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Tobacco use continues to be a prevalent behavior among many mothers and fathers throughout pregnancy and the postpartum period. The current review provides a framework for understanding parental tobacco smoking during a critical period of child development and its potential impact on postpartum caregiving. It is well documented that maternal illicit substance use can compromise caregiving, increasing the risk of child neglect and maltreatment. However, to date, few studies have specifically investigated the impact of tobacco smoking among mothers and fathers during the prenatal and postpartum periods and how parental tobacco smoking may influence postpartum caregiving. We review current literature on parental tobacco smoking, with a predominant focus on mothers who use tobacco, and the potential impact on postpartum caregiving with a view to informing and tailoring tobacco-cessation programs for expectant and new parents who smoke tobacco. Highlights: The continuation of tobacco-use among mothers and fathers during the prenatal and postpartum periods is of significance. Maternal tobacco-use is influenced by paternal tobacco smoking behaviors. Postpartum tobacco-use can lead to suboptimal caregiving behaviors, such as reduced breastfeeding initiation and duration. Maternal tobacco-use has been associated with attenuated perceptual and attentional processing of infant facial cues. Future studies need to examine the specific effects of parental tobacco-use to postpartum caregiving. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Inadequate Boundaries Questionnaire (IBQ) was created as a multi-dimensional measure of boundary violations in parent-child relationships. Use of the IBQ has been increasing; however, its psychometric properties, including its proposed five-factor structure, have yet to be comprehensively evaluated. The current study examined the factor structure, reliability, mother-adolescent agreement, and convergent and discriminant validity of the IBQ-Parent and -Youth English versions among community and clinical adolescents and their mothers. Confirmatory factor analysis most strongly supported four factors: Guilt Induction-Psychological Control, Parentification, No Boundaries (Enmeshment), and Triangulation. The scales showed acceptable to excellent reliability. Mother-adolescent agreement was moderate in the healthy community sample and weaker in the clinical sample. Convergent and discriminant associations supported the validity of the Guilt Induction-Psychological Control scale, with a more complex picture emerging for other scales. Implications of these findings and directions for future research with the IBQ are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The COVID-19 pandemic led to increased mental health concerns among parents. Emerging studies have shown links between COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy and psychological distress, including among parents. The primary aim of this study was to extend these emerging findings by examining the role of COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy in mental health functioning in a national sample of U.S. parents, accounting for the effects of COVID-19 vaccination status and underlying medical conditions increasing COVID-19 risk. A nationally representative sample of U.S. parents (N = 796) completed a cross-sectional survey between February-April 2021, including measures of depressive, anxiety, and COVID-19 acute stress symptoms; COVID-19 vaccination status; underlying medical conditions increasing COVID-19 risk; and COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy. The sample consisted of 51.8% fathers, Mage=38.87 years, 60.3% Non-Hispanic white, 18.1% Hispanic/Latinx, 13.2% Non-Hispanic Black/African American, 5.7% Asian, and 2.8% Other Race. Hierarchical regression models adjusted for demographic covariates revealed that greater COVID-19 vaccination hesitancy and presence of an underlying medical condition were consistently associated with higher levels of depressive, anxiety, and COVID-19 acute stress symptoms among parents. Having had at least one COVID-19 vaccination dose was associated with greater levels of COVID-19 acute stress, but was not associated with depressive or anxiety symptoms. Results add new evidence from the U.S. in support of the link between COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy and psychological distress, point to the potential utility of behavioral health care workers in helping reduce vaccine hesitancy, and provide tentative data suggesting that COVID-19 vaccination for parents alone may not have provided mental health relief. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The COVID-19 pandemic has significantly disrupted the lives of children and their caregivers. Recent research has examined the impact of the pandemic on child and caregiver functioning but there is a paucity of work examining the impact of the pandemic on the broader family system. The current study examined family resilience during the COVID-19 pandemic across three aims: Aim 1 tested whether meaning, control, and emotion systems form a unitary family adaption factor, Aim 2 evaluated a concurrent model of family resilience, and Aim 3 examined whether parent gender and vaccination status moderated paths in the final model. A nationally representative sample of U.S. parents (N = 796; 51.8% fathers, M age = 38.87 years, 60.3% Non-Hispanic White) completed a cross-sectional survey about themselves and one child (5–16 years old) between February-April 2021, including measures of COVID-19 family risk and protective factors, pre-existing family health vulnerabilities, race, COVID-19 stressors, and family adaptation. Confirmatory Factor Analysis demonstrated that the meaning (i.e., family making meaning of COVID-19), control (i.e., stability in routines), and emotional (i.e., family support) facets of family adaptation are unique but related. A path model revealed that there were concurrent effects from COVID-19 exposure, pre-existing vulnerabilities, and racial diversity status to the family protective, vulnerability, and adaptation variables. Additionally, parent COVID-19 vaccination status altered the association between pre-existing family health vulnerabilities and the family protective factor. Overall, results underscore the importance of examining pre-existing and concurrent risk and protective factors for family resilience during a stressful, global, and far-reaching event. Highlights: A unitary factor of family adaptation comprised of meaning, control, and emotional support variables was not supported. A concurrent path model of family resilience during the COVID-19 pandemic provided an acceptable fit to the data. COVID-19 exposure, pre-existing vulnerabilities, and racial diversity status were associated with the adaptation variables. COVID-19 emotional vulnerability and demographic protection were also concurrently associated with family adaptation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Racial disparities in maternal health are alarming and persistent. Use of electroencephalography (EEG) and event-related potentials (ERPs) to understand the maternal brain can improve our knowledge of maternal health by providing insight into mechanisms underlying maternal well-being, including implications for child development. However, systematic racial bias exists in EEG methodology—particularly for Black individuals—and in psychological and health research broadly. This paper discusses these biases in the context of EEG/ERP research on the maternal brain. First, we assess the racial/ethnic diversity of existing ERP studies of maternal neural responding to infant/child emotional expressions, using papers from a recent meta-analysis, finding that the majority of mothers represented in this research are of White/European ancestry and that the racially and ethnically diverse samples that are present are limited in terms of geography. Therefore, our current knowledge base in this area may be biased and not generalizable across racially diverse mothers. We outline factors underlying this problem, beginning with the racial bias in EEG equipment that systematically excludes individuals of African descent, and also considering factors specific to research with mothers. Finally, we highlight recent innovations to EEG hardware to better accommodate diverse hairstyles and textures, and other important steps to increase racial and ethnic representativeness in EEG/ERP research with mothers. We urge EEG/ERP researchers who study the maternal brain—including our own research group—to take action to increase racial diversity so that this research area can confidently inform understanding of maternal health and contribute to minimizing maternal health disparities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The COVID-19 pandemic has led to increased mental health concerns, including depression and anxiety among parents and internalizing and externalizing problems among youth. To better understand the mechanisms and moderators of child mental health during the pandemic, the current study tested two moderated mediation models in which parent depression and anxiety indirectly impacted child internalizing and externalizing problems through negative effects on multiple parenting variables, with these associations moderated by families' exposure to COVID-19-stressors. A national sample representative of U.S. parents (N = 796, 48.2% female, Mage = 38.87 years, 60.3% Non-Hispanic white, 18.1% Hispanic/Latinx, 13.2% Non-Hispanic Black/African-American, 5.7% Asian, 2.8% Other Race) completed a cross-sectional online survey in February-April 2021. Children ranged from 5–16 years old (Mage = 10.35 years, 59.8% Non-Hispanic white, 17.2% Hispanic/Latinx, 13.7% Non-Hispanic Black/African-American, 4.5% Asian, 4.8% Other Race). Parent depression/anxiety was directly and indirectly associated with child internalizing and externalizing problems. For both internalizing and externalizing problems, indirect associations occurred by means of increased parent hostility and inconsistent discipline and decreased routines and parent supportiveness. There were also specific indirect effects through decreased monitoring (internalizing problems) and parenting self-efficacy (externalizing problems). Multiple indirect effects were moderated by number of COVID-19-stressors experienced. Notably, COVID-19-stressors did not have direct effects on child mental health when other variables were considered. Findings highlight the buffering effects of parents for child mental health, the need to address parent depression/anxiety in child interventions, the utility of existing evidence-based parent interventions during the pandemic, and the need to assess families' level of exposure to COVID-19-stressors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper serves as a call to action for increased focus on emotion regulation during pregnancy. We make this case by summarizing the limited research to date on this topic, which has demonstrated that emotion regulation in pregnant people has important mental health, caregiving, and developmental correlates throughout the perinatal period. Given its crosscutting and modifiable nature, bolstering emotion regulation during pregnancy has the potential for considerable intergenerational consequences, and it is critical to further investigate this construct. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Empirical evidence relying primarily on questionnaire reports indicates parent coping socialization messages play an important role in children's psychological functioning. The present study utilized a multi-informant, multi-method design to build on previous coping socialization research in childhood and adolescence. A novel coding system was developed to measure observed parental socialization of coping messages from observations of a discussion-based peer stress task. Questionnaires and direct observations were obtained from mothers with and without a history of depression (N = 116; 50% with a history of depression) and their children (9 to 15 years). Observed maternal coping socialization messages were not significantly correlated with mother or child reports of child internalizing symptoms in bivariate analyses. However, in multiple linear regression analyses, current maternal depressive symptoms and children's level of peer stress emerged as significant moderators of the association between observed maternal coping socialization messages and children's internalizing symptoms. The conceptual and methodological contributions of the current study are discussed, limitations and strengths are noted, and implications for future research are outlined. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discrepancies in parent-adolescent reports of parenting practices may reveal important information about parent-adolescent relationship quality. Youth attachment security has been identified as a factor that may explain discrepancies between parents and adolescents in reporting on parenting. However, previous research has not examined this question among clinical samples, and has generally utilized non-optimal analytic strategies in modeling discrepancies. The current study aimed to extend previous work by using latent profile analysis (LPA) to identify patterns of mother-adolescent divergence in reports of parenting in a large clinical sample, examining the characteristics of discrepancy groups in terms of age, gender, and psychopathology, and examining associations between attachment and discrepancies. A sample of adolescents with psychiatric disorders (N = 416; ages 12-17) and their mothers completed reports of parenting practices. Adolescents also completed the Child Attachment Interview and a measure of psychopathology. LPA was used to identify groups of mother-adolescent dyads with similar patterns of divergence across domains of parenting. Chi-square, ANOVA, and logistic regression analyses were used to test associations between youth age, gender, psychopathology, and attachment and mother-adolescent discrepancy profile membership. Three discrepancy profiles emerged: Strong Divergence, Moderate Divergence, and Low Divergence. Youth in the Moderate Divergence profile were oldest and had highest levels of externalizing pathology. Youth with insecure (dismissing and preoccupied) attachment, relative to securely attached youth, were more likely to be in the Strong Divergence profile. Securely attached adolescents were more likely to be in Low or Moderate Divergence profiles. Clinical implications are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]