title: Does Mindful Parenting Matter? Paths to Youth's Mindfulness, Self-Compassion, Adjustment, and Coping
Creators: name: Mera, Samira
Publisher: name: Griffith University
Year: 2024
Subjects: subject: mindfulness
subject: mindful parenting
subject: youth
subject: disposition

description: Youth, defined by the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare (2021) as a period from 12 to 24 years of age, can be a challenging time for both children and their parents. During this period, the family can face a number of new challenges and many children experience increased mental health problems as they transition from childhood to the teenage years (Costello et al., 2011; Moreira et al., 2018) and again through the emerging and early adulthood years (Costello et al., 2011; Duffy et al., 2019; Jones, 2013; Pedrelli et al., 2015). One remedy is to sustain good parent-youth relationships by being involved in children's lives, sharing positive activities, and monitoring behaviour while also being supportive of autonomy (Adams &amp; Laursen, 2007; Morris et al., 2007). Much of what is known about the role of parents in children and youth's functioning has followed from research investigating psychological theories that draw attention to family circumstances, parenting traits, parent-child relationships, and children's traits as important foundations for children's positive social and emotional adjustment and development (Collins et al., 2000; Maccoby, 1992; Morris et al., 2007; Steinberg, 1990). Most relevant here is the model of Morris et al. (2007) that describes in detail how parent-child relationships are important to children and youth's development of emotion regulation, which has been identified as one of a few well-studied and supported mediational developmental processes that explains why parenting has impact on children's social and emotional adjustment. Given the past support for the strong correlation between emotion regulation and mindfulness, whereby adolescents (Hambour et al., 2018) and adults (Kerin et al., 2020) who report better emotion regulation also report a higher level of dispositional mindfulness, the model by Morris et al. (2007) was the inspiration for a proposed Mindful Parenting Influence Model (MPIM), which has been developed and tested as part of this PhD research. In the MPIM, mindful parenting was proposed as a foundation for youth's positive emotional and social developmental outcomes, but emotional regulation in the original model was replaced with youth's trait of dispositional mindfulness, and the impact of mindful parenting on youth functioning was expected to be mediated via dispositional mindfulness. In addition, youth's self-compassion and interpersonal mindfulness were identified as two other possible mediators in the MPIM alongside youth's dispositional mindfulness. In this work, dispositional mindfulness was defined as being present, curious, and accepting of one's internal experiences, such as thoughts and feelings (Bishop et al., 2004), self-compassion was defined as being kind and understanding towards oneself during difficult times (Neff, 2003a, 2003b), and interpersonal mindfulness was defined as being present and non-judgemental of one's internal and external experiences when engaging with another person (Pratscher et al., 2019). As outcomes, this research focused on multiple aspects of youth's social and emotional adjustment (i.e., general well-being, social anxiety, friendship quality, prosocial behaviours, and conflict negotiation skills) along with youth's adaptive and maladaptive coping in response to academic and social stressors. More specifically, this PhD research had three primary aims: 1) to revise a youth-report of mindful parenting based on an existing parent-report of mindful parenting and assess its psychometric properties and to conduct a preliminary test of the MPIM; 2) to conduct a comprehensive test of the MPIM to examine the direct and indirect associations of youth's experience of mindful parenting in explaining their social and emotional adjustment via the above three mediators; and 3) to conduct a similar comprehensive test of the MPIM to assess the direct and indirect roles of mindful parenting in explaining youth's adaptive and maladaptive ways of coping with academic and social stressors via the same three mediators. [...]