Abstract
Background
Talking about past experiences with parents is generally thought to promote positive psychological adjustment in children. Less is known about parent–child co-reminiscing when discussing past traumatic experiences, such as natural disasters, a unique type of shared trauma that can have long-lasting, and variable, psychological impacts on children and families.
Objective
The current study examined the association between qualities of parent–child co-reminiscing and children’s posttraumatic stress symptoms (PTSS) following exposure to a devastating tornado.
Method
Forty-nine children ages 8–12 years (49% female; 78% White/Non-Hispanic) and their mothers who experienced a category EF-5 tornado in May 2011 participated in this study and provided joint recollections about their tornado experiences approximately 14–18 months post-tornado. Children also provided individual recollections about their tornado-related experiences. Individual recollections were coded for negative and positive emotion words and parent–child conversations were coded for maternal acknowledgement of child generated content.
Results
Maternal acknowledgement moderated the link between children’s use of both positive and negative emotion words and child tornado-related PTSS, such that children’s use of both positive and negative emotion words was associated with higher levels of PTSS but only at lower levels of maternal acknowledgment.
Conclusions
Maternal acknowledgement of child expressions may be a protective factor for disaster-exposed children. Understanding how children and parents discuss trauma experiences, and how aspects of discussions are associated with youth mental health, may ultimately inform interventions to help children and parents communicate following disaster exposure in a way that promotes optimal growth and recovery.
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Notes
Additional parent conversation variables, such as minimizing and arguing, were also coded for in the current sample given their salience in the literature. However, these were not included in our study because they occurred at such a low frequency. For example, the mean for the maternal argue variable was 0.65. This low rate of these “non-supportive” co-reminiscing styles may be due to the younger age of the children in this sample than in other samples in which these constructs have been explored.
Note that research with disaster-exposed adolescents has found parent egocentrism when parents and adolescents jointly discuss their disaster experiences to be associated with higher levels of youth PTSS (Hendrickson et al. 2020). Egocentrism is a construct derived from the emotion socialization literature that reflects the extent to which a parent centers the conversation around their own experiences. Given the apparent importance of egocentrism for adolescent samples, we examined the moderating role of egocentrism in our younger sample (e.g., ages 8–12 years old) as well. However, egocentrism did not moderate the link between children’s use of negative/positive emotion words in their individual recollections and youth PTSS (B = −.14, p = .83 and B = −.38, p = .35, for negative and positive words respectively). Sample size limitations significantly decreased our ability to use the complex statistical model that was used in the Hendrickson et al. (2020) paper, which contained multiple parent–child talk variables in one model. Thus, we did not find this null finding, which differed in its analytic approach to the Hendrickson et al. (2020) finding, to be worth further discussion.
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Funding
This work was funded in part by the Pioneer Classes Dissertation Award administered by the University of Kansas (KU) Endowment Association on behalf of the KU Clinical Child Psychology Program, the Scott Mesh Honorary Scholarship for Research in Psychology, administered by the American Psychological Association of Graduate Students, the Doctoral Student Research Fund, administered by the KU Graduate School, and the Psychology Strategic Initiatives Research Grant, administered by the KU Psychology Department, all awarded to Dr. Hambrick.
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Abel, M.R., Hambrick, E.P. & Vernberg, E.M. Talking with Children About Natural Disasters: Maternal Acknowledgment, Child Emotion Talk, and Child Posttraumatic Stress Symptoms. Child Youth Care Forum 50, 947–968 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10566-021-09605-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10566-021-09605-5