Emotion socialization practices in non-biological parents of children with FASD.
Carson Kautz-Turnbull, Madeline Rockhold, Emily Speybroeck and 3 others
PMID 40222243WHAT IT FOUND
In families of children with FASD, non-biological parents often used emotion coaching and dismissing together, not as opposite styles.
Older caregivers reported less coaching, and caregivers with more childhood trauma rated their children's behavior problems as more frequent.
Key findings
01Caregiver-reported child emotion regulation was significantly negatively correlated with child emotional lability/negativity and disruptive behavior.
02Emotion dismissing was significantly positively correlated with emotion coaching and empathy, suggesting caregivers used a mix of styles rather than one style exclusively.
03Older caregivers reported less emotion coaching, and caregivers with higher adverse childhood experience scores reported more frequent child behavior problems.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they found
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What it does not show
The study is cross-sectional, so it cannot show that caregiver coaching, age, or trauma caused child emotion regulation or behavior. The sample was mostly non-Hispanic White, high-income, and married or living with a partner, and it was recruited from an FASD diagnostic clinic, so results may not apply to families without clinic access or to biological parents. Data were missing more often after the pandemic began, and the parent-child conversation task was excluded from path models because many families struggled to complete it virtually. Only caregivers' childhood trauma was measured, not trauma experienced later in life. After correcting for many comparisons, several expected associations were nonsignificant, and relationships across different measurement methods were weak.
Declared interests
The authors declare no conflicts of interest.
The easy way to misread this
Do not conclude that emotion coaching reduces disruptive behavior or that caregiver childhood trauma causes behavior problems. These are cross-sectional associations, not tested interventions, and many expected associations were nonsignificant after correction.