Observing interactions between children and adolescents and their parents: the effects of anxiety disorder and age

Parental behaviors, most notably overcontrol, lack of warmth and expressed anxiety, have been implicated in models of the development and maintenance of anxiety disorders in children and young people. Theories of normative development have proposed that different parental responses are required to support emotional development in childhood and adolescence, yet age has not typically been taken into account in studies of parenting and anxiety disorders. In order to identify whether associations between anxiety disorder status and parenting differ in children and adolescents, we compared observed behaviors of parents of children (7–10 years) and adolescents (13–16 years) with and without anxiety disorders (n=120), while they undertook a series of mildly anxiety-provoking tasks. Parents of adolescents showed significantly lower levels of expressed anxiety, intrusiveness and warm engagement than parents of children. Furthermore, offspring age moderated the association between anxiety disorder status and parenting behaviors. Specifically, parents of adolescents with anxiety disorders showed higher intrusiveness and lower warm engagement than parents of non-anxious adolescents. A similar relationship between these parenting behaviors and anxiety disorder status was not observed among parents of children. The findings suggest that theoretical accounts of the role of parental behaviors in anxiety disorders in children and adolescents should distinguish between these different developmental periods. Further experimental research to establish causality, however, would be required before committing additional resources to targeting parenting factors within treatment

Social referencing and child anxiety: the evolutionary based role of fathers' versus mothers' signals

Children use signals from others to guide their behavior when confronted with potentially dangerous situations, so called social referencing. Due to evolutionary based different expertise of fathers and mothers, parents might be different social references for their children. The present study tested the influence of paternal and maternal social referencing signals on child anxiety. We expected that (1) children would show different social reference processing towards fathers’ and mothers’ signals; (2) in male-specific situations children would be more influenced by paternal signals, and in female-specific situations by maternal signals; (3) boys would respond with more anxiety to female-specific situations, and girls to male-specific situations; (4) high anxious children would be more susceptible to parental, and specifically paternal, social referencing signals than low anxious children. Children aged 8-13 read scripts of ambiguous situations in which the mother/father signaled anxious/confident behavior, and indicated how anxious they would feel. Experiment 1 (n = 129) concerned non-social situations, and Experiment 2 (n = 124) social situations. As expected, children responded with more anxiety to scripts in which their parent acted anxious than to scripts in which their parent acted confident. Children, also high-anxious children, were not differently affected by signals of fathers and mothers. Girls responded with more anxiety than boys in male-typical non-social situations. Congruence between the parent signaling and his/her evolutionary expertise did in general not affect social referencing. In conclusion, independent from parental evolutionary based expertise or from children’s level of anxiety, fathers’ signals have as much influence on their children’s anxiety as mothers’