Parental burnout is a state that parents experience overwhelming exhaustion in their parental role. Given the detrimental impacts of parents’ stress on adolescent development, youth may suffer from undesirable emotional adjustment due to parental burnout. Therefore, it is key to understand the underlying mechanisms through which parental burnout may play a role in youth’s mental health and identify protective factors that may reduce the potential negative impacts. Using a sample of 442 Chinese parent-adolescent dyads (Mean age of youth = 13.35 years; 50% girls), this two-wave longitudinal study examined how parental burnout contributes to youth’s mental health over the span of two months. Moreover, the current research investigated the potential mediating role of autonomy support and the potential moderating role of emotion regulation in the links between parental burnout and youth’s mental health. The results showed that greater parental burnout was predictive of youth’s greater depressive and anxiety symptoms two months later, and such effects were partially mediated by less autonomy-supportive parenting. Notably, the negative effects of parental burnout on autonomy-supportive parenting and youth’s mental health were not significant when parents used more cognitive reappraisal to regulate their emotions. These findings demonstrate the underlying mechanisms of how parental burnout affects youth’s mental health over time and highlight the protective role of healthy emotion regulation against parental burnout.

Parental burnout is a state that parents feel exhausted in their parental role. Although past research has examined concurrent correlates of parental burnout, the impacts of parental burnout on adolescent development over time remain largely unknown. The current study explored the indirect mechanisms linking mothers' parental burnout to adolescents' later internalizing and externalizing problems through maternal hostility among Chinese families. Using a sample of 606 adolescents (51.5% boys; M age = 12.89 years old) and their mothers (M age = 38.50 years old), this three-wave longitudinal study showed that mothers' parental burnout was predictive of adolescents' perceptions of their mothers' parental hostility over time, which were in turn related to adolescents' later internalizing and externalizing problems. Moreover, mothers' parental burnout was directly related to adolescents' later externalizing problems. Taken together, parental burnout played a role in adolescents' internalizing and externalizing problems over time through increased parental hostility. These findings underscore the importance of parental burnout on parenting behavior and adolescent adjustment.

Purpose Preventive health behavior during COVID-19 protects not only oneself but also the welfare of others. However, little attention has been paid to prosocial motivation in adolescents, who are often viewed as selfish and egocentric. Therefore, the current study aimed to explore the role of empathy in adolescents’ preventive health behavior using longitudinal data. Methods A total of 442 Chinese adolescents (mean age of youth = 13.35 years; 49.5% girls and 50.5% boys) completed two-wave longitudinal surveys over the span of two months during the pandemic (Time 1: July 2020; Time 2: September 2020). At T1, participants reported on their empathic concern, perspective taking, and concern for personal health. At both T1 and T2, participants reported on their preventive health behavior and COVID-related worry. Results Adolescents who showed greater empathic concern tend to engage in more preventive health behavior over time ( p < .01). However, greater empathic concern also predicted adolescents’ greater worry about COVID-19 over time ( p < .01). In comparison, adolescents’ perspective-taking and concern for personal health did not predict their health behavior or worry over time. Notably, the longitudinal effect of empathic concern on preventive health behavior and COVID-related worry remained ( p s < .05) after taking into account adolescents’ perspective-taking and concern for personal health. Conclusions These findings highlight adolescents’ prosocial motivation in engaging in preventive health behavior during the pandemic and also point out the potential negative influence of empathic concern on adolescent mental health.

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Despite a recent surge in research examining parent-child neural similarity using fMRI, there remains a need for further investigation into how such similarity may play a role in children’s emotional adjustment. Moreover, no prior studies explored the potential contextual factors that may moderate the link between parent-child neural similarity and children’s developmental outcomes. In this study, thirty-two parent-youth dyads (parents:Mage= 43.53 years, 72% female; children:Mage= 11.69 years, 41% female) watched an emotion-evoking animated film while being scanned using the functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). We first quantified how similarly emotion network interacts with other brain regions in responding to the emotion-evoking film between parents and their children. We then examined how such parent-child neural similarity is associated with children’s emotional adjustment, with attention to the moderating role of family cohesion. Results revealed that higher parent-child similarity in functional connectivity pattern during movie viewing was associated with better emotional adjustment including less negative affect, lower anxiety, and greater ego resilience in youth. Moreover, such associations were significant only among families with higher cohesion, but not among families with lower cohesion. The findings advance our understanding of the neural mechanisms underlying how children thrive by being in sync and attuned with their parents, and provide novel empirical evidence that the effects of parent-child concordance at the neural level on children’s development are contextually dependent.Significant StatementWhat neural processes underlie the attunement between children and their parents that helps children thrive? Using a naturalistic movie-watching fMRI paradigm, we find that greater parent-child similarity in how emotion network utilizes other brain regions during movie viewing is associated with youth's better emotional adjustment including less negative affect, lower anxiety, and greater ego resilience. Interestingly, these associations are only significant among families with higher cohesion, but not among those with lower cohesion. Our findings provide novel evidence that parent-child shared neural processes to emotional situations can confer benefits to children, and underscore the importance of considering specific family contexts in which parent-child neural similarity may be beneficial or detrimental to children's development, highlighting a crucial direction for future research.