of defeat and entrapment in high-stress mothers. British Journal of Medical Psychology, , –. Winton, M. A. (). An evaluation of a support group for parents who have a sexually abused child. Child Abuse and Neglect, , –. Yeh, C. H., Chen, M. L., Li, W., and Chuang, H. L. (). The Chinese version of the Parenting Stress Index: A psychometric study. Acta Paediatrica, ,  –. Zarling, C. L., Hirsch, B. J., and Landry, S. (). Maternal social networks and mother-infant interactions in full-term and very low birthweight, preterm infants. Child Development, , –.

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Index

ACTH (adrenocorticotrophic hormone),  adaptation, ,  –,  adolescents, , ; age of parents and, ; conduct problems of, ; delinquency and, ; internalized problems in, ; psychiatric disorders in, ; temperament and,  adoption, , , , , ,  adulthood, , , ,  African American families, , ,  age: of children, , –; of parents, –  aggression, , , , , ; child illness and, ; child-rearing practices and, ; as externalizing behavior, , ; gender differences and, ; intervention to treat, ; parental, – , ; psychopathology and,  agreeableness, ,  alcohol use, , –  ALSPAC study,  – , – ,  anger, , , , , ; cultural differences and, ; as negative affect, , ; temperament and, ,  animal studies, , ,  antisocial behavior, ,  –,  anxiety, in children, , , , , ,  anxiety, in parents, , , , ; child illness and, ; depression and, ; drug and alcohol use and, ; emotion-focused thinking and, ; genetic influences and, ; mothers not employed outside home and, ; multiple-children families and, ; negativity bias and, ; parent domain and,  –; as psychopathology, ; separation anxieties,  –  appraisal, coping strategies and,  – arousal, intolerance of,  assimilation, cultural,  asthma,  attachment relationships, –, , 

attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), , ,  authority, parental, ,  – autism, ,  autonomic nervous system (ANS), , ,  aversive behaviors,  avoidance goals,  avoidant coping strategy, – ,  Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children. See ALSPAC study “baby blues,”  behavioral medicine,  behavioral problems, , – , , ,  bi-directional processes, , ,  –; causality and,  –; gene-environment correlation and, – ; quasiexperimental designs and,  biology, , , , , , ; attention/ memory mechanisms and, ; genetic factors, –; influence on stress, ; psychophysiology, –; self-regulation and, ; temperament and,  bipolar disorder,  birth weight, low, – , , , ,  boys, –, ,  brain, , , , ,  Britain (England), ,  “burnout,”  California, state of,  cancer,  –  caregiving, daily stress of,  cerebral cortex, , ,  cerebral palsy,  change, stress and, –,  child abuse, , , – , ; adult victims of, ; physical and psychological,  childcare, – , , , – Child Care and Family Project (CCFP), , –, 

▪ 203 ▪

204

child development, , , , , ; biological factors in, ; changes in demand and, ; cognitive, ; environmental differences and, –; parent-child interaction and, ; risk factors for, ; social-emotional,  Child Development Project (CDP),  – ,  child domain, , ,  childhood, ,  child-rearing practices, –  children, , , ; adult, – ; attachment relationships with parents, – ; with cancer, , ; dependency of, , –; developmental disorders and, – ; difficult behaviors of,  – , ; with disabilities, , –, , , , ; emotional and behavioral problems in, ; gender and, –; misbehavior of, –, , ; moods of, –; parents’ gender roles and, ; protection of, –; siblings, ,  – ; in socioecological framework, – . See also adolescents; infants; toddlers Chinese culture,  chores, household,  chronosystem,  cognition, , ,  –, –  cognitive approach coping strategy, – ,  cognitive avoidance,  cognitive skills, , ,  cohabitation, , , ,  collectivism,  Colorado Adoption Project (CAP), ,  community, , , , ; child abuse and, , ; as culture, –; as nation, – ; parenting roles and, ; as workplace, –  conduct disorder or problems, , , ,  conscience, development of,  conscientiousness,  conservation-of-resources theory,  coping strategies, , ,  –, , – ; categories of, –; diagnosis and, ; environment and, ; functioning of, –; gender differences and, , – ; optimism versus pessimism, ;

Index

personality and, ; social support and, – ; temperament and, ; workrelated stress and,  – co-regulation, of emotional distress,  cortisol, ,  criminality,  culture, , –,  daily hassles (DH) theory, – daycare environment,  delinquency, , ,  demands, , –,  –; changes in,  – ; demand and resource framework, –; physiological reaction to,  denial, as avoidance strategy,  depression, in children, ,  depression, in parents, , , , , ; adaptation to stress and, ; child behavioral problems and, ; child illness and, ; counterproductive modeling and, ; drug and alcohol use and, , – ; emotion-focused thinking and, ; face-to-face interaction with infants and, ; gender differences and, ; genetic influences and, ; individual differences and, – ; as internalizing problem, ; mothers not employed outside home and, ; multiple-children families and, ; parent domain and,  –; parenting interventions and, ; postnatal, , – ; psychophysiology and, ; self-efficacy and, ; socioeconomic downturn and, ; transition to parenthood and, –  developing nations,  diabetes, ,  diagnosis,  – disabilities, – , , ; developmental, – , , ; physical, , , ; premature and low-weight births,  discipline, , , ; child abuse and, ; child-rearing practices and, –; harshness of, , ; methods of, , ; in multiple-children families, ; parenting role and, ; social cognition and,  dismissive problem solving,  disorder, stress as,  distress, , 

Index

divorce, , , , ; families and, ; parent age and, ; parental depression and, ; studies of,  domestic violence,  Down syndrome, ,  drug use, , –,  dyadic mutuality,  dysfunction, in parent-child relationship, ,  education, lack of access to,  education level, , , , , ,  effortful control,  emotion, , , , ; age-based changes and, ; brain cortex and, , ; childrearing practices and, ; coping strategies and, ; cultural differences and, ; cultural norms and, ; displays of, ; dysfunctional, ; emotional problems, – ; genetic factors and, ; parent-child “co-regulation” and,  – emotional support,  –  emotion-focused coping, – ,  empathic coping,  – employment: community as workplace, –; gender gap in,  – ; loss of, , , ,  English language,  environments, , ; family, ; genetics and, – ; influence on stress, ; manipulation of, ; monitored for threats, ; nonshared influences in, ,  –; passive genetic correlation with, ; self-regulation and, ; shared influences in, ; temperament and, ; uncertainty in,  epilepsy, , –  epinephrine,  ethnic background, , ,  European American families, , , , , ,  European countries, public welfare policies in, – , ,  event-dependent cognition,  evocative gene-environment correlation, – exhaustion,  exosystem,  experience, ,  experiments, laboratory,  –

205

externalizing problems, – ,  extraversion/surgency, , ,  families, , , ; challenging circumstances and, ; cultural milieu and,  –; daily stress and, ; emotional support within, ; ethnic background of, , , , , ; gender roles in, – ; genes and, – ; homeless, ; socioeconomic resources and, – ; structures and types of, –; two-income, , – , ; workplace community and, –  Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA), –  fathers, – , , ; age of, – ; coping strategies of, ; demands of work and family on, ; dismissive problem solving and, ; employment-related stress and, ; gender roles and, – ; household chores and, ; postnatal depression in, ; problem-focused coping and, , , ; unemployment of,  fear, , , ; brain and, ; emotional support and, ; negativity bias and, ; in parents, , , ; temperament and, ,  femininity, , –  fetus, individuality of,  financial difficulties,  “flexible” coping, – “fluctuating” coping,  folk tales,  forethought, , ,  foster families,  gay parents, ,  gender, – , –, –,  genetic studies, – , – , – ,  – goal setting, , –  grade school,  grandparents, , , – Head Start program,  health, , , , , ; European system of public healthcare, – ; good habits and, ; self-esteem and, –. See also mental health

206

heart disease, congenital,  Hispanic families,  HIV/AIDS,  homeostasis, ,  hormones,  housing,  Hypatia (Russell),  hyperactivity, ,  identity, parental, ,  illnesses, of children, , ,  – , , ; coping strategies and, ; lifethreatening, , ; parents’ marital relationships and, –; terminal, ,  illnesses, of parents, , , ,  immune system,  impulse control,  individualism,  individuality, of unborn babies,  infanticide,  infants, , , ; attachment security and, , ; attachment to fathers, ; cries of, , , , ; depressed parents and, – ; medically compromised, , ; mothers’ face-to-face interaction with,  –; as unique individuals, . See also birth weight, low; premature infants information processing, – instrumental support,  intentional behaviors,  internalizing problems, –,  intervention studies,  in vitro fertilization (IVF),  isolation, social, ,  kindergarten, ,  knowledge,  labor, parental division of, , ,  language skills, ,  learning disabilities,  lesbian parents, ,  longitudinal studies, , , ; of child illness, –; on parent and child effects, –; parents of developmentally disabled children, ; of role overload, ; on social support, ; on socioeconomic resources, 

Index

macrosystem,  marriage, , , ; conflict in, , ; marital transitions, ,  –; parents as partners, –; polygamous (Kenya), ; socioeconomic hardship and,  masculinity, ,  –  maternity leave, , , ,  mental health, , , , ; clinics, ; of parents, ; professionals,  mental illness, ,  mental retardation,  mesosystem,  metacognitive style,  microsystem,  mood, ,  mother-infant attachment, –,  mother-infant interactions, , – ,  – mothers: addicted, ; African American, ; Child Development Project (CDP) and, ; child illness and, ; coping strategies and, – ; cultural image of, ; depression in, , , , –, – , , ; gender roles and, – ; premature infants and, ; prenatal social cognitions of, –; role overload and, ; schooling and, ; sibling children and, ; single, , , ; social cognitions of, ; social support coping among, ; teenage, , , , , ; working outside the home,  –, , – ,  negative affectivity, , ,  neglect, parental,  neuroendocrine system,  neurons,  neuroticism, –  neurotransmitters,  noncompliant behaviors, , , , , ,  norepinephrine,  normality, ,  nutrition,  openness, ,  oppositional defiant disorder (ODD),  optimism, , ,  orienting sensitivity, 

Index

“over demand,”  oxytocin, ,  parasympathetic nervous system, ,  Parent-Child Interaction System (PARCHISY),  parent-child relationship,  –, , , ; “co-regulation” and,  –; faceto-face interaction,  –; genetic influences in,  –; laboratory experiments and,  –; prenatal social cognitions and,  parent-child-relationship (P-C-R) stress, – , , – ,  parent domain, ,  parenthood, , , ; adjustment to, ; biological advantage and necessity of, , ; goals of, ; intervention to reduce stress and, ; preparation for,  –; rewards and difficulties of, ; single, , ; social role of, ; transition to, –,  –, , – , , ; workplace demands and,  parenting self-concept, ,  parenting stress, –, , , – ; behavioral problems and,  – ; bi-directional processes and,  –; “burnout,” ; child abuse and, – ; child and parent roles as cause of,  – ; child illness and, , ; children and,  –; coping with, – , ; definition of, –; developmentally disabled children and, –; diagnosis and, – ; effects on parents, – ; emotional support and, ; family structures and,  –; gender differences and, –; individual differences and, – ; intervention to reduce,  – ; longitudinal studies and, –; marriage and, ; maternal depression and, ; mechanisms (processes) of, ; premature infants and,  – ; public healthcare and, – ; quasi-experimental designs and, –; siblings and, ; socioeconomic resources and, –; subjective experience and, ; theories of, – Parenting Stress Index, , ,  parents: age of, – ; attributes of, ; childhood memories of, ; child-rear-

207

ing practices and, – ; “co-parents,” , ; education level, , , , ; gender of, –, –; identity (role) of, , ; as partners, –; reaction to infants’ cries, ; social cognitions of, –  part-time employment,  passive gene-environment correlation,  – paternity leave, , , ,  perception, ,  perfectionism,  permissiveness,  personality, , , , –  pessimism, ,  physiology, , , , ; gender differences and, – ; social withdrawal and, ; of stress reaction, ; of stress response, –; successful coping and,  Pittsburgh Youth Study,  planning, , , ,  positive affectivity, ,  postnatal depression, –  poverty, , –  preemptive coping, – pregnancy, –, , ; age of parents and, ; brain development and, ; in vitro fertilization and, ; maternal depression and, ; parents’ social cognitions during, ; public healthcare and, –  premature infants, –, , , ,  prenatal care, – preschool childcare,  primary appraisal,  problem-focused coping, , –, , ; fathers and, , , ; reduction of stress and, – psychiatry,  psychology, ,  psychopathology, , –  punishment, physical, , , , , ,  quasi-experimental designs, – questionnaires, , ,  “real-ideal” mother, – rejection, parental, , , 

208

relationship-focused coping strategies, – remarriage, , , ,  resources, conservation of,  resources, demands and, ,  responsibility, parenthood and, ,  role overload/strain, , ,  sadness, , , ; in childhood, ; chronic, , , ; in parents,  schematic cognition,  schizophrenia,  school environment, ,  secondary appraisal,  self-control, , , , , ; discipline practices and, ; in early childhood, ; emotion-focused coping and, ; interpersonal relationships and,  self-efficacy, , , – ,  self-esteem, , , , , ,  self-referent social cognitions,  –  self-reflection,  –,  self-regulation, –, , , , ,  separation anxieties, , , – serial marriages,  sexual abuse,  sibling studies,  – single parenthood, , , ,  sleep problems, , , ,  social behaviors,  social cognitive theories, ,  –  socialization, , ,  social support, , , , ; community as workplace and, ; coping mechanisms and, ; cultural differences and, ; diagnosis and, ; mothers and, ; relationship-focused coping, –  social withdrawal,  socioeconomic status, , , , –; grandparents as parents and, ; harshness of discipline and, , ; parenting studies and, ,  Spanish language, 

Index

spanking, ,  spina bifida,  stability, –, ,  stepparents, ,  stigmatization,  “still face” procedure,  stress: different kinds of, , , ; emotionalfocused coping and, ; “spillover” of, –, –; subjective experience of, , ,  stress reaction, , –, ; gender differences and, – ; infant cries and, ; physiological aspects,  substance abuse, , ,  suicide,  support networks,  survival strategies, ,  Sweden,  sympathetic nervous system, ,  taxes, public healthcare and, , ,  teachers, –  temperament, – , ,  – temper tantrums, ,  therapies, ,  thyroxin,  “time outs,”  toddlers, –, , , , ; attachment security and, ; physical discipline of,  TRACKS study, –, ,  trait anxiety,  twins, , , , , ,  uncertainty, intolerance of,  “under demand,”  United States,  –, , –,  vagal tone,  vassopressin,  vulnerable child syndrome,  worrying, 

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