The impact of parent mindfulness on family health and child psychosocial well-being

University Of Vermont & St Agric College, Burlington VT

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Abstract

? DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The proposed NRSA project will be part of a research training plan to prepare the PI for a career as a research scientist in a university or medical school setting, specializing in research on the influence parents have on family health and their children's health trajectory. Broadly, the proposed project aims to significantly advance our understanding of parental mindfulness and its influences on family systems and the causal role that parental mindfulness may play in child psychosocial development. The proposed NRSA will test a model (see Figure 1, below), based on work by Bogels and Restifo (2014), Dumas (2005), Duncan et al (2009), and Kabat-Zinn (1997), which posits that higher levels of parental mindfulness facilitate positive child psychosocial development through three interrelated paths: (1) Increases in parental well-being (e.g., self-nourishing attention, reductions in anxiety and depressive symptoms, and/or reductions in parenting stress); (2) improvements in inter-parental relationship quality (e.g., increases in relationship satisfaction, increases in co-parenting support, and decreases in co-parenting conflict), and 3) increases in adaptive parenting (e.g., reductions in parental reactivity within parent-child interactions, and increases in positive and decreases in negative parenting), either directly or indirectly through enhanced parental well-being and/or inter-parental relationship quality. The current proposal represents an important innovative extension by examining this theoretical model across six longitudinal samples of families (N = 1,080), across three different child development stages, and among both clinical parent and child populations as well as with community samples. Such a multi-study longitudinal approach greatly enhances both the breadth and confidence in findings as well as the broad scale generalizability of findings to families and children. Research on the longitudinal influence of parental dispositional mindfulness on family health and child psychosocial well-being will inform the development of mindfulness-based programs for families and children across diverse contexts.