Background The COVID‐19 pandemic introduced challenges to families with young children with developmental delays. Beyond the widespread concerns surrounding illness, loss of employment and social isolation, caregivers are responsible for overseeing their children's educational and therapeutic programmes at home often without the much needed support of professionals. Method The present study sought to examine the impact of COVID‐19 in 77 ethnically, linguistically and socioeconomically diverse families with young children with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDDs) in California and Oregon, who were participating in larger intervention studies. Parents responded to five interview questions about the impact of the pandemic, services for their child, silver linings or positive aspects, coping and their concerns about the long‐term impact of the pandemic. Results Parents reported that their biggest challenge was being at home caring for their children with the loss of many essential services. Parents reported some positive aspects of the pandemic, especially being together as a family. Although there were positive aspects of the situation, many parents expressed concern about long‐term impacts of the pandemic on their children's development, given the loss of services, education and social engagement opportunities. Conclusion Results suggest that parents of young children with IDD report significant challenges at home during the pandemic. Professional support, especially during the reopening phases, will be critical to support family well‐being and child developmental outcomes.

Children's emotion dysregulation and maternal scaffolding at age 4 were examined as predictors of social skills at age 6, for 66 children with and 106 without early developmental delays. Observed scaffolding and regulation during frustrating laboratory tasks related to later mother, father, and teacher social-skill ratings for children with delays and were stronger predictors of social skills within this group than were developmental level and early behavior problems. In contrast, fewer associations were found for typically developing children, with early behavior problems providing the only unique prediction to social skills. Data support a model in which dysregulation partially mediates the association between developmental status and social-skill outcomes. Implications for research, prevention, and early intervention are discussed.

This study examined interrelations among different types of parental emotion socialization behaviors in 88 mothers and 76 fathers (co-residing with participating mothers) of 8-year-old children. Parents completed questionnaires assessing emotion socialization behaviors, emotion-related attitudes, and their children’s social functioning. An observed parent-child emotion discourse task and a child social-problem solving interview were also performed. Parent gender differences and concordance within couples in emotion socialization behaviors were identified for some but not all behaviors. Fathers’ reactions to child emotion, family expressiveness, and fathers’ emotion coaching during discussion cohered, and a model was supported in which the commonality among these behaviors was predicted by fathers’ emotion-coaching attitudes, and was associated with children’s social competence. A cohesive structure for the emotion socialization construct was less clear for mothers, although attitudes predicted all three types of emotion socialization behavior (reactions, expressiveness, and coaching). Implications for developmental theory and for parent-focused interventions are discussed.

Epidemiological studies of children and adolescents with intellectual disability have found 30-50% exhibiting clinically significant behavior problems. Few studies, however, have assessed young children, included a cognitively typical comparison group, assessed for specific disorders, and/or studied family correlates of diagnosis. We assessed 236 5-year old children, 95 with developmental delay (DD) and 141 with typical development (TD), for clinical diagnoses using a structured interview. Every disorder assessed was more prevalent in the developmental delay group. The percent of children meeting criteria for Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) most highly differentiated the two groups (ratio 3.21 to 1). There was high stability from externalizing behavior problems at age 3 to ADHD diagnoses at age 5 in both groups. In regression analyses, parenting stress at child age 3 related to later ADHD diagnosis in both groups and maternal scaffolding (sensitive teaching) also predicted ADHD in the DD group.Children and adolescents with developmental delays are at high risk for emotional and behavioral problems. Epidemiological studies of youth with intellectual disability (ID) have reported clinically significant emotional and behavior problems and/or diagnosable mental disorder in a third to a half of cases (Cormack, Brown, & Hastings, 2000;Dekker & Koot, 2003;Einfeld & Tonge, 1996;Emerson, 2003a;Koskentausta, Iivanainen, & Almqvist, 2007). In the present study we assessed behavior disorders longitudinally from age 3 to 5 in children with developmental delay (DD) or typical development (TD), focusing on ADHD. We use the term "developmental delay" rather than the more formal diagnosis of intellectual disability for this sample of young children, as classification would be less stable over time than with school-aged and older children and it was based upon IQ alone. We had three primary aims: (1) to determine the relative risk of diagnosable mental disorders in children with or without DD; (2) to determine whether early externalizing behavior problems are stable and predict subsequent ADHD diagnosis; and (3) to explore whether family characteristics relate longitudinally to ADHD diagnosis.Correspondence should be addressed to: Dr. Bruce L. Baker, Department of Psychology, UCLA, 405 Hilgard Ave, Los Angeles, CA. 90095. baker@psych.ucla.edu. NIH Public AccessAuthor Manuscript J Clin Child Adolesc Psychol. Author manuscript; available in PMC 2011 January 1. NIH-PA Author ManuscriptNIH-PA Author Manuscript NIH-PA Author ManuscriptMost studies of co-occurring psychiatric diagnosis among youth with ID have sampled children with a wide age range, often from age five or six years through mid or late adolescence. From these age-mixed samples, often assessed at a single time point, one can draw only limited conclusions about age of onset and trajectory of emotional and behavior problems. In one notable exception, the authors conducted three assessments over a five year period and used multi-level growth curve a...

Parenting was examined among families of children with borderline intelligence in comparison to families of typically developing children and children with developmental delays. Parenting data were obtained at child age 5 via naturalistic home observation. Mothers of children with borderline intelligence exhibited less positive and less sensitive parenting behaviors than did other mothers and were least likely to display a style of positive engagement. Children with borderline intelligence were not observed to be more behaviorally problematic than other children; however, their mothers perceived more externalizing symptoms than did mothers of typically developing children. Findings suggest the importance of mothers' explanatory models for child difficulties and highlight children with borderline intelligence as uniquely at risk for poor parenting.Since Bell's (1968) seminal paper emphasized the importance of child effects on parenting, socialization research has significantly advanced understanding of reciprocal influences within the parent-child relationship (Collins, Maccoby, Steinberg, Hetherington, & Bornstein, 2000). Research on bidirectionality has led to increased appreciation for the transactional relations between child attributes and parenting in the prediction of children's socioemotional functioning. Although substantial research has been focused on families of typically developing children, an important area in which to examine child effects is in the context of families of children at risk for poor outcomes due to biological factors or developmental disruptions. Evidence suggests that children's developmental status may not only amplify the importance of parenting (Crnic, Friedrich, & Greenberg, 1983;Crnic & Greenberg, 1987), but also may alter the actual parenting that a child receives (Floyd & Phillippe, 1993).Relatively little is known about the quality of parenting among families of children with borderline intelligence, despite evidence that these children are at heightened risk for maladaptive outcomes (Valliant & Davis, 2000). Although children with borderline intellectual functioning fall within a narrow IQ band, defined as 71-84 by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders-DSM-IV (American Psychiatric Association, 2000), they comprise a greater percentage of the population than do children with diagnosable © American Association on Intellectual and Developmental DisabilitiesRequests for reprints should be sent to Rachel M. Fenning, University of California, Los Angeles, Department of Psychology, 405 Hilgard Ave., Los Angeles, CA 90095. rfenning@ucla.edu. NIH Public Access Author ManuscriptAm J Ment Retard. Author manuscript; available in PMC 2009 December 10. NIH-PA Author Manuscript NIH-PA Author Manuscript NIH-PA Author Manuscript developmental delays, suggesting that evidence of maladaptive family processes may have significant implications for future intervention and prevention efforts. In the present study we addressed this gap in the literature by investigatin...

Associations between variability in sympathetic nervous system arousal and individual differences in symptom severity were examined for children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Thirty-four families participated in a laboratory visit that included continuous measurement of electrodermal activity (EDA) during a battery of naturalistic and structured parent-child, child alone, and direct testing tasks. Multiple indices of EDA were considered. Greater variability in EDA was associated with higher levels of ASD symptoms, with findings generally consistent across tasks. Intellectual functioning did not moderate the relation between EDA and ASD symptoms. Sympathetic arousal tendencies may represent an important individual difference factor for this population. Future directions and conceptualizations of EDA are discussed.

This study examined parent-child emotion discourse, children's independent social information processing, and social skills outcomes in 146 families of 8-year-olds with and without developmental delays. Children's emergent social-cognitive understanding (internal state understanding, perspective taking, and causal reasoning/problem solving) was coded in the context of parent-child conversations about emotion, and children were interviewed separately to assess social problem solving. Mothers, fathers, and teachers reported on children's social skills. The proposed strengths-based model partially accounted for social skills differences between typically developing children and children with delays. A multigroup analysis of the model linking emotion discourse to social skills through children's prosocial problem solving suggested that processes operated similarly across the two groups. Implications for ecologically focused prevention and intervention are discussed.

The theory of biobehavioral synchrony proposes that the predictive power of parent-child attunement likely lies in the manner with which behaviors are aligned with relevant biological processes. Symptoms of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) may challenge the formation of behavioral and physiological synchrony, but maintenance of such parent-child attunement could prove beneficial. The present study is the first to examine parent-child physiological synchrony in ASD. Parent and child electrodermal activity (EDA) was measured continuously during naturalistic free play. Parent-child EDA synchrony (positive covariation) was positively correlated with observed parent-child emotional attunement. Hierarchical linear modeling revealed that child ASD symptoms moderated the association between parent EDA and child EDA, such that EDA synchrony was stronger for children with lower ASD symptom levels.