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April 24, 2020
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Parents may transmit suppressed stress to children

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Sara F. Waters

Parents who suppress feelings of stress around their children may increase their children’s stress, according to study findings published in Journal of Family Psychology.

“We set out to determine whether parents transmitted their physiological stress to their children and whether suppressing their emotion while interacting with their children actually increased that stress transmission,” Sara F. Waters, PhD, assistant professor in the department of human development at Washington State University Vancouver, told Healio Psychiatry. “This is, of course, the opposite of what we as parents are hoping to do when we hide our negative emotions from our children, and this study can help parents think about better ways to manage their emotions around their children. Even very young children are more sensitive to parental emotional states than we might assume. In other published studies, we have found that mothers transmit their physiological stress to their 12-month-olds.”

Prior studies have reported the importance of shared affective states for healthy early development because children learn self-regulation skills, in part, through behavioral and affective synchronization with adult caregivers. In the current study, Waters and colleagues examined associations between parental acute stress responses and potential stress transmission among their children, who were aged 7 to 11 years, as well as how parental emotional suppression might affect parents’ and children’s physiological behavior and responses.

The researchers recruited 107 parent-child dyads and separated the parents and children. They then asked each parent to perform a stressful activity, such as public speaking, to activate the physiological stress response system. Before parents were reunited with their children, the researchers randomly assigned them to either suppress their affective state (ie, hide their emotions from their child) or to serve as controls and act naturally. Upon reuniting, parents and children engaged in a conversation about the topic that ranked highest on a “conflict list” of five topics that generated conflict between parent and child. The researchers filmed the interactions, and third-party viewers who did not know which parents were in which group scored them. Body sensors measured participants’ sympathetic nervous system responses.

infographic showing stressed parent with head in hands, and three key findings from the study
Data reference: Waters S, et al. J Fam Psychol. 2020;doi:10.1037/fam0000664.

Results showed three key associations:

  • suppressing mothers’ sympathetic nervous system responses influenced these responses in their children;
  • suppressing fathers’ sympathetic nervous system responses were influenced by these responses in their children; and
  • dyads with suppressing parents appeared less engaged and less warm during interaction compared with control dyads.

“I was really glad that we included both mother-child pairs and father-child pairs,” Waters told Healio Psychiatry. “The majority of parenting research only includes mothers, which leads to the assumption that what we find applies to fathers, too. Our study showed that the effects of suppression on parent and child physiology were different for fathers than for mothers. Fathers are important for child development and we do not yet know all the ways in which fathers differ from mothers, so we need to include fathers in research much more.”

Waters also noted that significant stressors, like the COVID-19 pandemic, provide important opportunities for caregivers to model healthy stress coping strategies.

“If caregivers are feeling stressed out about something big, like the pandemic, then odds are our children are experiencing some stress about it, too,” Waters said. “Be honest with them about the situation without sharing more information than is needed. Acknowledge to them that you are stressed and then show them what you do to help yourself feel calmer and better. This makes you a role model of emotional resilience for your children and allows you to work together with your child to come up with methods to help them feel better, too.” – by Joe Gramigna

Disclosures: Healio Psychiatry could not confirm relevant financial disclosures at time of reporting.