Parenting Practices of Anxious and Nonanxious Mothers: A Multi-Method, Multi-Informant Approach

Abstract

Anxious and non-anxious mothers were compared on theoretically derived parenting and family environment variables (i.e., over-control, warmth, criticism, anxious modeling) using multiple informants and methods. Mother-child dyads completed questionnaires about parenting and were observed during an interactional task. Findings revealed that, after controlling for race and child anxiety, maternal anxiety was associated with less warmth and more anxious modeling based on maternal-report. However, maternal anxiety was not related to any parenting domain based on child-report or independent observer (IO) ratings. Findings are discussed in the context of the impact of maternal anxiety on parenting and suggest that child, rather than maternal, anxiety may have a greater influence on parental behavior.

Family Factors in the Development, Treatment, and Prevention of Childhood Anxiety Disorders

“…In general, these studies provide only limited support for the claim that anxious, compared to non-anxious, parents tend to be overcontrolling, less warm, and model more anxious behavior (Bögels and Brechman-Toussaint 2006;Drake and Ginsburg 2011;Grüner et al 1999;Wood et al 2003). Indeed, although parental anxiety may influence parenting behaviors in some cases, there is emerging empirical evidence that higher levels of child anxiety evoke certain parenting behaviors Moore et al 2004;Whaley et al 1999).…”

Anxiety-Promoting Parenting Behaviors: A Comparison of Anxious Parents with and without Social Anxiety Disorder

“…IOs were undergraduate and graduate level research assistants, and master’s and doctoral level study staff who completed an average of 15 hours of supervised training on the coding task and were required to obtain 80% agreement across all ratings on five sample tapes of the parent-child interactions prior to coding study tapes. Additionally, inter-rater reliability has been demonstrated with these tasks and coding manual in previous studies [9, 10]. IOs, who were blind to parental diagnosis and this study’s hypotheses, rated the frequency and severity of parenting behaviors using a five-point Likert-type scale (0 = behavior not present , 1 = very rarely present/up to 25% of time , 2 = behavior present a little/26-50% of time and/or of mild severity, 3 = behavior present some/51-75% of the time and/or of moderate severity, 4 = behavior present most of time/76% or more of time and/or of marked severity).…”

“…Only the interaction of completing the third (most complex) design was coded for this study. These five-minute interactions were coded by independent observers (IOs) using a standardized coding manual that has been used in previous studies [9]. IOs were undergraduate and graduate level research assistants, and master’s and doctoral level study staff who completed an average of 15 hours of supervised training on the coding task and were required to obtain 80% agreement across all ratings on five sample tapes of the parent-child interactions prior to coding study tapes.…”

Investigating Unique Environmental Influences of Parenting Practices on Youth Anxiety

“…For example, the family-wide factors, such as low socioeconomic status (Grant et al, 2003), inter-parental conflict (Buehler, Benson, & Gerard, 2006), and parental psychopathology (Drake & Ginsburg, 2011;Goodman, 2007) may influence both parenting and youth anxiety. Researchers have attempted to overcome this familial confounding by using the ''within-family, 2-siblings-per-family'' design.…”