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Parental Distress Tolerance in Three Periods of Child Development: The Moderating Role of Child Temperament

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Abstract

Emotion regulation (ER) is essential to everyday, normative functioning. One aspect of ER is distress tolerance—the ability to persist in goal-directed activities when experiencing aversive states. Despite an assumption that ER improves with age, very little is known about ER across parenthood. Emotion regulation may be taxed by parenthood with implications for negativity in the family environment. The purpose of the current study was to describe levels of distress tolerance across periods of parenthood and to evaluate child temperament as a moderator of the relationship between child’s age and parents’ distress tolerance. A total of 602 parents (66.3% female, M age   = 32.31 years, SD = 7.07) whose eldest child belonged to one of three developmental periods (i.e., infancy, n = 187; early childhood, n = 214; late childhood, n = 201) completed an online survey. While we found no evidence for a main effect of child’s age on parent distress tolerance, children’s negative affectivity moderated the association between period of parenthood and parent distress tolerance. Specifically, children who were higher in negative affectivity had parents who reported less distress tolerance between the developmental periods. The implications of the current study are discussed in the context of current and future research on emotional regulation among parents.

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Author Contributions

A.M.: designed and executed the study, analyzed the data, and wrote the paper. J.C.: collaborated with the design of the study and editing of the final manuscript. M.H.: collaborated with the design of the study and editing of the final manuscript.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology, San Francisco State University, 1600 Holloway Ave., San Francisco, CA, 94132, USA

    Alexandra E. Morford, Jeffrey T. Cookston & Melissa J. Hagan

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  1. Alexandra E. Morford
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  2. Jeffrey T. Cookston
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  3. Melissa J. Hagan
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Correspondence to Alexandra E. Morford.

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All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards.

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As stated in the Method section, informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study.

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Morford, A.E., Cookston, J.T. & Hagan, M.J. Parental Distress Tolerance in Three Periods of Child Development: The Moderating Role of Child Temperament. J Child Fam Stud 26, 3401–3411 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10826-017-0838-x

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