Under pressure: How caregivers’ experience and management of daily distress impacts parenting practices and youth mental health

Significant attention has been paid to the youth mental health crisis; however, parent mental health is less often discussed. Given the direct links between parent and youth mental health and growing evidence that parents are under unprecedented stress (Surgeon General’s Report, 2024), understanding how parents experience and manage daily stressors—and how this impacts parenting practices and subsequent child well-being—is critical. Accommodation, or any behavior a loved one engages in with the hopes of reducing symptom-related distress or impairment in functioning, is one parenting practice that may be particularly relevant in understanding how parent distress impacts youth symptoms. This study sought to explore the relationships between caregiver distress and experience of distress with accommodation and youth anxiety and depression symptoms, in a sample of 207 treatment-seeking and 58 nonclinical youth (ages 9-18) and their caregivers (NTotal = 265). Pathway models were conducted to examine caregiver psychological distress, distress tolerance, and experiential avoidance in predicting youth symptom severity, mediated by accommodation. Results suggest that caregiver psychological distress and experiential avoidance, but not distress tolerance, predicted youth symptoms and that these relationships were partially mediated by accommodation. This underscores the impact of parent distress on parenting practices in the development and maintenance of youth anxiety and depression and sheds light on potential avenues for enhancing prevention and treatment efforts for both parents and youth.