The Child and Parent Emotion Study: Protocol for a longitudinal study of parent emotion socialisation and child socioemotional development

Introduction:&nbsp;Parents shape child emotional competence and mental health via their beliefs about children&rsquo;s emotions, emotion-related parenting, the emotional climate of the family and by modelling emotion regulation skills. However, much of the research evidence to date has been based on small samples with mothers of primary school-aged children. Further research is needed to elucidate the direction and timing of associations for mothers and fathers/partners across different stages of child development. The Child and Parent Emotion Study (CAPES) aims to examine longitudinal associations between parent emotion socialisation, child emotion regulation and socioemotional adjustment at four time points from pregnancy to age 12 years. CAPES will investigate the moderating role of parent gender, child temperament and gender, and family background.Methods and analysis:&nbsp;CAPES recruited 2063 current parents from six English-speaking countries of a child 0&ndash;9 years and 273 prospective parents (ie, women/their partners pregnant with their first child) in 2018&ndash;2019. Participants will complete a 20&ndash;30 min online survey at four time points 12 months apart, to be completed in December 2022. Measures include validated parent-report tools assessing parent emotion socialisation (ie, parent beliefs, the family emotional climate, supportive parenting and parent emotion regulation) and age-sensitive measures of child outcomes (ie, emotion regulation and socioemotional adjustment). Analyses will use mixed-effects regression to simultaneously assess associations over three time-point transitions (ie, T1 to T2; T2 to T3; T3 to T4), with exposure variables lagged to estimate how past factors predict outcomes 12 months later.Ethics and dissemination:&nbsp;Ethics approval was granted by the Deakin University Human Research Ethics Committee and the Deakin University Faculty of Health Human Research Ethics Committee. We will disseminate results through conferences and open access publications. We will invite parent end users to co-develop our dissemination strategy, and discuss the interpretation of key findings prior to publication.Trial registeration:&nbsp;Protocol pre-registration: DOI 10.17605/OSF.IO/NGWUY.</jats:sec

Child and Parent Physical Activity, Sleep, and Screen Time During COVID-19 and Associations With Mental Health:Implications for Future Psycho-Cardiological Disease?

The COVID-19 pandemic has afforded the opportunity for some to improve lifestyle behaviours, while for others it has presented key challenges. Adverse changes in global lifestyle behaviours, including physical activity, sleep, and screen time can affect proximal mental health and in turn distal cardiovascular outcomes. We investigated differences in physical activity, sleep, and screen time in parents and children during early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic in Australia compared to pre-COVID-19 national data; and estimated associations between these movement behaviours with parent and child mental health. Cross-sectional baseline data from the COVID-19 Pandemic Adjustment Study (CPAS; N = 2,365) were compared to nationally representative pre-pandemic data from the Longitudinal Study of Australian Children (LSAC; N = 9,438). Participants were parents of children aged ≤ 18 years, residing in Australia. Parents provided self-report measures of mental health, physical activity and sleep quality, and reported on child mental health, physical activity and screen time. Children in CPAS had significantly more sleep problems and more weekend screen time. Their parents had significantly poorer sleep quality, despite increased weekly physical activity. Children's sleep problems were significantly associated with increased mental health problems, after accounting for socioeconomic status, physical activity, and screen time. Poorer parent sleep quality and lower levels of physical activity were significantly associated with poorer mental health. Monitoring this cohort over time will be important to examine whether changes in movement behaviour are enduring or naturally improve with the easing of restrictions; and whether these changes have lasting effects on either parent or child mental health, and in turn, future risk for CVD

Child and Parent Physical Activity, Sleep, and Screen Time During COVID-19 and Associations With Mental Health: Implications for Future Psycho-Cardiological Disease?

The COVID-19 pandemic has afforded the opportunity for some to improve lifestyle behaviours, while for others it has presented key challenges. Adverse changes in global lifestyle behaviours, including physical activity, sleep, and screen time can affect proximal mental health and in turn distal cardiovascular outcomes. We investigated differences in physical activity, sleep, and screen time in parents and children during early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic in Australia compared to pre-COVID-19 national data; and estimated associations between these movement behaviours with parent and child mental health. Cross-sectional baseline data from the COVID-19 Pandemic Adjustment Study (CPAS; N = 2,365) were compared to nationally representative pre-pandemic data from the Longitudinal Study of Australian Children (LSAC; N = 9,438). Participants were parents of children aged ≤ 18 years, residing in Australia. Parents provided self-report measures of mental health, physical activity and sleep quality, and reported on child mental health, physical activity and screen time. Children in CPAS had significantly more sleep problems and more weekend screen time. Their parents had significantly poorer sleep quality, despite increased weekly physical activity. Children's sleep problems were significantly associated with increased mental health problems, after accounting for socioeconomic status, physical activity, and screen time. Poorer parent sleep quality and lower levels of physical activity were significantly associated with poorer mental health. Monitoring this cohort over time will be important to examine whether changes in movement behaviour are enduring or naturally improve with the easing of restrictions; and whether these changes have lasting effects on either parent or child mental health, and in turn, future risk for CVD

Text Mining of Reddit Posts: Using Latent Dirichlet Allocation to Identify Common Parenting Issues

Background: Parenting interventions offer an evidence-based method for the prevention and early intervention of child mental health problems, but to-date their population-level effectiveness has been limited by poor reach and engagement, particularly for fathers, working mothers, and disadvantaged families. Internationally, there has been a call for more sensitive intervention frameworks that better recognize parents’ differences and match support accordingly. Tailoring intervention content to parents’ context (i.e., to common parenting situations) offers potential to enhance parent engagement and learning by increasing relevance of content to parents’ daily experiences. However, this approach requires a detailed understanding of the common parenting situations and issues that parents face day-to-day, which is currently lacking. Objective: We sought to identify the most common parenting situations discussed by parents on parenting-specific forums of the free online discussion forum, Reddit, one of the most popular social media platforms in the world. We aimed to understand perspectives from both mothers and fathers, and therefore retrieved publicly available data from two parenting-specific ‘subreddits’ (r/Daddit; r/Mommit). Methods: We used latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) to identify the most common topics discussed in the Reddit posts. Once topics were identified, we completed a manual text analysis of the 10 posts ranked as most relevant to each topic, and summarized the parenting situations that were described. Our pre-specified definition of a parenting situation required that the post involve a parent and their child aged 0-18 years and describe a potential or actual difficulty or issue. Results: We retrieved 340 (r/Daddit) and 578 (r/Mommit) original posts. A model with 31 LDA topics was found to be the best fitting model. Of these, 24 topics included posts that met our inclusion criteria for manual review. From these, we identified 45 unique but broadly-defined parenting situations. The majority of parenting situations were either focused on basic childcare situations relating to eating, sleeping, routines, sickness and toilet training; or related to how to respond to child negative emotions or difficult behavior. Most situations were discussed in relation to infant or toddler age children, and on the whole, there was a high level of consistency in the themes raised in r/Daddit and r/Mommit. Conclusions: Our text analysis of the r/Daddit and r/Mommit posts highlighted two overarching themes in topics commonly discussed in online parenting forums; basic childcare, and management of child emotions and behavior. Our results offer potential to tailor parenting interventions in a meaningful way, creating opportunities to develop content and resources that are directly relevant to parents’ lived experiences

Latent Profile Analysis of Parent Emotion Socialization

This is a preprint of the manuscript titled "Profiles of Parents’ Emotion Socialization Within a Multinational Sample of Parents". This manuscript has been submitted for peer review at a journal, but not yet accepted (as of March 2023). Figures relevant to the manuscript are available in a zip file, in the supplementary materials

Parenting in Motion: Parent’s Perspectives on the Relationships between Play-based Physical Activity and Emotion Regulation in Early Childhood.

Physical activity during early childhood, otherwise known as ‘play-based physical activity’, may support emotion regulation development, thereby contributing to positive mental health outcomes across the lifespan. To initiate the co-design of a novel play-based physical activity parenting program, one-hour qualitative interviews (n=17) were conducted with parents of children aged two-four years. Interviews aimed to understand the regulatory effects of play-based physical activity and its role in parenting practices. Thematic template analysis identified five themes highlighting that play-based physical activity encompasses various forms, and dimensions, and is interwoven with learning across multiple domains. Play-based physical activity offered both preventative and immediate regulatory benefits, and facilitated family connection, and co-regulation. However, variation was found in parents’ utilisation of play-based physical activity for managing child emotion regulation difficulties. Some parents reported using it to respond to child dysregulation sensitively, others used it to distract and promote positive emotions during child dysregulation, and some did not consciously use it as a parenting strategy. Furthermore, several barriers were identified that limit play-based physical activity engagement and effectiveness, such as low parent capacity. Our findings confirm prior evidence of the regulatory benefits of play-based physical activity and physical activity, and extend this literature by showing the role, and effects of play-based physical activity in early childhood parenting practices

Child and parent physical activity, sleep and screen time during COVID-19 compared to pre-pandemic nationally representative data and associations with mental health

Objective: To investigate differences in movement behaviors (physical activity, sleep, screen time) in both parents and children during the early stages of COVID-19 pandemic in Australia, compared to pre-COVID-19 national data; and, estimate associations between these movement behaviors with parent and child mental health. Methods: We used cross-sectional baseline data from the COVID-19 Pandemic Adjustment Study (CPAS; N=2,365). Participants were parents of children aged ≤18 years, residing in Australia. We drew on nationally representative pre-COVID data from the Longitudinal Study of Australian Children (LSAC; N=9,438). In both studies, parents provided the same self-report measures of physical activity, sleep quality, as well as measures of child physical activity and screen time. Parents reported on their own and their child’s mental health. Results: Compared to LSAC, children in CPAS had more sleep problems (17.4% vs 8.9%, p&lt;.001) and more weekend screen time (3.98 hours vs 3.35 hours, p&lt;.001), while more parents had poor sleep quality (56.7% vs 21.0%, p&lt;.001) despite increased weekly physical activity (3.86 days vs 2.85 days, p&lt;.001). Children’s sleep problems were associated with increased depression, anxiety and irritability symptoms, after accounting for physical activity and screen time (all p&lt;.001). Poorer parent sleep quality and lower levels of physical activity were associated with poorer mental health across all indicators (all p≤.001). Conclusion: Government funded mental health programs to implement evidence-based sleep interventions for children and their parents, along with targeted messaging around physical activity should be considered to promote mental health within the family context during lockdown restrictions

Subjective wellbeing in parents during the COVID-19 Pandemic in Australia

Objectives: To examine the subjective wellbeing of Australian parents raising children and adolescents (0-18 years) during ‘stage three’ COVID-19 restrictions (April 2020), in comparison with subjective wellbeing in parents assessed over an 18-year period prior to the pandemic. We also aimed to examine socio-demographic and COVID-19 predictors of subjective wellbeing during the pandemic. Methods: Cross-sectional data were from: (1) the COVID-19 Pandemic Adjustment Survey (CPAS, N=2,365 parents of a child 0-18 years, 8-28th April, 2020); and, (2) a pre-pandemic database bringing together over 18-years of national data on subjective wellbeing (N=17,529 adults living with children, collected in annual surveys over 2002-2019). Results: Levels of subjective wellbeing during the pandemic were considerably lower than ratings prior to the pandemic (Personal Wellbeing Index, mean [SD]=65.3 [17.0]; compared to [SD]=75.8 [11.9], p&lt;0.001). Within the pandemic data, subjective wellbeing was lower in parents with low education, language other-than-English, receiving income assistance (i.e., a government benefit), single parents, and young parents. Subjective wellbeing was also lower in fathers, parents raising a child with a neurodevelopmental condition, parents with physical or mental health problems, and parents reporting COVID-related stressors, such as employment changes, financial strain, negative feelings/attributions about COVID-19, and supervising children while working-from-home. Unexpectedly, parent engagement with news media about the pandemic was associated with higher subjective wellbeing. Conclusion: Subjective wellbeing in parents raising children aged 0-18 years appears to be disproportionately impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic and associated social restrictions in Australia. Specific at-risk groups, for which government intervention may be warranted, include parents in socially disadvantaged contexts, parents with pre-existing mental health difficulties, and parents facing significant COVID-19 related work changes