Abstract
Healthy dyadic interactions serve as a foundation for child development and are typically characterised by mutual emotional availability of both the parent and child. However, several parental factors might undermine optimal parent–child interactions, including the parent’s current parenting stress levels and the parent’s past bonding experiences with his/her own parents. To date, no study has investigated the possible interaction of parenting stress and parental bonding history with their own parents on the quality of emotional availability during play interactions. In this study, 29 father–child dyads (18 boys, 11 girls; father’s age = 38.07 years, child’s age = 42.21 months) and 36 mother–child dyads (21 boys, 15 girls; mother’s age = 34.75 years, child’s age = 41.72 months) from different families were recruited to participate in a 10-min play session after reporting on their current parenting stress and past care and overprotection experience with their parents. We measured the emotional availability of mother–child and father–child play across four adult subscales (i.e., sensitivity, structuring, non-intrusiveness, non-hostility) and two child subscales (i.e., involvement and responsiveness). Regression slope analyses showed that parenting stress stemming from having a difficult child predicts adult non-hostility, and is moderated by the parents’ previously experienced maternal overprotection. When parenting stress is low, higher maternal overprotection experienced by the parent in the past would predict greater non-hostility during play. This finding suggests that parents’ present stress levels and past bonding experiences with their parents interact to influence the quality of dyadic interaction with their child.
Highlights
Healthy parent–child interactions provide opportunities for children to accrue rich social experiences for development [1,2,3,4,5,6]
This study seeks to investigate the link between parenting stress and parentalg bonding history on the emotional availability in a parent–child interaction
Current parenting behaviours may be influenced by both past and present circumstances. This means that when examining the development of parenting behaviours, both parenting received as a child and current parenting stress experienced should be taken into account
Summary
Healthy parent–child interactions provide opportunities for children to accrue rich social experiences for development [1,2,3,4,5,6] These dyadic exchanges are bidirectionally influenced by nuanced patterns of emotional transactions contributed by both the parent and the child [1,2,3,4,6,7,8] and are influenced by psychological [9] and biological and factors [10,11]. The quality of parent–child interactions hinges on dyadic partners’ emotional availability to each other [12]; that is, their emotional connectedness and ability to mutually discern and respond to each other’s needs [12,13,14]. Sci. 2020, 10, 114 parental and child aspects of the relationship, emotionally available dyads are better able to reciprocate each others’ socio-emotional cues in a congruent manner [15,16,17]
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