Neglectful parents and mental-health problems

Emotional neglect can be defined as 'emotional unresponsiveness, unavailability and neglect characterised by a lack of interaction between parent and child.' It has been linked to children developing more mental-health problems but most research so far has been based on adults' memories of their childhood not how children feel at the time. A team of researchers from the University of Glasgow and the Medical Research Council in Glasgow studied 1,694 children. The children filled out a questionnaire called the Parental Bonding Instrument at 11 to assess their relationship with their parents and then had a computerised psychiatric interview at 15 to assess any mental-health problems. 3% of the children perceived their parents as almost always emotionally neglectful and controlling and this group had more than twice the risk of developing mental-health problems at 15.

Young, Robert, Lennie, Susan and Minnis, Helen - Children’s perceptions of parental emotional

neglect and control and psychopathology Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry
doi:10.1111/j.1469-7610.2011.02390.x

Prematurity, poverty and child development

In 2006 12.8% of births in the U.S. were premature. Premature births are linked to delays in motor/neurologic function, intellectual and academic development, language problems, poorer executive functioning and worse behaviour. Premature births are more common in poorer people. Being poor also has an effect on child development and children who are both premature and have poor parents are at an even greater risk of developmental problems. A team of researchers from the University of Maryland and Pennsylvania State University looked into some of these problems in a study of 122 African-American women with premature babies. They found that psychosocial risk (mothers' depression, stress and self-efficacy) and sociodemographic risk (poverty, mothers' education and marital status) were linked to maternal sensitivity which in turn affected the strength of the attachment between the mothers and their children at 12 months. However, the health of the children did not affect maternal sensitivity or later attachment.

Candelaria, Margo,  Teti, Douglas M. and Black, Maureen M. - Multi-risk infants: predicting attachment

security from sociodemographic, psychosocial, and health risk among African-American preterm infants Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry doi:10.1111/j.1469-7610.2011.02361.x

How parents can stop their children binge drinking

Anna-Karin Danielsson from the Department of Public Health Sciences at the Karolinska Institutet in Sweden has been looking into the factors behind teenage binge drinking in her Ph.D. thesis. She monitored 1,200 pupils aged between 13 and 19 between 2001 and 2006. She found that the teenagers who displayed risky behaviour at 13 were more at risk of high alcohol consumption and associated problems with their health, school work, parents and friends later. For boys the risk was reduced when parents kept an eye on what they were up to while for girls an emotionally-stable and close parent-child relationship had more of a protective effect. The study also compared drinking patterns in different countries and found that Scandinavian countries and the U.K. were different to other countries insofar as girls were just as likely to binge drink as boys.

Depressed dads are quicker spankers

Fathers who are depressed are more likely to spank their children. A team of researchers led by Dr R. Neal Davis from Intermountain Healthcare in Utah interviewed more than 1,700 new fathers from 20 large cities in the U.S. 40% of depressed men said that they had spanked their kids in the last month compared to only 13% of men without symptoms. According to a 2009 report from the Institute of Medicine more than 15 million American children are living with an adult who suffers from depression. Although 77% of men and 65% of women in the U.S. are in favour of spanking both the American Academy of Pediatrics and the American Psychological Association discourage it.

You can find out more about this research here.

Jollying along could be best approach for toddlers' tantrums

Jollying children along could be a better way of coping with toddlers' tantrums than punishing them. Researchers from the University of Illinois studied 107 children who were taking part in a larger study of children's social and emotional development. When the children were 33 months old their parents were asked how often their children displayed angry or 'social fearfulness,' and how they dealt with this behaviour by their children. Some of the parents jollied their children along saying 'stop behaving like a baby,' for example while others punished them sending them to their room, taking away toys or removing privileges. When the children reached 39 months their parents were asked about their behaviour again. Those who were more likely to punish their children were more likely to have children who were anxious and withdrawn. This was particularly the case among boys who had a higher level of negative emotions at 33 months.

Growing up in the UK - not so bad after all?

In 2007 a Unicef report rated Britain's children as some of the most unahppy in the developed world. However, a new study, by researchers at the Institute for Social and Economic Research at the University of Essex has painted a rosier picture finding that 70% of children between 10 and 15 rated themselves as happy or very happy. The researchers surveyed more than 2,000 children and found little difference between those living in households in the top fifth of income and those in the bottom fifth. A more important factor was whether children lived with both parents and the happiness of their parents' relationship, particularly that of the mother. 60% of the children said they were completely happy with their family situation with children in one-parent families being less likely to report themselves completely happy. Having older siblings had no effect on happiness but having younger brothers and sisters was associated with less happiness and the effect was greater if there were more younger siblings. Children who quarelled more than once a week with their parents and didn't discuss important matters with them only had a 28% chance of saying they were completely happy with their families but children who ate dinner with their family at least three times a week were more likely to say they were happy with their family. How much television children watched was completely unrelated to how happy they were with family life.

Study gives thumbs up to parenting programme

Parenting programmes aim to intervene early to improve child-rearing in vulnerable groups and to get children off to a better start in life. There are a number of different programmes available and researchers from New York University have been studying the effectiveness of one they themselves developed called ParentCorps. The programme is aimed at toddlers and includes a series of 13 group sessions which aim to teach parents ways to establish routines and rules for the family, reinforce positive behaviour and provide effective consequences for misbehaviour. The researchers studied 171 children comparing those in schools which took part in the ParentCorps programme to those which carried on as usual. In schools that too part in the programme parents had improved knowledge of parenting strategies, reported more effective discipline and were more responsive to their children. The children were also rated by their teachers as being better behaved in the classroom and as showing more social and emotional competence.

Parenting programme lays firm foundations

The birth of a child can bring stress and conflict to couples as well as joy and happiness. The Family Foundations programme aims to foster attitudes and skills related to positive family relationships such as emotion regulation, temperament and positive parenting. Researchers from Penn State University studied the effectiveness of the programme comparing a group of parents around the birth of their first child who received eight sessions of it (four before birth and four after) to a control group. The study found that the parents who took part in the programme had lower levels of stress and depression and higher levels of confidence in their parenting abilities; they also supported each other more and showed more effective parenting styles with less over-reaction and less use of corporal punishment.

Study gives thumbs up to Canadian family intervention

There has been a lot of research recently into ways in which the Government, health services and other public bodies can intervene early in the lives of disadvantaged children to help them do better later on in life. One such initiative is the Better Begginings, Better Futures project which has recently been studied by researchers from Queen's University in Ontario, Canada. The researchers compared 959 children, 601 of whom were between four and eight and took part in the project and 358 of a similar age who formed a control group. Follow-up data on the children was collected when they were in years 3, 6, 9 and 12 at school. The study found improvements in social and school functioning in the children who took part in the project and fewer emotional and behavioural problems at school. By year 12 the children who took part in the study were less likely to have committed a property crime and their parents were reporting greater feelings of social support, happier marriages and better family functioning. The project proved cost-effective as the Government ended up spending less money helping each child because they did better in the long term.

Mothers' mental health and children's feeding problems

Mothers' eating disorders, depression and anxiety are all known to cause feeding difficulties in their children, however, there have been few studies investigating how eating disorders interact with mothers' other mental-health problems to create feeding difficulties in children. A team of researchers from the Institute of Psychiatry, King's College London studied 10,902 women taking part in the long-term Avon Longitudinal Study of Parenting and Children. They found that mothers having an eating disorder had a direct effect on children's feeding problems and also had an indirect effect by making women more depressed and anxious. Having a child with feeding difficulties also increased the mothers' distress over time.

Micali, Nadia ... [et al] - Maternal eating disorders and infant feeding difficulties: maternal and child mediators in a longitudinal general population study Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry DOI: 10.1111/j.1469-7610.2010.02341.x

Mothers' mental health and children's asthma

Researchers from the Kyushu University Institute of Health Science in Japan have been looking into the influence of mothers' parenting styles and mental health on their children's asthma. They studied 223 mothers who had children between the ages of two and 12. The study found that children over the age of seven suffered more severe attacks if their mothers were overprotective. Mothers who were chronically angry, irritated or who suppressed their emotions also had children who suffered more with asthma.

Domestic violence and spanking children

People who are violent or psychologically abusive to their partners are also more likely to spank their children. Researchers from Tulane University in New Orleans surveyed mothers and fathers from around 2,000 families with three-year-old children. As many as seven in ten of the families reported some form of abuse between the couples such as slaps, kicks or keeping a partner from seeing his or her family and nearly two-thirds of the toddlers in these families were spanked by their parents within the last month. The children who were most likely to be spanked were those whose parents were aggressive towards each other with mothers more likely to be the ones hitting their children. In a 2008 survey 77% of men and 65% of women agreed that a child sometimes needs a 'good hard spanking.' The American Academy of Pediatrics and the American Psychological Association both discourage spanking children.

You can find out more about this research by clicking on the title of this post.

Good fathers and happy sons

Most psychological research into parenting concentrates on the role of mothers but having a good relationship with one's father can also help people to cope better in later life. Researchers from California State University, Fullerton studied 912 people between the ages of 25 and 74. Over eight days they interviewed the participants about that day's experiences asking them about their mental state and any stressful events. The participants were also asked about the quality of their childhood relationships with their parents. The study found that more people were likely to say their childhood relationship was better with their mother than with their father; a difference that was more pronounced among men. People who had had a good relationship with their mother reported 3% less psychological distress compared to those who reported a poor relationship. Men who had had a good relationship with their father also reported less psychological distress but this effect was not as strong among women.

You can find out more about this research by clicking on the title of this post.

Intensive intervention cuts child abuse

Intensive interventions can dramatically reduce levels of child abuse in at-risk families. Researchers from Southern Methodist University in Dallas studied 35 families on the at-risk register. Half of them received intensive support in which they were taught how to pay attention and play with their children, how to listen and comfort them, how to offer praise and positive attention, how to give appropriate instructions and commands and how to respond to misbehaviour. They were also given access to materials and resources such as food banks and Medicaid. The other families received normal levels of support from social services. Only 5.9% of the families who received the intensive intervention were later referred to social services for child abuse compared to 28% of the other families.

You can find out more about this research by clicking on the link in the title of this post.

Affectionate mothers and resilient children

Babies shown lots of affection by their mothers tend to cope better with stresses and strains as adults. Researchers from Duke University in North Carolina studied 482 people. When they were babies the researchers watched how their mothers treated them and rated them as having low, normal or high levels of affection. The participants were then tracked until they were, on average, 34 and assessed on how they dealt with stress, hostility and anger, sensitivity and anxiety. Those people with mothers who had given them high levels of affection handled all types of distress better and were particularly good at dealing with anxiety. The research fits in with attachment theory in which the quality of the attachment between a child and its primary caregiver (usually its mother) is held to influence its subsequent psychology and relationships with others.

You can find out more about this research by clicking on the link in the title of this post.

Parents of autistic children no likelier to split up

Parents of children with autism are no more likely to split up than other parents. A figure of 80% of parents of children with autism splitting up has become common currency in the autism 'community' over the last few years but no one really knows where it comes from, or if there is any truth behind it. Brian Freedman from the Center for Autism and Related Disorders at the Kennedy Krieger institute in Baltimore used data from a 2007 national survey to look into this issue. The survey included information on 77,911 American children aged between 3 and 17. The study found that 64% of autistic children lived with both parents compared to 65% of children unaffected by autism.

You can find out more about this research at

http://www.mentalhelp.net/poc/view_doc.php?type=news&id=128448&cn=20

Parenting programmes - are they a long-term solution?

Parenting programmes like The Incredible Years have been proven to have good short-term effects but little research has been done into their long-term effectiveness or into what makes them effective, or not, in children diagnosed with 'conduct disorder' and 'oppositional defiant disorder.' Researchers from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology studied 54 children who had taken part in The Incredible Years programme following them up five or six years afterwards to see how they were getting on. 5-6 years later two-thirds of the children no longer had a diagnosis of 'conduct disorder' or 'oppositional defiant disorder.' The strongest predictors of whether children still had a diagnosis were if they lived only with their mother or if they were a girl.

Drugli, May Britt ... [et al] - Five-to six-year outcome and its prediction for children with ODD/CD treated with parent training Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry May 2010, 51(5), 559-566

Mothers, attachment and insecurity

Attachment theory stresses the importance of the bonds a child forms with its mother during infancy - something seen as increasingly important by psychologists. Jude Cassidy from the University of Maryland traced 26 adults in Pittsburgh whose mothers had taken part in a study 40 years earlier. The mothers were asked to rate their one-month old babies on factors such as crying, spitting, sleeping, feeding and predictability and then do the same for the 'average baby.' Twelve of the participants had been rated more negatively than the average baby by their mothers and three quarters of them were classified as 'insecurely attached' in adulthood after being interviewed by the researchers. Of the 14 babies who had been positively perceived by their mothers only two were classified as 'insecurely attached.' Insecure attachment can lead to ongoing problems forming healthy emotional attachments to other people.

You can find out more about this research at

http://bps-research-digest.blogspot.com/2010/03/thirty-years-on-babies-judged.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+BpsResearchDigest+%28BPS+Research+Digest%29&utm_content=Google+Reader

Attachment, prenatal stress and cognitive development

Babies whose mothers were stressed when they were pregnant could end up with worse cognitive development than their peers. But any effects on cognitive development can be almost completely overcome by good parenting. A study led by Professor Thomas O'Connor from the University of Rochester Medical Centre measured the levels of the stress hormone cortisol in 125 women as they underwent amniocentesis. When the children were 17 months old the researchers assessed the baby's cognitive development using puzzles, pretend play and memory tests. They also gauged the quality of the relationship between the mothers and their babies using a test in which children are briefly left alone and then reunited with their mothers. The study found that for children with an 'insecure' attachment to their mothers a high prenatal cortisol level was linked to shorter attention spans and weaker language and problem-solving skills. However, there was no link between prenatal cortisol levels and cognitive development in children who had a secure relationship with their mother.

You can find out more about this research at

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/02/100225140906.htm?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+sciencedaily+%28ScienceDaily%3A+Latest+Science+News%29&utm_content=Google+Reader

Depression in new mothers

About one in ten people in the U.S. suffers from depression with women being twice as much at risk as men. Depression can affect the way people bring up their children with mothers' and children's development being affected. A team of researchers led by Robin Gaines Lanzi looked into this issue in a study of the first three years of children born to 682 mothers. 396 of the mothers were adolescent, 169 were 'lower resource' and 117 were 'higher resource.' The study found that the adolescent mothers had higher prenatal rates of depression and were more depressed six months after their baby's birth than the older mothers. As depression increased the mothers displayed less warmth and sensitivity to their children, were less responsive and spoke to them less and their children were less likely to seek out warmth from their mothers.

Lanzi, Robin Gaines ... [et al] - Depression among a sample of first-time adolescent and adult mothers Journal of Child and Adolescent Psychiatric Nursing November 2009, 22(4), 194-202