Children's Negative Emotions Research Articles

Family functioning and emotion socialization in Chinese two‐parent households: A person‐centered approach

AbstractThe current study adopted cluster analysis as a person‐centered approach to identify patterns of Chinese families’ functioning and parents’ emotion socialization responses and investigate their associations with children's emotion regulation and behavioral outcomes. Both parents residing in the same family were included to explore joint contributions of mothers and fathers within the family system. Participants were 204 Chinese two‐parent (mother and father) households of 5‐ to 10‐year‐old children (Mage = 7.43 years, SD = .81; 98 girls). Both parents filled out online questionnaires about their perceptions of family functioning (cohesion, adaptability) and endorsement of responses to children's negative emotions (supportive, nonsupportive). Mothers also reported children's lability/negativity, emotion regulation, problematic behaviors (internalizing, externalizing) and prosocial behaviors. Five clusters were identified: poor‐functioning/dismissing, well‐functioning/coaching, engaged fathers, engaged mothers, and balanced/diffuse. Overall, poor‐functioning/dismissing families had children with the lowest functioning and well‐functioning/coaching families had children with the most optimal outcomes. The other three clusters were moderate in terms of child functioning with children of engaged fathers having less optimal outcomes than the other two. The nuanced variations among clusters and meaning of results are discussed in relation to Chinese cultural contexts. Findings support the utility of a person‐centered approach for illuminating how parents’ socialization practices interconnect holistically within dynamic family systems.

Brief Report: Alexithymia Trait Severity, Not Autistic Trait Severity, Relates to Caregiver Reactions to Autistic Children's Negative Emotions.

Alexithymia impacts an individual's ability to recognize and understand emotions and frequently co-occurs with autism. This study investigated the relationship between children's alexithymia, autistic traits, and caregiver reactions to their child's negative emotions. Caregivers of 54 autistic and 51 non-autistic children between the ages of 7 and 12 years rated their child's alexithymia and autistic trait severity and their reactions to their child's negative emotions. Caregivers of autistic children reported greater supportive reactions and fewer restrictive/controlling reactions to their child's negative emotions when their child had more alexithymia traits. This study extends previous research by demonstrating that caregivers of autistic children with co-occurring alexithymia traits represent a specific subgroup of caregivers that respond more positively to their child's negative emotions.

Long-term effects of targeted prevention programmes for families with young children: A population-based study on parenting stress and children's negative emotionality.

Many prevention programmes for families focus parental adversities and adverse childhood experiences. Effects of such programmes are often examined in clinical trials; there is less research on effects under naturalistic conditions. The aim of this study was to examine the longitudinal association between parenting stress and child's negative emotionality, its modification through targeted prevention programmes, and to investigate the effects in the general population. Data were taken from a sample of n = 903 families with infants (mean age: 13.3months) who participated in a baseline study (T1) and a follow-up study (T2) 2 years later. The survey included parental self-report measurements on parenting stress and child's negative emotionality (T1 and T2 each) and targeted prevention programmes (T1 only). An autoregressive cross-lagged panel design was used to analyse the association of parenting stress and the child's negative emotionality, including use of targeted prevention programmes as moderator. We also tested if targeted prevention programmes can reduce parenting stress or child's negative emotionality using Propensity Score Matching (PSM). Parenting stress at T1 affected children's negative emotionality at T2, but children's negative emotionality at T1 did not affect parenting stress at T2. When targeted prevention was included as moderator, the correlation disappeared among programme users. With PSM, there was no direct effect on parenting stress or child's negative emotionality. But a subsample of parents with high parenting stress at T1 who used targeted prevention at T1 reported less child's negative emotionality problems at T2 than parents who scored high in parenting stress but did not receive targeted prevention at T1. Results suggest that the spillover from parenting stress to child's negative emotionality may be modified by prevention. Prevention programmes may help to build resources and have a direct positive effect on the child, especially for parents with high parenting stress.

The moderating effect of facial emotion recognition in maternal emotion socialization and child socioemotional adjustment

AbstractThe current study investigated relations among maternal emotion socialization, children's facial emotion recognition (FER), and children's behavioral problems. A sample of 118 preschoolers (Mage = 41.96 months) and their mothers participated. Mothers reported their reactions to children's negative emotions and rated children's internalizing and externalizing problems by completing the Coping with Children's Negative Emotions Scale and Child Behavior Checklist, respectively. Children's FER was assessed with a task that involved matching emotion labels to facial expressions. Results revealed that FER moderated the association between minimizing/punitive maternal reactions and children's externalizing problems. Minimizing/punitive maternal reactions were found to positively correlate with externalizing problems in children with lower levels of FER, but not among children with high levels of FER. Exploratory analyses with child gender also suggested that the moderating effect of FER in the relation between minimizing/punitive maternal reactions and children's internalizing problems applied only to boys, not to girls. The results highlight the importance of children's FER and gender, in addition to maternal reactions to expressed emotion, in shaping their socioemotional adjustment.

Text mining of Reddit posts: Using latent Dirichlet allocation to identify common parenting issues.

Parenting interventions offer an evidence-based method for the prevention and early intervention of child mental health problems, but to-date their population-level effectiveness has been limited by poor reach and engagement, particularly for fathers, working mothers, and disadvantaged families. Tailoring intervention content to parents' context offers the potential to enhance parent engagement and learning by increasing relevance of content to parents' daily experiences. However, this approach requires a detailed understanding of the common parenting situations and issues that parents face day-to-day, which is currently lacking. We sought to identify the most common parenting situations discussed by parents on parenting-specific forums of the free online discussion forum, Reddit. We aimed to understand perspectives from both mothers and fathers, and thus retrieved publicly available data from r/Daddit and r/Mommit. We used latent Dirichlet allocation to identify the 10 most common topics discussed in the Reddit posts, and completed a manual text analysis to summarize the parenting situations (defined as involving a parent and their child aged 0-18 years, and describing a potential/actual issue). We retrieved 340 (r/Daddit) and 578 (r/Mommit) original posts. A model with 31 latent Dirichlet allocation topics was best fitting, and 24 topics included posts that met our inclusion criteria for manual review. We identified 45 unique but broadly defined parenting situations. The majority of parenting situations were focused on basic childcare situations relating to eating, sleeping, routines, sickness, and toilet training; or related to how to respond to child negative emotions or difficult behavior. Most situations were discussed in relation to infant or toddler aged children, and there was high consistency in the themes raised in r/Daddit and r/Mommit. Our results offer potential to tailor parenting interventions in a meaningful way, creating opportunities to develop content and resources that are directly relevant to parents' lived experiences.

Parental coping as a buffer between child factors and emotion-related parenting in families of children with autism spectrum disorder.

Parents of children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) experience high levels of stress related to their children's symptoms and comorbid behavior problems. Adaptive parental coping in response to child-related stressors is proposed to serve a buffering function, and yet, little research has examined whether coping actually moderates associations between child factors and parent outcomes in this population. The few studies to do so have focused on parent well-being as the primary outcome and have not considered the degree to which child-related stressors may affect parenting and contribute to maladaptive transactional parent-child processes over time. The present study tested whether adaptive parental coping was associated with reduced associations between higher levels of child ASD symptoms and comorbid externalizing problems and poorer quality parent reactions to child negative emotions in 63 families of children with ASD. Parents reported on their children's externalizing problems, their own coping behavior, and their reactions to their children's negative emotions, and child ASD symptoms were measured through direct testing. Adaptive coping-primarily active planning-moderated the association between children's behavior problems and supportive parent reactions such that parents of children with more externalizing problems reported less supportive reactions, but only when adaptive coping was low. Child ASD symptoms did not significantly relate to parent reactions, and coping did not moderate these associations. This cross-sectional study is the first to identify parental coping as a potential protective factor for parenting behavior in families of children with ASD and comorbid behavior problems. Implications for future longitudinal research are discussed. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Relations between parental response to children's negative emotions and suicidal ideation in chinese adolescents: Internalizing problems, emotion regulation, and perceived relationship quality with parents as mediators

Past work points to the crucial role of parents’ responses to children's negative emotions (PRCNE) in adolescents’ socioemotional adjustment. The presence of suicidal ideation (SI) is an important sign of significant distress and suicide risk. However, research on the relations between PRCNE and adolescents’ SI is lacking. This research aimed to investigate whether parental reactions to children's negative emotions (PRCNE) was related to adolescents’ SI and, if so, through which processes. This research utilized data from a sample of Chinese adolescent families (N = 4,574; Parents: 35.81% males, M = 44.07 years old; Adolescents: 55.40% males, M = 16.28 years old), with parents giving their reports on PRCNE and adolescents self-evaluating their psychosocial development (i.e., internalizing problems, emotion regulation, perceived relationship quality with parents) and SI. We examined the relations between six types of PRCNE and adolescents’ SI, and analyzed the mediating roles of adolescents’ internalizing problems, emotion regulation (i.e., cognitive reappraisal and expressive suppression), and perceived relationship quality with parents. The results showed that emotion-focused response, problem-focused response, and expression encouragement negatively predicted, while punitive response and distress response positively predicted adolescents’ SI. However, no statistically significant association emerged between minimization and adolescents’ SI. Moreover, adolescents’ internalizing problems, usage of expressive suppression, and perceived relationship quality with parents could mediate the relations between PRCNE and adolescents’ SI. Contrary to our hypothesis, the results did not support an indirect effect of PRCNE on adolescents’ SI through adolescents' cognitive reappraisal. The present research illuminates adolescents’ SI by emphasizing the roles of PRCNE. The findings also highlight the importance of paying attention to adolescents’ internalizing problems, expressive suppression, and perceived relationship quality with parents in relation to PRCNE in interventions aimed at reducing adolescents’ SI.

Mothers’ Socialization of Emotions and Socio-Emotional Competences in Children with and without Intellectual Disabilities in Belgium and Quebec

This study aims first to compare Belgian and Quebec mothers’ emotion- related reactions toward typically developing (TD) children and children with intellectual disabilities (ID) and examine whether these practices vary depending on individual factors and culture. Second, it investigates to which extent these maternal reactions contribute to Theory of Mind (ToM), emotion regulation and social skills in these children. The participants were 72 children with and without ID matched on developmental age and their mothers from Belgium and Quebec. Mothers completed questionnaires on their reactions to emotions felt by their children’s and on the children’s socio-emotional abilities. One-way MANCOVAs indicated effects only for ID samples of culture, considering maternal educational level as a covariate, on maternal unsupportive reactions to negative emotions and, specifically, on unsupportive (punition and minimization) and supportive (problem-focused, comforting and encouragement) reactions to negative emotions. Correlational and stepwise regression analyses showed that individual factors, such as developmental age, ID factor in children, mothers’ educational level and culture explained a percentage of the variance in mothers’ reactions to positive or negative emotions in children. Moreover, individual factors and mothers’ reactions to positive or negative emotions in children explained a percentage of the variance in children’s ToM abilities, emotion regulation and social skills. Findings highlighted the importance of considering cultural and educational factors as well as individual characteristics to understand how ToM, emotion regulation and social adjustment in children with and without ID are influenced by these factors in addition to parents’ reactions to emotions. It provides useful information for assisting parents in supporting their child’s socio-emotional abilities.

Happiness Related Mothering, Study of Mother with Young Children

The way parents take care of young children varied greatly. One of the study showed that parents with young children were more stressed than when their children were adults. Another study explained that when children were very young, they could get more emotional benefits, new meanings, and feelings for children. The purpose of this study was to understand the determinants of happiness for parents with young children. This study used a qualitative approach to semi-structured interviews. There were five subjects, and the participant criteria in this study was a married woman with children aged 2-5 and directly participating in childcare. Obtained results about the factors that determine the mother’s happiness, namely: 1) When children get better care than what they (mothers) got as a child. 2) Parent consciously, healthily, happily, and not promote negative emotions in children. 3) Understand, master, and enjoy parenting challenges. 4) Establish close and flexible relationships with children. 5) Be able to respond to children's bad behavior constructively towards the mother-child relationship. 6) Successfully carry out their role with confidence so that there was no need to compare themself with others or compare their children with other children. 7) Accept all abilities and limitations as a mother. 8) When children grow up healthy, happy, and adaptive.

Tuning in to kids: A randomized controlled trial of an emotion coaching parenting program for Chinese parents in Hong Kong.

Tuning in to Kids (TIK) is a parenting program that focuses on emotion coaching and is evidenced to be effective in Western populations. This study used a randomized controlled trial to examine the intervention effects of TIK on Chinese parents of low to middle socioeconomic status in Hong Kong. One hundred four parents (99 mothers and five fathers; Mage in years = 37.92) of preschoolers aged 3-6 years were randomly assigned to the experimental (n = 54) or waitlist control group (n = 50). Parent and child outcomes were assessed at baseline (Time 1), immediately after the 6-week intervention (Time 2), and 6 weeks postintervention (Time 3), using the Alabama Parenting Questionnaire, Coping with Children's Negative Emotions Scale, Parenting Stress Index-Short Form, and Emotion Regulation Checklist. The experimental group reported significant reductions in punitive parenting and parenting stress at Time 2, and these effects were maintained at Time 3. Delayed improvements in parents' use of expressive encouragement and children's emotion lability/negativity were observed at Time 3 in the experimental group. The immediate intervention effects were replicated in the waitlist control group at Time 3 after they attended the training. This study represented one of the few randomized controlled trials of TIK conducted in a non-Western sample. Our results corroborated the findings of prior studies of TIK and provided preliminary support for its effectiveness across different cultural contexts. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

Childhood ADHD Symptoms, Parent Emotion Socialization, and Adolescent Peer Problems: Indirect Effects Through Emotion Dysregulation.

Although parent reactions to children's negative emotions are important to the development of adolescent social and emotional functioning, there is a lack of research examining this aspect of parenting in samples that include youth with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). This study addresses this gap in the research by examining the independent effects of childhood ADHD symptoms and parent reactions to negative emotions in the longitudinal prediction of adolescent emotion dysregulation and peer problems. A sample of 124 youth (52% female) with and without clinical elevations in ADHD symptoms were assessed in childhood (8-12 years; M = 10.50) and followed up 5-6 years later in adolescence (13-18 years; M = 16.15). Path models tested the direct effects of childhood ADHD symptoms, supportive parent reactions, and non-supportive parent reactions on adolescent peer problems (friendship quality, deviant peer affiliation, peer aggression) and the indirect effects via adolescent emotion dysregulation. Emotion dysregulation mediated the effects of greater ADHD symptoms and of less parent supportive reactions on adolescent peer problems; parent reactions also independently predicted specific adolescent peer problems. Even for youth with clinical elevations in ADHD symptoms, parent reactions to children's negative emotions may be important in understanding adolescent emotion dysregulation and peer problems.

From Negative Emotionality to Aggressive Behavior: Maternal and Paternal Parenting Stress as Intervening Factors.

Child temperament plays a key role in the development of psychopathology, notably through transactions with the family environment. In particular, temperamental negative emotionality is a documented antecedent of child aggressive behavior, with parenting stress sometimes proposed to play a mediating role in this association. However, research has mostly addressed bivariate associations and seldom considered the full chain linking child negative emotionality to aggression through parenting stress. In addition, most relevant studies have focused on mothers; therefore, possible combined contributions of maternal and paternal stress, such as interactive effects, are under-investigated. Addressing these gaps, this longitudinal multi-informant study aimed to examine the mediating role of maternal parenting stress, paternal parenting stress, and their interaction in the association between infant negative emotionality and child aggression. Among 186 mostly White middle-class families (98 boys), infant negative emotionality was reported by mothers and fathers at 15months, both parents reported on their own parenting stress at 3years, and child aggression was assessed by teachers in the first grade of elementary school. The results revealed a moderated mediated pathway, such that there was a significant indirect effect of child negative emotionality on aggression through paternal stress, however only when maternal stress was also high. These findings suggest that the risk of negative emotionality translating to aggressive behavior is magnified when both parents experience high levels of stress in their parenting role. The results also underscore that both parents play significant yet different roles in the process linking early negative emotionality to subsequent aggression.

Heterogeneous patterns of maternal emotion socialization and their association with maternal depression and maltreatment history: A person-centered approach

BackgroundThe influence of parent's emotion-related socialization behaviors (ERSBs) on children, and predictors of such ERSBs has been studied extensively. However, to our knowledge, no study used a person-centered approach for subtyping the parental ERSB patterns and identifying parental characteristics that could discriminate the patterns. ObjectivesThe present study explored establishing heterogeneous maternal ERSBs and confirmed whether mothers' depression and maltreatment experienced in childhood are predictive of the subtypes. Participants and settingIn Korean, 695 mothers of 7–12-year-old children participated in the study. We conducted a latent profile analysis (LPA) using the six reaction categories of the Korean version of the Coping with Children's Negative Emotions Scale (K-CCNES). We compared the characteristics of children and mothers among the derived classes and conducted a multinomial regression analysis to evaluate the predictors for each class. ResultsFive classes emerged based on the LPA: “restrained” (25.0%), “ineffective” (19.0%), “harsh” (7.3%), “dismissive” (28.9%), and “supportive” (19.7%). Demographics, children's behavioral problems, maternal depression, and maltreatment history showed differences between the subgroups. Maternal depression and experiences of emotional neglect contributed to differentiating the negative ERSBs subgroups from positive styles. ConclusionsWe were able to categorize mothers into subgroups displaying heterogeneous patterns of ERSBs. While maternal depression was the strongest predictor of negative patterns, mothers' emotional neglect experiences were an additional characteristic that uniquely predicted the lack of supportive responses to children's negative emotions. Therefore, exploring maternal emotional states and maltreatment experiences could be helpful for clinicians seeking to establish intervention strategies to improve parental ERSBs.

Parent-child relationship and child anger proneness in infancy and attachment security at toddler age: a short-term longitudinal study of mother- and father-child dyads

ABSTRACT Early parent-child relationship and child negative emotionality have both been studied as contributors to attachment security, but few studies have examined whether negative emotionality can moderate effects of parent-child relationship on security and whether the process is comparable across mother- and father-child dyads and different security measures. In 102 community families, we observed parent-child shared positive affect and infants’ anger proneness at 7 months, and attachment security at 15 months, using observer-rated Attachment Q-Set (AQS) and a continuous measure derived from Strange Situation Paradigm (SSP). For mother-child dyads, high shared positive affect and low anger proneness were associated with AQS security. Those effects were qualified by their interaction: Variations in shared positive affect were associated with security only for relatively more anger-prone children. That effect reflected the diathesis-stress model. For father-child dyads, shared positive affect was associated with security. There were no effects for SSP security with either parent.

Emotion socialization in mothers who experienced maltreatment: Mentalizing the past may help the present.

Adults who experienced childhood maltreatment (CM) are at increased risk for parenting problems. Mentalization capacity may disrupt intergenerational patterns of problematic parenting among mothers with a CM history. In this study, we examine: (a) parents' use of negative emotion socialization practices as one path of intergenerational transmission of risk in mothers with CM and (b) whether mothers' ability to mentalize about the emotion socialization behaviors of attachment figures diminishes intergenerational similarity in negative emotion socialization practices. Mentalization was operationalized as the frequency of cognitive processing words in mothers' narrative responses to questions about how and why attachment figures responded to their negative emotions during childhood. Participants included 154 mothers with and without a self-reported CM history in a case-control design, matched on child age, gender, maternal education, and race/ethnicity. Mothers with CM recollected more unsupportive responses to their negative emotions during childhood, which in turn predicted using more punishing, ignoring, and magnifying responses toward their own child's negative emotions (i.e., a significant indirect effect). However, greater cognitive processing language when describing the emotional climate of childhood diminished this pathway (i.e., a significant moderated effect). Among mothers who recollected unsupportive responses to emotions from their parents, those whose narratives included more cognitive processing words did not act in similar ways toward their own child whereas those who used fewer cognitive processing words did. These preliminary findings support the growing body of research suggesting that the quality of mentalization can be a protective factor among adults who experienced childhood maltreatment. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

A biopsychosocial approach to emotion-related parenting: Physiological responses to child frustration among urban Chinese parents.

Research on predictors of emotion-related parenting has predominantly focused on parents' social cognitions including parenting goals and beliefs about emotions. Less is known about parents' regulation of their own arousal when facing children's negative emotions, and how it relates to parents' ability to engage in sensitive and supportive behaviors. Taking a biopsychosocial approach, the current study focused on parents' psychophysiological responses when viewing their children experience frustration among 150 urban Chinese families (children were 6-12 years, Mage = 8.54, SD = 1.67), and examined how these responses were associated with emotion-related parenting. The primary caregiver of each family (121 mothers and 29 fathers) participated in the study with the child. Measures of sympathetic [skin conductance level (SCL)] and parasympathetic [respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA)] activity were collected from parents during resting baseline and a child frustration task. Parents self-reported their tendency to react supportively and unsupportively to children's displays of negative emotions. Their general availability to children's emotional needs was observed during a separate interactive task. Results suggested that parents who showed greater sympathetic arousal during the child frustration task reported less supportive and more unsupportive reactions to children's negative emotions in daily life, and also tended to be emotionally unavailable during the interactive task. No main effect was found for RSA reactivity, and there was no significant interaction between SCL and RSA reactivity in predicting parenting. Findings highlight the importance of considering parents' physiological regulatory functioning as a proximal factor shaping parenting behaviors directed toward children's emotions. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

Associations between maternal reactions to child negative emotions and child social competence: A longitudinal study.

According to a heuristic model of emotion socialization, the implications of parental reactions to child emotions may vary by child characteristics. Children's knowledge about culturally bound, emotion display rules may be one of such characteristics, as it may alter children's interpretations of their parents' behaviors. The interrelationships among parental unsupportive reactions to child negative emotions, child emotion knowledge, and child social competence, however, have rarely been investigated. The present study examined whether Chinese children's emotion knowledge moderated the associations of mothers' minimizing and punitive reactions with changes in children's peer acceptance, social cognition, and aggression over time. On two occasions separated by about 1 year, data were collected from 330 children, their mothers, and class teachers from 10 kindergartens in Hong Kong, China. The age of children in Wave 1 averaged 4.81 years (SD = 0.38), and 56% of them (n = 186) were girls. Multilevel models indicated that maternal minimizing reactions were not significantly linked to changes in child social competence. But, for children with more knowledge about emotion display rules, maternal punitive reactions were linked to increases in child peer acceptance and social cognition and decreases in aggression over time. Theoretically, findings demonstrated the interplay of parental socialization practices and child individual characteristics in shaping child development. Practically, findings pointed to the importance of explaining emotion display rules to children in Chinese communities and helping children to balance self-expression of emotions with consideration of others' feelings. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

Retrospective Reports of Parental Problem Drinking and Parent Reactions to Child Negative Emotions: Implications for Emotion Regulation in the Transition to Adulthood

Exposure to parental problem drinking (PPD)—symptoms of alcohol use disorder, heavy and hazardous drinking—is associated with mental health problems in emerging adults, but mechanisms of risk are not fully explicated. The current study explores the role of parental emotion socialization, a key factor in the development of emotion regulation, in the context of PPD. A sample of 377 U.S. college students reported retrospectively on PPD, parent reactions to participant negative emotions, and participants’ own current depressive and anger rumination. Both mother and father PPD were related to greater same-parent minimization, distress and punitive reactions, and less problem-focused, emotion-focused, and encouragement of expression of negative emotions. Supportive and nonsupportive parental reactions to negative emotions intervened in associations between PPD and emerging adult depressive and anger rumination. Findings suggest that emotion dysregulation may be a key mechanism of risk for mental health problems among emerging adults exposed to PPD.

Caregiver Behaviors and Child Distress in Trauma Narration and Processing Sessions of Trauma-Focused Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (TF-CBT)

Trauma-Focused Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (TF-CBT) is an effective treatment for children impacted by trauma, and non-offending caregivers play an important role in this treatment. This study aims to identify correlates of four caregiver variables that have been identified as predictors of child outcomes in TF-CBT: support, cognitive-emotional processing, avoidance, and blame/criticism. Audio recorded sessions were coded from a community effectiveness trial of TF-CBT that included 71 child-caregiver dyads participating in the trauma narration and processing phase of treatment. Regression analyses were conducted to examine caregiver trauma history and child baseline symptoms (internalizing, externalizing, and posttraumatic stress disorder [PTSD] symptoms) as predictors of caregiver behavior during the trauma processing sessions. Caregivers who reported exposure to more trauma types exhibited more in-session avoidance and also processing during the trauma processing phase of treatment. Child symptoms at baseline did not predict caregiver in-session behaviors. Bivariate correlations were used to investigate concurrent associations between mean levels of in-session caregiver behaviors and in-session child distress (negative emotion, hopelessness, negative behaviors). More caregiver blame/criticism was associated with more in-session child distress on all three measures. Caregiver avoidance was associated with more child negative emotion and hopelessness. Findings may help identify therapeutic targets when working with caregivers to promote change and enhance TF-CBT outcomes.

Committed to Caring: Cluster-Analysis of Appraisals and Feelings of Family Childcare Work.

BackgroundThere is a concern regarding the decreasing number of family childcare (FCC) providers, due to the population that primarily relies on it. Compared to studies of center- and school-based preschool practitioners, the FCC literature is lacking robust workforce studies, including examinations of whether and how FCC providers’ workplace appraisals of and feelings while at work are associated with indicators of interaction quality (relationships with families, relationships with children, and responsiveness to children's negative emotions) and the quality of their interactions with children and families.ObjectiveThe present study examines how groups of FCC providers, categorized based on differences in appraisals of and feelings experienced at work, differ in the quality of interactions with children and families. The study seeks to extend the FCC literature by also describing socio-ecological factors, such as provider and program characteristics, of these different groups of providers.MethodSurvey data was collected through a national study of FCC providers (N = 888). A person-centered analysis using hierarchical clustering was used to classify providers into groups based on their workplace appraisals and feelings experienced at work.ResultsA person-centered cluster analysis identified four groups. Indicators of interaction quality varied between groups. Group membership was associated with FCC providers' professional commitment, job satisfaction, and emotional exhaustion.ConclusionsFindings from the current study support calls to increase investment in the support of the FCC workforce by addressing FCC providers’ needs through recognition of differences in workplace appraisals and provider feelings at work. In particular, reducing FCC providers’ emotional exhaustion may be an effective way to increase the quality of their interactions with children and families.