Emotion Regulation Difficulties in Military Fathers Magnify Their Benefit from a Parenting Program

Introduction: Deployment to combat zones and exposure to war-related trauma can be highly stressful to service members. The stress persists during the reintegration period, and may present substantial challenges to their parenting behaviors aiming to socialize children’s emotion-related functioning—emotion socialization related parenting behaviors (ESRBs). Military parents may react to emotionally charged situations by becoming emotionally unavailable and withdrawn, which may diminish their capacity to respond constructively to children’s emotions. As a core internal process underlying various psychopathologies, emotion regulation (ER) is central to ESRBs. To improve emotion regulation and parenting behaviors, After Deployment Adaptive Parenting Tools (ADAPT) was developed as a preventive intervention program for military families. While there is evidence supporting the effectiveness of the program, little is known about the role of parental ER on the intervention effects. The current study examined 1) whether the ADAPT program improved fathers’ ESRBs at 1-year post-baseline (T3); 2) whether baseline ESRBs moderated the intervention effects on ESRBs at T3; 3) whether ER moderated and/or mediated the effects on ESRBs; and 4) whether the mediation effects were conditional on baseline ER.

Methods: The sample included 181 fathers (M age = 37.76, SD = 6.42) who had been deployed to recent conflicts and had at least one 4-12-year-old child. The difficulties in emotion regulation scale (DERS) was used to measure ER difficulties at baseline and T3. Family interaction tasks were observed and rated using the Macro-Level Family Interaction Coding Systems to assess ESRBs at baseline and T3, which yielded four categories: positive engagement, withdrawal avoidance, reactivity-coercion, and distress avoidance. All analyses were conducted in Mplus 8 controlling for parent age, SES, and deployment related variables.

Results: We did not find significant intent-to-treat effects on ERSBs at T3, but fathers with greater levels of ER difficulties at baseline showed significantly reduced observed reactivity-coercion and distress avoidance in the intervention versus control group. Fathers’ baseline ERSBs were not found to moderate the intervention effects. Moreover, fathers’ ER difficulties at T3 mediated the ITT effect on reactivity-coercion at T3, and the mediation effect was moderated by baseline ER difficulties. For fathers with greater ER difficulties at baseline, the intervention significantly decreased their reactivity-coercion through reductions in their ER difficulties.

Conclusions: This study highlighted the role of emotion regulation as a key mechanism and provided a deeper understanding about how and for whom a parenting intervention works among deployed fathers.