Parental emotional competence and parenting in low-income families with adolescents.

Abstract

Ample research has demonstrated that alexithymia, which is characterized by difficulty processing emotions, is associated with disruptions in parenting infants and toddlers. Individuals suffering from alexithymia have among other negative outcomes difficulty building and maintaining interpersonal relationships. Research on emotional expression and recognition has documented the importance of these competencies for the quality of the parent-child relationship and for skills critical for parents of adolescents, such as effective monitoring. However, literature linking parental alexithymia to parenting behaviors and related constructs during adolescents is lacking. The present study closes this gap by examining how mothers’ (M age = 39.42 yrs, SD = 7.62; Range = 23–67) alexithymia affects parent-reported behaviors of solicitation and control, as well as youths’ (53.6% female; M age = 12.13 yrs, SD = 1.62; Range = 9–16) reported disclosure and felt acceptance by their mothers among a sample of 358 primarily urban, African American families. Structural Equation Models revealed that mothers’ alexithymia was prospectively related to less parental solicitation two years later for both males and females, and to lower levels of felt acceptance for males. Multiple group analyses revealed that these models fits equally well for younger and older youth. Contrary to hypotheses, alexithymia was not related to control or to disclosure. Taken together, these findings indicate that parents’ difficulty in processing emotions contributes to parenting beyond early childhood.

Emotion Regulation in Families: Exploring the Link between Parent-Child Alexithymia and Child Post-Traumatic Stress Symptoms Amidst the COVID-19 Pandemic

“…Research indicates that meta-emotion philosophy mediates the relationship between emotion coaching and children's social competence [48] and that better parent emotion coaching skills are associated with higher child emotional competencies [49]. This corroborates findings from research on parent modeling and socialization, which has linked parental alexithymia to child outcomes such as lack of emotional and social competence [48][49][50]. Thus, the current study proposes a pathway (Fig.…”

Longitudinal Associations Between Maternal Solicitation, Perceived Maternal Acceptance, Adolescent Self-Disclosure, and Adolescent Externalizing Behaviors

“…Some recent work in this area (e.g., Borre & Kliewer, 2014) showed that parents’ exposure to violence and their overall stress levels affect their mental health, which in turn affects parenting. Further, parents’ emotional competence is prospectively associated with parental monitoring and perceived parental acceptance among low-income, urban adolescents (Kliewer et al, 2016). Additional research may wish to include all components of parental monitoring (e.g., parental control and parental knowledge) to examine how all of these monitoring constructs work together to affect adolescent externalizing behaviors.…”

Emotion Regulation and Parental Bonding in Families of Adolescents With Internalizing and Externalizing Symptoms

“…As a consequence of this hypothesis, literature suggests the existence of a potential intergenerational transmission of the difficulty in emotional regulation from parents to their children ( Lumley et al, 1996 ; Fukunishi and Paris, 2001 ; Guttman and Laporte, 2002 ; Kliewer et al, 2016 ). Nevertheless alexithymia along with parental bonding have been usually studied only at the individual level both in the general population and in psychiatric patients, including recently adolescents too.…”