(PS7-35) Daily Impact of Child Emotional Outbursts on Maternal Self-efficacy

In the past year, the United States Surgeon General issued an advisory regarding the unprecedented state of parental stress and mental health concerns, with 48% of parents reporting that most days, their stress is "completely overwhelming." The present study was designed in response to this growing concern, with a specific focus on self-efficacy in parents of children with ADHD. Parental self-efficacy is a cognitive process that refers to a parent’s belief in their parenting skills, general parenting knowledge, and overall ability to manage child-related challenges. Parents of children with ADHD rate themselves lower than parents of non-clinical children on measures of efficacy; however, the extent to which self-efficacy may fluctuate in response to day-to-day child behavioral symptoms, such as emotional outbursts, remains unclear. A nuanced understanding of the short-term impact emotional outbursts have on maternal self-efficacy is necessary to gain insight into the daily experiences of mothers managing child ADHD and identify possible mechanisms for behavioral intervention. To advance this work, we hypothesized that mothers would report lower same-day self-efficacy on days when child outbursts occurred compared to days when not. 

Preliminary analyses were conducted as part of an ongoing daily survey study for mothers of children (ages 6-8.9 years, diagnosed with ADHD and exhibiting ≥3 outbursts/week). This remote protocol involves an initial online interview followed by 14 days of daily questionnaires, during which mothers reflect on their self-efficacy (Me as a Parent Questionnaire), mood (Immediate Mood Scaler) and experiences using executive functions (Short Executive Function Scale) that day. Mothers also indicate if their child had a tantrum, and if so, specify how long it lasted, which behaviors occurred, and which strategies they used to manage it. 

Initial results included n=27 mothers, 2 of which were excluded due to incomplete data. Of this sample, 82% identified as White, 11% as Black, 7% Asian; 7% identified as Hispanic/Latinx. Preliminary analyses showed significantly lower self-efficacy scores on days when tantrums occurred (M= 10.22, SD = 0.99) compared to days when not (M = 11.02, SD = 1.99), t(22) = -2.40, p</span> = .013, Cohen’s d = 0.50, suggesting a relationship between tantrum occurrence and same-day maternal efficacy.

For mothers of children with ADHD and frequent emotional outbursts, the occurrence of an outburst during the day may influence feelings of competence as a parent, even several hours later, which may contribute to unhelpful subsequent discipline responses and thus reinforce low efficacy. As such, brief, practical, in-the-moment behavioral interventions that boost parents’ feelings of competence and efficacy shortly after outbursts (e.g., just-in-time adaptive interventions), may be uniquely effective for this population. 

Of note, other factors that may explain mothers’ feelings of efficacy, including mood, executive functioning, outburst duration/severity, and discipline strategies, are included in ongoing data collection (to be completed by April 2025). Future analyses will utilize multi-level modeling to more thoroughly evaluate within-person variability of day-to-day efficacy.