Maternal Distress Influences Young Children’s Family Representations Through Maternal View of Child Behavior and Parent–Child Interactions

Abstract

Objective Distress of a parent is a key influence on the quality of the child's experience in the family. We hypothesized that maternal distress would spill over into more negative views of their children's behaviors and less emotional availability in their relationships. Further, we investigated whether these cumulative experiences contributed to children's emerging narratives about mothers and family life. Method In this longitudinal study, mothers of young twin children reported their distress on three occasions in relation to: self, the marital relationship, and the family climate. Mothers also reported on their children's externalizing behavior problems. Mother-child interaction was observed focusing on maternal sensitivity and child responsivity. Children responded to story stem beginnings about challenging situations in the family and their narratives were scored for family conflict and cohesion themes. APIM methods of dyadic data analysis accounted for the inclusion of both twins in the analysis. Results Results from structural equation models supported the hypothesized cumulative experience of maternal distress on children's family life representations for both family conflict and family cohesion. Conclusion A family environment in which children are exposed to persistent maternal distress early in life may have cumulative effects, influencing how mothers interact with and view their children's behavior at later developmental stages. Moreover, exposure to repeated distress for longer periods of time may contribute to an intergenerational continuity of distress for the child that may become rooted in negative affective bias in their own view of family relationships.

Do Young Children's Representations of Discipline and Empathy Moderate the Effects of Punishment on Emotion Regulation?

“…Story stem tasks also provoke children to draw upon their scripted knowledge of understandings of family relationships and parenting using tangible props and play scenarios (Page, ). As increasing self‐awareness and language skills emerge, five‐year‐olds offer rich representations in their differentiated and detailed narratives of family relationships (Bretherton, Prentiss, & Ridgeway, ; Yoo, Popp, & Robinson, ). Story telling approaches have been used to evaluate associations between parenting and children's internal representations of relationships.…”

Preschoolers’ narrative representations and childhood adaptation in an ethnoracially diverse sample

“…Prior work with this and other samples has shown positive relations between mothers' own representations of their preschool aged child and children's narrative content and coherence in the MSSB (Bretherton, Biringen, Ridgeway, Maslin, & Sherman, 1989;Sher-Censor et al, 2013;Yoo, Popp, & Robinson, 2014). Likewise, a study by Schechter and colleagues (2007) demonstrated the impact of maternal violence exposure on children's representational content and coherence in the MSSB.…”

Family Conflict Moderates Early Parent–child Behavioral Transactions

“…Specifically, there is no research that has examined how children shape or reinforce parenting in the context of family conflict. Previous research has indicated that children as young as 5 years experience poorer parent–child relationship quality in the face of high family conflict (Sturge‐Apple, Davies, Winter, Cummings, & Schermerhorn, ; Yoo, Popp, & Robinson, ), and several studies have corroborated the link between high family conflict, negative parenting, and young children's internalizing and externalizing behaviors (Malik et al., ; Rhoades, ; Shaffer, Suveg, Thomassin, & Bradbury, ; Stover et al., ). Within the Early Head Start Research and Evaluation Project (EHSREP; Administration for Children and Families, ), the study from which the data for the present analyses were drawn, two studies have found significant effects of family conflict on parental behaviors.…”