Optimism and positive and negative feelings in parents of young children with developmental delay.
E Kurtz-Nelson, L L McIntyre
PMID 28444813WHAT IT FOUND
Parents of preschoolers with developmental delay who were more optimistic reported more positive and less negative feelings about their child, even after accounting for child behaviour problems and parenting stress.
Key findings
01Parents who were more optimistic reported more positive feelings and less negative feelings about their child.
02Optimism still predicted both positive and negative feelings after child behaviour problems and parenting stress were taken into account.
03The interaction between parenting stress and optimism predicted positive feelings, but not negative feelings.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they found
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What it does not show
Parent feelings, parenting stress, and child behaviour problems were all reported by the same parent, so shared self-report may inflate associations. The sample came from one geographical region and was mainly White/Caucasian mothers, so it may not apply to other families. The study was cross-sectional, so it cannot show that optimism changed feelings or that feelings changed optimism. Many associations were small to moderate. The paper did not observe parent-child interactions or child behaviour directly. The study was not an intervention trial; it used data collected before randomisation and did not test whether changing optimism or stress affects feelings.
Declared interests
The work was supported by NIH grant R01 HD059838 and was part of a larger early family-based intervention study. The supplied text does not report author conflicts of interest.
The easy way to misread this
Do not conclude that optimism caused better parent feelings or that an optimism training would help families. The study measured variables at one time and did not test an intervention.