ABSTRACT
Objectives: Research interest in mindfulness, the capacity for present-oriented, nonjudgmental attention and awareness, and its relation to parenting has been growing in recent years. However, factors facilitating the association between mindfulness and parenting are not yet well understood. In the present study, we examined whether parents' biased causal thinking about children's misbehaviors, i.e., parental attributions, may mediate the link between parents' dispositional mindfulness and parenting. Given that parents of children with clinically elevated mental health difficulties tend to report more biased parental attributions, we further examined whether the proposed mediation may differ across parents of children with and without clinical diagnoses or referrals for mental health difficulties. Methods: Parents (59.8% mothers) of 8- to 12-year-old children with (n = 157) and without (n = 99) clinical diagnoses or referrals for mental health difficulties participated in online surveys assessing their mindfulness, parental attributions, and negative parenting behaviors. Results: More mindful parents reported less negative parenting, with the link significantly mediated by less biased parent-directed attributions, but not child-directed attributions. The mediating effect via parent-directed attributions was significantly moderated by the child's clinical status: the effect was retained only for parents of children with clinical diagnoses or referrals for mental health difficulties. No significant moderation effect emerged for child-directed attributions. Conclusions: The results provide initial support for the links among parents' mindfulness, parental attributions, and parenting. The present findings suggest that parental mindfulness may be important for less biased parental attributions, with implications for parenting behaviors at least in the context of children's mental health disorders.
ABSTRACT
The present study used a newly developed simplified coding system, the Therapist Demand and Support Code, to examine specific therapist behaviors in the context of a previously conducted training trial on Deliberate Practice (DP). The parent trial randomized trainees to a DP workshop or its Traditional, more didactic counterpart (Westra et al., 2020). In both groups, trainees were taught to use Support, rather than Demand, for managing ambivalence and resistance, with the DP group having more feedback and practice. In this study, 68 trainees interviewed both an ambivalent community volunteer and an ambivalent simulator 4 month post workshop. The DP group was found to exhibit significantly fewer Demand behaviors than the Traditional group, with the latter also being significantly quicker to use Demand in the interviews. Moreover, the simulator evoked significantly greater Demand from therapists, regardless of the Training group, suggesting the simulators were more resistant. Although therapist use of Support was equal for community volunteers across training groups, Traditional workshop trainees decreased Support when interviewing the more resistant simulators, whereas DP trainees increased their Support with this same group. This is consistent with findings that DP trainees were more appropriately responsive, making fewer Demands following interviewee counterchange talk and using more Support at these times. These results provide some initial validation of the simplified therapist behavior coding system and offer further evidence for the benefits of DP workshop training for managing resistance. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).