(PS7-53) Title: Links between Parental Depression Symptoms and Parenting Behaviors in Emotionally Reactive Children Experiencing Low-Income

Abstract Text: Depression symptoms can interfere with caregivers' ability to provide warm, responsive parenting to their young children (Goodman, 2020; Goodman & Gotlib, 1999). This can be even more challenging for parents with emotionally reactive infants and toddlers. Children’s emotions and behaviors can also elicit negative parenting behaviors during parent-child interactions. These processes may be exacerbated within families experiencing significant adversity, which further strains parental coping resources. To better understand how individual child factors impact associations between parental psychopathology and parenting behaviors, we examined how parental depression symptoms relate to positive and negative parenting behaviors dependent on child emotion reactivity symptoms in families experiencing low income.

Participants were 86 low-income parents (M=32.08, SD-6.41) and their toddlers (M=29.42 months, SD=7.1) a subset of families from a larger longitudinal study. The majority of both children (94%) and parents (80%) identified as Latino/a. Approximately 70% of families had incomes at or below the federal poverty line for the median study year. Parents completed the Center for Epidemiological Studies Depression Scale (Radloff, 1977) and the Child Behavior Checklist (Achenbach & Rescorla, 2001). During a home visit, parents and children participated in a semi-structured free play task, modified from the 3-bag task (Ware et al., 2000). Trained coders watched the videos of the parent-child interaction task and rated parenting behaviors following gold-standard procedures and supervised by a central team (e.g., sensitivity, positivity, negativity).

Linear regressions showed that child emotion reactivity moderated associations between parental depression symptoms and parents’ positivity (b=-0.003, p=.037) and negativity (b=0.003, p=.001). Simple slopes testing showed that at higher levels of child emotion reactivity, parental depression symptoms were associated with less positivity (b=-0.04, p<.01), and more negativity (b=0.03, p<.01). Parental depressive symptoms were not associated with parenting behaviors at lower and average levels of child emotion reactivity. Additionally, parental depression symptoms and child emotion reactivity were not associated with parental sensitivity during the parent-child interaction.

The results indicate that child emotion reactivity is an important factor in understanding links between parental depression and both positive and negative parenting behaviors within families facing adversity. Lower levels of child emotion reactivity may buffer associations between parental depression symptoms and negative parenting behaviors. The larger longitudinal project targeted parenting behavior. Both parents’ perceptions of their children’s emotion reactivity and their parenting – especially as interacting with their own mental health, may be potential targets for future interventions that could yield positive effects on parenting behaviors.