Parental Anger and Trajectories of Emotional Well-Being from Adolescence to Young Adulthood

Child-parent agreement on the SDQ: The role of child-parent attachment and parental feelings

OBJECTIVES

Children and their parents often provide divergent reports regarding their mental health on the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire (SDQ). These discrepancies may impede the diagnostic processes. The present study aimed to explore how a child's attachment to the parent and parental feelings may explain some of the variability between parent's and children's reports on the SDQ.

METHODS

Data were collected using self-report questionnaires from 277 children and their parents (n = 421) who were referred to a public mental health clinic. This information was classified into clinical categories (normal and abnormal) and analyzed using multinomial logistic regression.

RESULTS

The agreement rates between children and parents on the normality of children were high in general and across gender and age. Insecure attachment to parents positively and significantly predicted the agreement of child and parent reporting abnormality and disagreement when parents reported normality and children reported abnormality. Parental anger positively and significantly predicted disagreement in reports in which parents reported abnormal anger and children reported normal anger.

CONCLUSIONS

These findings highlight the importance of assessing informant variability in association with emotional and relationship variables as clinically meaningful information for a clinical diagnosis.

Paternal Feelings and Child's Anxiety: The Mediating Role of Father-Child Insecure Attachment and Child's Emotional Regulation

The study introduces a path model that links between paternal feelings and child’s anxiety symptoms, aiming to test the mediational role of father–child insecure attachment and the child’s difficulties in emotional regulation in the occurrence of anxiety disorders among a sample of 148 fathers and their children (65 boys and 83 girls aged 8–18) attending the child psychiatric center of a public hospital. Participants completed a battery of diagnostical and research questionnaires, including the Parental Feelings Inventory (PFI), the Difficulties in Emotion Regulation Scale (DERS), the Screen for Child Anxiety–Related Emotional Disorders (SCARED), and the Experiences in Close Relationships Scale–Revised Child version (ECR-RC). Using structural equation modeling, we found father’s anger to be associated with father–child anxiety attachment, while the latter simultaneously mediated the link to the child’s anxiety both directly and indirectly (through emotion regulation [ER]). Consistent with previous evidence, we found insecure attachment and emotional regulation to be uniquely associated with the child’s anxiety. The current findings are among the first to demonstrate the interrelations between these variables in the context of father–child relations, suggesting that the child’s exposure to paternal anger might contribute to developing difficulties in ER and elevated anxiety due to a father–child insecure-anxious attachment relationship. The theoretical and practical implications of the findings are discussed in light of parental gender.