Category: Parenting / Families
Newland, L. A. (2015) Family well‐being, parenting, and child well‐being: Pathways to healthy adjustment, Clinical Psychologist, 19, 3-14.
, Eisenberg, N., Cumberland, A., & Spinrad, T. L. (1998). Parental Socialization of Emotion. Psychological inquiry, 9(4), 241–273., Dumas J. E. (2005). Mindfulness-based parent training: strategies to lessen the grip of automaticity in families with disruptive children. Journal of clinical child and adolescent psychology : the official journal for the Society of Clinical Child and Adolescent Psychology, American Psychological Association, Division 53, 34(4), 779–791.,Laura McKee, Ph.D. (she/her/hers)
Associate Professor
Georgia State University
Decatur, Georgia
Anne Shaffer, Ph.D. (she/her/hers)
University of Georgia
Athens, Georgia
Lindsey Green, B.S. (she/her/hers)
University of Washington, Seattle
Seattle, Washington
Grace Cain, B.A. (she/her/hers)
Graduate Student
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Chapel Hill, North Carolina
Sarah Moran, B.A., M.A. (she/her/hers)
PhD Student
Georgia State University
Atlanta, Georgia
Laura McKee, Ph.D. (she/her/hers)
Associate Professor
Georgia State University
Decatur, Georgia
As applied clinical scientists, our training and research have historically had a primary focus on psychopathology and how to ease suffering. As we continue this important work, the scope of our purview is widening to include a welcome consideration of well-being, not just as the absence of pathology, but as a state of physical and mental health (Wood & Tarrier, 2010). This same history is clear in the parenting domain, specifically, as we have typically sought to identify parenting behaviors and styles associated with child psychopathology. Recently, scholarship has begun to feature a focus on child well-being, including gratitude and positive affect, as worth of attention, and the ways that parents might raise happy, grateful, well-adjusted youth (e.g., Newland, 2015). However, so many important questions remain unanswered, with research that continues to be limited by its reliance on primarily White samples, self-report measures, and cross-sectional data. The proposed symposium answers the call for “cultivating joy” by exploring how positive parenting supports well-being and reduces suffering in youth samples diverse in age (i.e., infancy, early childhood, adolescence), race/culture, and socio-economic status, and with rigorous methodologies suited to the questions being asked (i.e., observational, qualitative, and longitudinal data as well as data from a clinical trial).
The first paper explores how first-time, lower income mothers’ positive affect and interactiveness during a play observation with infants 4-6 months of age relates to infant positive emotionality at 10-12 months of age. The second paper considers how parent dispositional mindfulness impacts parent acquisition and maintenance of skills in a behavior parent training program targeting families of low-income children with behavior disorders. The third paper investigates the associations between parent emotion socialization responses to youth happiness and sadness and adolescent life satisfaction and depression, as explained by gratitude and perceived stress, in primarily Latinx, urban youth. Finally, the fourth paper presents the process of gathering qualitative data from parents to modify a parent-mediated program for 4- to 6-year-olds that harnesses parent mindfulness and emotion socialization to encourage youth empathic joy.
Our discussant will consider how these studies move the field forward by considering supportive parenting and parent dispositional mindfulness as they relate to youth well-being and distress. Implications for intervention, including data from the fourth paper, will be considered, as will additional approaches to incorporating CBT into work that is evidence-based and inclusive of minoritized populations.