The Gender Perspective on Parent-to-child Aggression: Gender and Gender-constellations

Parent-to-child aggressive behavior is a common risk factor for children's health. Gender is correlated also to the odds of using aggression and the odds of being a victim of aggression. Yet, only few studies have considered the constellation of perpetrator's and victim's gender as a factor of parental aggression. The current study addresses parent-to-child aggressive behavior while focusing on the constellation of perpetrator's and victim's gender (i.e., mother-daughter, mother-son, father-daughter, father-son). It utilizes a community sample of Israeli university students (N = 508), 78% of which are female, on average 25.67 years of age (SD = 8.29). The participants reported the incidence and frequency of verbal and physical aggressive behavior of their parents against them during the years of middle school. The results show gender and gender-constellation to be significantly correlated with parental aggression. Overall, sons were more likely to suffer both verbal and physical aggression from their parents than daughters were. Only paternal verbal and physical aggression was more common against daughters, and only maternal verbal and physical aggression was more common against sons. Parental verbal and physical aggression from both parents were more common against sons. For all types and forms of parental aggression, daughters reported higher frequencies. These results suggest that while parent's gender might predict their overall aggressive behavior, and child's gender might predict their overall odds to be victimized by parental aggression, gender-constellation might create gender-specific selective patterns of parental aggressive behavior. Thus, the theoretical contribution of this study is in emphasizing that gender-constellations have an explanatory value beyond gender alone. These findings might be valuable to assess the risk of daughters and sons to suffer parental aggression, and for practitioners to provide apt professional response.

Vicious cycle of emotional maltreatment and bullying perpetration/victimization among early adolescents: Depressive symptoms as a mediator

RATIONALE

Emotional maltreatment and bullying (including both bullying perpetration and bullying victimization) are two prevalent and highly related problems among children and adolescents worldwide. The adverse consequences of emotional maltreatment and bullying behoove researchers to identify their causal mechanisms.

OBJECTIVE

We examined the reciprocal relations between emotional maltreatment and bullying perpetration/victimization and whether depressive symptoms functioned as mediator of the relations, after separating within-person effects from between-person effects.

METHODS

A total of 4273 Chinese early adolescents (45.2% girls; M_age = 9.90 years, SD = 0.73) participated in a five-wave longitudinal study with 6-month intervals.

RESULTS

Results from random intercept cross-lagged panel modeling showed: (a) emotional maltreatment and bullying perpetration were bidirectionally related; (b) bullying victimization directly predicted emotional maltreatment, but not vice versa; (c) emotional maltreatment indirectly predicted bullying perpetration/victimization via depressive symptoms; and (d) bullying victimization indirectly predicted emotional maltreatment via depressive symptoms.

CONCLUSIONS

These findings provided evidence for bidirectional spillover effects in the family and peer domains, demonstrating that early adolescents may become trapped in a vicious cycle of negative relationships, directly or indirectly, via their depressive symptoms. To prevent a downward spiral, findings suggested that bullying interventions need to address family and peer relationships as well as individual psychological well-being simultaneously to be most effective.

Gender-Specific Differences in Corporal Punishment and Children's Perceptions of Their Mothers' and Fathers' Parenting

Corporal punishment is a widespread phenomenon and a common malformation of parenting. Gender is a core category of social order and family structure. Gender-specific differences in parenting and violent behavior have been studied for many years. Yet, relatively little is known about the impact of gender interactions on parent-to-child physical violence or the impact of such violence on children's perceptions of their parents' behavior. This study used data collected from 618 students in academic institutions in northern Israel to examine the relationship between different gender interactions (e.g., mother-daughter, mother-son, father-daughter, and father-son) and the frequency of corporal punishment experienced by the respondents when they were in elementary school (between the ages 6 and 12). This study also examined whether gender interactions influence the relationship between corporal punishment and respondents' perceptions of their parents' behavior, namely the perceived parenting the respondents received during childhood. Cross tabulations and repeated measures were used to analyze the data. Significantly fewer daughters (as compared with sons) experienced corporal punishment and significantly fewer daughters experienced corporal punishment from both parents. Corporal punishment had a significant negative impact on the perceived parent-child relationship. Violent parental behavior had a significantly stronger effect on the perception of the father-child relationship, as compared with the perception of the mother-child relationship, even when the mother was the violent parent. These findings point to the importance of gender interactions in research and psychosocial practice.

Disentangling Child-Specific and Family-Wide Processes Underlying Negative Mother-Child Transactions

The current study examines the transactional processes between maternal negativity and child disruptive behavior during early childhood, using a sibling comparison design. This design allows for a more sophisticated test of the behavioral training hypothesis than is possible when only one child per family is included in the analysis as it excludes two confounders (passive gene-environment correlation and family-wide environmental influence). Three hundred and ninety-seven families were visited on three occasions when the target child was 1.5, 3 and 4.5 years old (920 children, 51.5% female). The target child and up to three older siblings per family were included in data collection and analysis. Mothers and fathers reported on children's disruptive behavior and mothers reported on their negativity to children. Within-family cross-lag pathways, as well as a significant indirect effect through which children increased their own disruptive behavior via maternal negativity confirmed a behavioral training effect. Family level maternal negativity and sibling disruptive behavior showed high levels of stability over three to four years and no context effect for maternal negativity or sibling disruptive behavior was seen. The theoretical and clinical implications of these findings are discussed.

Parent-offspring transaction: Mechanisms and the value of within family designs

This article is part of a Special Issue "Parental Care". Parenting is best understood as a transactional process between parents and their offspring. Each responds to cues in the other, adapting their own behavior to that of their partner. One of the goals of parenting research in the past twenty years has been to untangle reciprocal processes between parents and children in order to specify what comes from the child (child effects) and what comes from the parent (parent effects). Child effects have been found to relate to genetic, pre and perinatal, family-wide, and child-specific environmental influences. Parent effects relate to stresses in the current context (e.g. financial strain, marital conflict), personality and ethnicity but also to adverse childhood experiences (e.g. parental mental health and substance abuse, poverty, divorce). Rodent models have allowed for the specification of biological mechanisms in parent and child effects, including neurobiological and genomic mechanisms, and of the causal role of environmental experience on outcomes for offspring through random assignment of offspring-mother groupings. One of the methods that have been developed in the human and animal models to differentiate between parent and child effects has been to study multiple offspring in the family. By holding the parent steady, and studying different offspring, we can examine the similarities and differences in how parents parent multiple offspring. Studies have distinguished between family average parenting, child-specific parenting and family-wide dispersion (the within family standard deviation). These different aspects of parenting have been differentially linked to offspring behavioral phenotypes.

The etiology of the association between child antisocial behavior and maternal negativity varies across aggressive and non-aggressive rule-breaking forms of antisocial behavior

There is a robust association between negative parenting and child antisocial behavior problems. However, the etiology of this association remains unclear. Extant literature has reported strikingly different conclusions across studies, with some highlighting genetic mediation and others highlighting environmental mediation. One possible reason for these discrepancies across studies may be the failure to differentiate between aggressive and non-aggressive (rule-breaking) dimensions of childhood antisocial behavior, given their notably different etiologies and developmental trajectories (Burt 2012). The current study sought to examine the phenotypic and etiologic associations of maternal negativity with aggressive and rule-breaking antisocial behavior, respectively. Participants included 824 mothers and their twin children between the ages of 6 and 10. Our results highlighted clear etiologic distinctions in the associations of aggression and rule-breaking with maternal negativity. Aggression was associated with maternal negativity via both genetic and environmental factors, whereas the association between non-aggressive rule-breaking and maternal negativity was entirely environmental in origin. These findings provide additional support for the presence of meaningful distinctions between aggressive and non-aggressive forms of antisocial behavior, and highlight the complex relationship between parenting and child outcome.

Maternal overreactive sympathetic nervous system responses to repeated infant crying predicts risk for impulsive harsh discipline of infants

Physiological reactivity to repeated infant crying was examined as a predictor of risk for harsh discipline use with 12-month-olds in a longitudinal study with 48 low-income mother-infant dyads. Physiological reactivity was measured while mothers listened to three blocks of infant cry sounds in a standard cry paradigm when their infants were 3 months old. Signs of harsh discipline use were observed during two tasks during a home visit when the infants were 12 months old. Mothers showing signs of harsh discipline (n = 10) with their 12-month-olds were compared to mothers who did not (n = 38) on their sympathetic (skin conductance levels [SCL]) and parasympathetic (respiratory sinus arrhythmia) reactivity to the cry sounds. Results showed a significant interaction effect for sympathetic reactivity only. Mean SCL of harsh-risk mothers showed a significant different response pattern from baseline to crying and onward into the recovery, suggesting that mean SCL of mothers who showed signs of harsh discipline continued to rise across the repeated bouts of cry sounds while, after an initial increase, mean SCL level of the other mothers showed a steady decline. We suggest that harsh parenting is reflected in physiological overreactivity to negative infant signals and discuss our findings from a polyvagal perspective.