Session: Promoting Optimal Parenting for Positive Youth Outcomes (Society for Prevention Research 26th Annual Meeting)

This symposium presents a series of papers discussing the protective role of positive parenting and deleterious effects of negative parenting on youth outcomes. The papers consider influential factors across genetic, physiological, and behavioral levels of analysis.

Across all three papers, results support the protective role that optimal parenting plays and/or deleterious effects of negative parenting on youth outcomes and point to important parenting-focused intervention targets to promote youth outcomes. Paper 1, which examines the impact of early poverty and caregiving quality on later adolescent DNA methylation, demonstrates that secure attachment can buffer the influence of poverty on epigenetic aging in adolescents. These findings suggest that interventions promoting parenting capabilities, specifically secure attachment, for children living in poverty may offset the deleterious effects of poverty. Paper 2, which examines two physiological indices of emotional reactivity in response to parent-child conflict as a predictor of reactive aggression demonstrates the mediational role that parental response to emotion plays in the link between physiological measures of adolescent emotional reactivity and reactive aggression. Thus, parental response to emotion may be a particularly important intervention target to prevent reactive aggression from occurring in youth with elevated emotional reactivity in conflict situations. Finally, findings from paper 3, which examines the transactional nature of relationships among parental involvement in education, child ADHD symptoms, and child academic achievement, demonstrate that early school age parent involvement and achievement are both linked to lower ADHD symptoms at age 9 and early school age PI is also associated with higher achievement at age 9. These findings highlight the potentially protective role that early PI may play in promoting academic and behavioral functioning, such that interventions aimed to increase high quality PI for children at elevated risk for ADHD symptoms may be useful in promoting more optimal academic and behavioral functioning.