Effects of a Parenting Prevention Program on Parental Emotion Socialization for Military Families: Experiential Avoidance As a Moderator

Introduction: About 2 million US children are living with a parent who has been deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan. Children of a deployed parent have reported elevated anxiety compared to community norms (Lester et al., 2010), suggesting an urgent need for preventive efforts targeting child emotional problems. One promising approach is parental socialization of children’s emotion, known to be associated with children’s social-emotional competence (e.g. Morris et al., 2007; Spinrad et al., 2007). It is hypothesized that parenting programs that intervene parental emotion socialization (ES) may show differential outcomes depending upon parents’ own emotional functioning. In fact, military fathers’ experiential avoidance (i.e., the unwillingness to be in touch with one’s negative emotions) has been found to be associated with more withdrawal and distress avoidance with their children and spouses (Brockman et al., 2016). The current study investigates the effectiveness of a parenting program designed for military families (After Deployment: Adaptive Parenting Tools; ADAPT) in parental ES. Further, the moderating effects of parental experiential avoidance (EA) at pre-intervention for the intervention effects are tested.

Methods: Secondary data from a randomized control trial of the ADAPT program were used in the current study. The sample included 336 families (N = 608 parents; primarily White and middle class) with at least one deployed parent and one target child aged 4-12. Parental ES was self-reported using the Coping with Children’s Negative Emotions Scale (CCNES) at pre-intervention and 6-month post-intervention. Experiential avoidance was self-reported at pre-intervention using the Acceptance and Action Questionnaire (AAQ). Structural equation modeling was used to test the intent-to-treat effects on mothers’ and fathers’ ES at 6-months post-intervention, controlling for ES and family demographics at pre-intervention.

Results: ES was specified as two latent variables: supportive ES (emotion-focused, problem-focused, and expressive encouragement subscales) and unsupportive ES (punitive, distress, and minimization subscales). Structural equation models for mothers and fathers demonstrated good model fit. Results showed that the intervention had a significant direct effect on mothers’ unsupportive ES (β = -0.29, p < .001) and mothers’ supportive ES (β = 0.14, p < 0.05). Moreover, the intervention interacted with pre-intervention EA to predict mothers’ supportive ES at 6-month (β = 0.20, p= .001), such that mothers’ with higher EA showed larger intervention-related gains in supportive ES. No direct or moderated intervention effects were detected for fathers.

Conclusions: This study provided evidence for the effectiveness of ADAPT on improving mothers’ ES and the role of experiential avoidance as a moderator of the intervention among post-deployed families.