by Matthew Smith
August means back-to-school time for students across the country.
That means new classrooms, classmates and schedules.
All of that unknown means that stressors pile up fast for children in unfamiliar situations. A publication led by an University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Social Work associate professor details how youth stress can affect their parents.
Melissa Lippold and her team of researchers published “Youth daily stressors predict their parents’ well-being” in Nature’s June edition of Communications Psychology. The paper shared insights into how youth stressors cross over and can affect their parents’ mental and physiological well-being.
“We often think about how parents affect their childrens’ well-being, but this study shows evidence that child experiences and stressors can also affect parents’ well-being,” Lippold said. “When their children experience stress, parents are affected emotionally and physiologically, too. In our study, on days their children experienced stress their parents also experienced negative emotions, physical symptoms, and changes to their stress-related physiology.”
While extensive research has been done into how stress between marital partners affects one another and how parental stress affects children, Lippold’s team felt more research was needed into the child-to-parent stress dynamic.
The team proposed two hypotheses: parents will experience lower well-being on days when their youth experience stressors and that parents with youth who experience higher number of stressor days will have a lower average level of well-being overall.
Study methods
To test their hypotheses the team tracked a mix of daily diary entries and saliva samples from 318 youth-parent pairs over eight days. The youth ranged from 9 to 17-years old.
Adolescents in the study reported on their stressful experiences every day for eight days — including all types of stressors, stressors with the focal parent (parent involved in the study), stressors with other family members, and stressors outside of the family.
Parents detailed information about their daily emotions while providing saliva samples over four days of the study to test cortisol levels — a hormone used to assess the functioning of physiological stress-response systems. Parents also shared physical symptoms, including any headaches, their overall energy level, and other discomforts.
Study findings
The study’s results did find an association between youth stress and parental well-being.
Overall, the study found that on days when youth experienced a stressor, their parents experienced lower well-being, including greater negative affect (feelings and emotions), more physical symptoms (headaches, fatigue and stomach problems), and higher bedtime cortisol levels compared to days when youth had no stressors. This link was found across all stressors, including those with a focal parent, those with additional family members, and those outside of the family.
The study also found that stressors played a role on parental physical and mental health over time, even when controlled for parents’ own stress. Parents reported poorer next-day physical health and more negative affect on days following reports of youth stressors. The findings highlight how the effects of youth stressors on parents can linger, enhancing their impact and prolonging parental recovery time.
Translating findings
The study provides interesting findings for researchers, including confirming that youth stressors can and do cross over to affect parent well-being.
“When youth experience stressors, not only does it affect their own mood and physiology, it also affects the well-being of their parents,” the study finds.
Interventions may be able to help parents learn to be present to support their children in ways that don’t have negative implications for parents’ own health.
— Melissa Lippold, UNC School of Social Work associate professor
Knowing this crossover exists may lead to more studies, the team said, including investigations into how youth stress affects effective parenting behaviors and long-term parental health outcomes.
If the crossover effect leads to higher health risks for parents — or ineffective parenting behaviors — that could have negative implications for parents and children.
It’s not all bad, however, as the study mentions that higher parental responsivity and attunement may be a cause for the crossover effect, which can lead to positive effects for youth.
“We are very interested in understanding how child stress affects parents’ physical health over time and how interventions may help parents experience less emotional and physiological reactivity to child stress over time,” Lippold said. “Interventions may be able to help parents learn to be present to support their children in ways that don’t have negative implications for parents’ own health.”
Lippold’s research team included investigators from the University of Wisconsin at Madison, the University of Georgia, and Pennsylvania State University.
Read more in Communications Psychology.
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