Effects of a Mindfulness-Based Family Intervention On Adolescent Report of Parent Emotional Awareness

Adolescence is an emotionally charged period of life and youth experience a greater variety and intensity of emotions than when they were younger.  Many changes in adolescent emotional experiences connect to family-life as adolescents and their parents often experience declines in closeness and increases in intensity of affect and conflict. These emotional interactions may escalate and become mutually reinforcing, contributing to increases in feelings of interpersonal strain, disconnection, and problem behavior.  Parents may begin to avoid these challenging moments which can contribute to further escalation of problems.  How parents manage these intense emotional interactions and help socialize their adolescent’s positive and negative emotion expressions can influence the quality of parent-youth relationships and level of youth’s problems and well-being.  Parent’s awareness and acceptance of their child’s emotions and parental coaching of emotions have been associated with more positive development. Similarly, recent models of mindfulness in parenting have proposed that parent’s awareness and non-judgmental acceptance of youth emotions are an important aspect of parenting and these skills can be taught in mindfulness-based programs for parents and youth.  

This paper presents findings from the Strengthening Pennsylvania’s Families trial which compared the efficacy of the Strengthening Families Program: For Parents and Youth 10-14 (SFP) to a mindfulness-based adaptation (MSFP) and a home-study (HS) condition. SFP is delivered in seven two-hour sessions delivered weekly and attended by parents and youth.  Mindfulness modifications were made to parent training sessions.  Three hundred fifty eight families of 6^th and 7^th grade youth from four communities were randomly assigned to one of the three conditions.  During pre and post-intervention assessments, youth reported on their mother’s and father’s emotional awareness (e.g., “My mom/dad understands when I am upset, even without me having to tell him/her can tell when I am”) and acceptance (e.g., “My mother/father allows me to express my emotions even if it seems to make her/him uncomfortable”).  Effect sizes were computed to compare pre-post scores across conditions. Youth from MSFP reported significantly more positive change on mother’s emotional awareness compared to HS (.33) SFP (.21) and father’s emotional awareness compared to HS (.68) SFP (.49).  MSFP youth also reported greater positive change in mother’s emotional acceptance compared to HS (.28) SFP (.27) and father’s emotional acceptance compared to HS (.49) SFP (.39).  The presentation will describe the intervention activities, and these results, explore potential moderators of these effects and discuss implications for prevention science.