The relationships of child and parent factors with children's anxiety symptoms: Parental anxious rearing as a mediator
Highlights
► Child and parent factors contribute to child anxiety symptoms. ► We examine numerous child and parent factors as correlates and predictors of child anxiety. ► Child neuroticism, cognitive bias and pubertal status were associated with higher child anxiety. ► Maternal anxiety and anxious/overprotective parenting were linked to higher child anxiety. ► Maternal anxious parenting and child neuroticism were unique predictors of child anxiety.
Section snippets
Threat-based cognitive bias
Cognitive theories of anxiety disorders emphasise that anxious individuals are more likely to interpret ambiguous and mildly threatening stimuli as overly dangerous and threatening compared with non-anxious peers (e.g., Mogg & Bradley, 1998). Several studies highlight that threat interpretation bias is a cognitive correlate of childhood anxiety using homograph tasks (Hadwin et al., 1997, Taghavi et al., 2000) and ambiguous vignette paradigms (Bögels et al., 2003, Bögels and Zigterman, 2000,
Maternal anxiety
All major models of childhood anxiety disorders emphasise the critical role of parents in the origins and maintenance of anxiety disorders in children (e.g., Rapee, 2002; Rapee & Spence, 2004). Parental anxiety is a significant risk factor for child anxiety, given the higher than expected incidence rates of anxiety in parents of anxious children, compared to the general population (Last et al., 1987, Last et al., 1991). Although paternal and maternal anxiety appear to confer risk equally for
The present study
Overall, the current study extended the existing literature by examining well-established child and parent variables that have been found to play a role in the development and/or maintenance of child anxiety, but have rarely been examined in a single study. As described in multiple theories and models of the development of anxiety disorders (see McClure and Pine, 2006, Murray et al., 2009, Rapee et al., 2009 for reviews), we expected that parent factors (i.e., maternal anxiety and maternal
Participants
Participants were 85 children between 7 and 12 years of age (M age = 10.43; SD = 1.41). Of these, 49 were recruited from a local primary school (25 boys; 24 girls) and 36 were recruited when they made contact with an anxiety disorders treatment programme (16 males; 20 females). Fifteen percent had a principal diagnosis (i.e., most severe) of generalised anxiety disorder, 17.8% had a specific phobia, 8% had social phobia, 2.2% had separation anxiety disorder, and 57% had no psychiatric diagnoses.
Associations between study measures
Pearson correlations were estimated to examine bivariate relationships of children's anxiety symptoms with all other measures. As can be seen in Table 1, mothers’ anxious rearing (r = 57, p < .001) and overprotection (r = .27, p < .05), but not emotional involvement or rejection, were significantly associated with children's reports of their anxiety symptoms. More specifically, when mothers were more anxious and overprotective in their rearing, children had more anxiety symptoms. Moreover, as expected,
Discussion
The first aim of this study was to examine the extent to which child and parent factors are uniquely associated with child anxiety symptoms. The second goal was to determine whether associations of child factors (which included child neuroticism and cognitive bias) with child anxiety were indirect via maternal rearing behaviour. The participants were a large sample of children with varying levels of anxiety, including those with diagnosed anxiety disorders. Data were collected from both
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2016, Psychiatry ResearchCitation Excerpt :Parenting styles that are characterized by low warmth and high rejection and control have also been found among anxiety disordered child populations (Waters et al., 2013). Mothers’ anxious rearing has also been found to be associated with anxiety symptoms in children (Waters et al., 2012). Further, in a study of children aged 8–14 by Barrett et al. (2002), parents of children with OCD (n=18) were less likely to engage in positive behavior during interactions with their child than parents of control children, anxious children, and children with externalizing problems.
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2015, Journal of AdolescenceCitation Excerpt :Adolescents higher in depressive symptoms, relative to others, anticipated that they would rely less on support seeking, while those higher in social anxiety tended to anticipate they would rely more on support seeking. Although this differing pattern of correlations was not anticipated, it is consistent with some evidence that anxious children and adolescents can exhibit signs of dependence on the support and protection of others, whereas depressed youth are more likely to be hesitant to ask for support and assistance (Epkins & Heckler, 2011; Waters, Zimmer-Gembeck, & Farrell, 2012). Overall, this suggests that comorbid depression and social anxiety is particularly detrimental to youth when they need to cope with interpersonal stress.