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Parental emotion coaching involves acknowledging and validating children’s feelings, as well as guiding them on how to manage intense or negative feelings. Although parental emotion coaching has been identified as a potentially important factor for children’s emotional development, research into this topic is scant. The present study examined whether maternal emotion coaching can play a mediational role between family risk (i.e. economic disadvantage, family stress, and maltreatment) and emotion regulation in preschoolers. Seventy-four preschoolers, aged 46–58 months, and their maternal caregivers participated in an observational laboratory study, including a narrative task in which mothers and children reminisced about a mildly upsetting event. We coded these conversations for maternal emotion coaching behaviors with the Family Emotional Communication Scoring System. A family risk score was obtained via the Family Events Checklist and demographic data. We measured children’s emotion regulation with the Emotion Regulation Checklist. Increased family risk was associated with both reduced child emotion regulation and reduced maternal emotion coaching. Maternal emotion coaching partially mediated the relation between family risk and child emotion regulation, in particular child emotional lability. The findings support further research into the possibilities of training mothers in high risk families in emotion coaching skills in order to foster their children’s emotional development.

This longitudinal study examined the relationship between couple relationship satisfaction, parenting practices, parent depression, and child problem behaviors. The study participants (n = 148) were part of a larger experimental study that examined the effectiveness of a brief family-centered intervention, the Family Check-Up model. Regression analysis results indicated that our proposed model accounted for 38% of the variance in child problem behavior at Time 2, with child problem behavior and couple relationship satisfaction at child age 2 years each accounting for a significant portion of the variance in child problem behavior at age 3. Couple relationship satisfaction directly predicted child behavior problems over time. Clinical and research implications are discussed.The relationship between couple relationship satisfaction and distress, parenting, and child outcomes is well established. Researchers have consistently demonstrated that couple distress negatively affects the partners' health, welfare, and quality of life, and is a risk factor for poor child outcomes (Cordova, Warren, & Gee, 2001;El-Sheikh & Staton, 2004;Fals-Stewart, O'Farrell, Birchler, Cordova, & Kelley, 2005). Children from high-conflict families, when compared with children from low-conflict homes, have more adjustment problems (Booth & Amato, 2001;Harold, Shelton, Goeke-Morey, & Cummings, 2004). Moreover, children of distressed couples often have poorer school performance, more behavioral problems, and greater incidence of physical illness (Cherlin et al., 1991). At the extreme end of couple conflict, children exposed to parental domestic violence have significantly higher rates of behavioral and emotional problems, poorer academic performance, lower levels of well-being, poorer physical health, and higher rates of clinical depression, anxiety, suicide ideation, drug abuse, and posttraumatic stress symptoms (Graham-Bermann & Edleson, 2001;Jouriles, Norwood, McDonald, Vincent, & Mahoney, 1996).The birth of a first child and negotiation of child-rearing responsibilities mark a developmental transition that is particularly influential on the couple relationship and child outcomes. Some research has demonstrated that this time period can be filled with joy and pleasure with the baby (Gottman & Notarius, 2002). Yet, in even the healthiest relationship, it is normative to experience a decrease in relationship satisfaction with the birth of the first child (Schulz, Cowan, & Cowan, 2006;Shapiro, Gottman, & Carrere, 2000). In fact, researchers estimate that one third of all divorces occur within the first 5 years of marriage, and for many couples, the trajectory toward divorce begins with the decline in the female partner's relationship satisfaction after the arrival of the first baby (Cowan & Cowan, 1992;Shapiro et al., 2000). During the transition to parenthood, couples frequently demonstrate a dramatic increase in relationship conflict in addition to a decrease in positive interactions, which result in an overall decline in couple re...

Prevention science researchers and practitioners are increasingly engaged in a wide range of activities and roles to promote evidence-based prevention practices in the community. Ethical concerns invariably arise in these activities and roles that may not be explicitly addressed by university or professional guidelines for ethical conduct. In 2015, the Society for Prevention Research (SPR) Board of Directors commissioned Irwin Sandler and Tom Dishion to organize a series of roundtables and establish a task force to identify salient ethical issues encountered by prevention scientists and community-based practitioners as they collaborate to implement evidence-based prevention practices. This article documents the process and findings of the SPR Ethics Task Force and aims to inform continued efforts to articulate ethical practice. Specifically, the SPR membership and task force identified prevention activities that commonly stemmed from implementation and scale-up efforts. This article presents examples that illustrate typical ethical dilemmas. We present principles and concepts that can be used to frame the discussion of ethical concerns that may be encountered in implementation and scale-up efforts. We summarize value statements that stemmed from our discussion. We also conclude that the field of prevention science in general would benefit from standards and guidelines to promote ethical behavior and social justice in the process of implementing evidence-based prevention practices in community settings. It is our hope that this article serves as an educational resource for students, investigators, and Human Subjects Review Board members regarding some of the complexity of issues of fairness, equality, diversity, and personal rights for implementation of preventive interventions.