Maternal anxiety and toddler inhibited temperament predict maternal socialization of worry

Abstract

Parent emotion socialization refers to the process by which parents impart their values and beliefs about emotional expressivity to their children. Parent emotion socialization requires attention as a construct that develops in its own right. The socialization of child worry, in particular, has implications for children’s typical socioemotional development, as well as their maladaptive development toward anxiety outcomes. Existing theories on emotion socialization, anxiety, and parent–child relationships guided our investigation of both maternal anxiety and toddler inhibited temperament as predictors of change in mothers’ unsupportive (i.e., distress, punitive, and minimizing) responses to toddler worry across 1 year of toddlerhood. Participants included 139 mother–toddler dyads. Mothers reported on their own anxiety and their emotion socialization responses to toddler worry. We assessed toddler inhibited temperament through a mother‐report survey of shyness and observational coding of dysregulated fear. Maternal anxiety but not child inhibited temperament predicted distress reactions and punitive responses, whereas maternal anxiety and toddler dysregulated fear both uniquely predicted minimizing responses. These results support the continued investigation of worry socialization as a developmental outcome of both parent and child characteristics.

Maternal Worry Socialization and Toddler Inhibited Temperament: Transactional Associations and Stability across Time

“…In another, mothers were more prone to child-focused worry when their child was temperamentally inhibited (Bryan & Dix, 2009). Pertinently, we recently examined predictors of mothers' worry socialization responses one year later in this sample (Kiel et al, 2020). We found that toddler dysregulated fear positively predicted mothers' minimizing responses to worry, even after accounting for concurrent anger socialization, earlier worry socialization, maternal anxiety, and toddler shyness.…”

“…We created an overall non-supportive worry response composite (12 items for CTNES, 18 items for CCNES, T1 α = 0.75, T2 α = 0.79, T3 α = 0.84) per time point by averaging worry-specific Punitive Reactions, Minimizing Reactions, and Distress Reactions subscales together (T1 rs = 0.09-0.25, T1 Mean r = .18, T1 ps = 0.007-0.361; T2 rs = 0.23-0.38, T2 Mean r = .32, T2 ps = ≤ 0.001-0.017; T3 rs = 0.39-0.62, T3 Mean r = .52, T3 ps ≤ 0.001). We used this method in a recent paper (Kiel et al, 2020) to derive worryspecific socialization vignettes. More broadly, CTNES and CCNES composite creation is consistent with past research (e.g., Gudmundson & Leerkes, 2012;Hurrell et al, 2015;Morelen et al, 2016), and both measures show acceptable least two of the three time points, with 41.9% and 58.1% of the included sample having data for two or three time points, respectively.…”

“…Given our recent work indicating that specific types of maternal non-supportive worry socialization responses (i.e., punitive, minimizing, distress responses) may uniquely relate to child inhibited temperament (Kiel et al, 2020), we ran three supplementary path analysis models in which we replaced overall non-supportive worry socialization with each of the three non-supportive response types (see Supplementary Information Figures S1-S3 and Supplement Discussion). Overall, model paths functioned relatively similarly across strategy types, with associations in the punitive response model closest to those in the main model.…”

“…Of note, we identified vignettes that shared common elements of child-expressed worry, fear, and/or temperamental shyness/behavioral inhibition. To retain linguistic conciseness and congruency toKiel et al, 2020, we refer to these vignettes as "worry-specific," though we acknowledge that this labeling may be imperfect and that these situations also likely often incorporate the other aforementioned elements.…”

Bidirectional effects of toddler temperament and maternal overprotection on maternal and child anxiety symptoms across preschool

“…Environments created by mothers with high levels of internalizing (e.g., anxiety) symptoms can be particularly stressful for children due to factors such as increased negative affect, dysfunctional behaviors, and cognitions (Goodman & Gotlieb, 1999; Bayer et al, 2006; Dix, 1991; Murray et al, 2009; Wood et al, 2003). Studies have shown that maternal anxiety is associated with overprotective parenting strategies (Bayer et al, 2006), parent worry, and socialization goals (Kiel & Buss, 2010b, Kiel et al, 2020). Additional work suggests that maternal worry (about the child) may be an important factor to consider.…”