More Deficit, More Benefit: Emotion Regulation As a Moderator of the Effects of a Military Parenting Program on Distress Avoidance for Male Service Members

Introduction: Military service members deployed to conflict zones face substantial challenges due to war-related trauma exposure. They may exhibit elevated levels of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and other mental health disorders. Exposure to traumatic events and subsequent PTSD symptoms, especially experiential avoidance, may impair parents’ interactions with their children. Military parents may react to emotionally charged situations by becoming emotionally unavailable and withdrawn, which may diminish their capacity to respond constructively to children’s strong emotions. Therefore, emotion regulation in family interactions is key for effective parenting, and particularly salient for military families in which a parent may have emotion dysregulation and experiential avoidance due to deployment. After Deployment, Adaptive Parenting Tools (ADAPT) is a parenting program tailored to the specific needs of military families, and it aims to improve parents’ emotion regulation and enhance effective parenting practices. Although previous studies have addressed the essential role of emotion regulation in parenting practices, little research has examined how parents’ emotion regulation might boost or lessen their benefit from parenting programs. The current study aims to investigate the moderating role of emotion regulation on effectiveness of a parenting program at 12 months post-baseline on fathers’ capacity to effectively respond to their children’s difficult emotions (i.e., fathers’ distress avoidance).

Methods: This study used a subset of data from a randomized controlled trial of ADAPT, which included 181 fathers in 2-parent families who had been deployed to OIF/OEF/OND conflicts. The difficulties in emotion regulation scale (Gratz & Roemer, 2004) was used to measure deficits in emotion regulation. Three family interactions tasks were observed and rated using the Macro-Level Family Interaction Coding Systems (Snyder, 2013) to assess observed distress avoidance in parent-child interactions. Parent age, SES, PTSD symptoms, and deployment months were controlled in the analysis.

Results: The intervention did not directly improve father’s observed distress avoidance relative to the control group (i.e., no main effects were found). However, the intervention did significantly reduce observed distress avoidance among fathers with above-average self-reported difficulties in emotion regulation at baseline (b = -.42, p < .01).

Conclusion: The intervention has its most benefits on fathers’ parenting by reducing distress avoidance for fathers with more emotion regulation problems. Our findings on the moderating effect of emotion regulation on the parenting program for military families may have important implications for personalized prevention intervention.