A Longitudinal Cross-Lagged Study of the Role of Parental Self-Criticism, Dependency, Depression, and Parenting Stress in the Development of Child Negative Affectivity

Parental self-criticism and dependency, referring to maladaptive expressions of self-definition issues and relatedness, respectively, confer vulnerability to psychopathology in the transition to parenthood, in part through their association with stress generation. This prospective study is the first to study the intergenerational transmission of vulnerability to distress associated with these stress-generation effects from first-time parents to offspring. Mother- and father-reported data concerning parental self-criticism, dependency, depression, parenting stress and child negative affectivity (N = 121), measured when their child was in infancy and again 1 year later, were analysed using multilevel structural equation modelling. Results showed that parenting stress partially mediated the relation between parents' self-criticism and child negative affectivity over time. Dependency, in contrast, did not show direct or indirect effects on child negative affectivity, and was characterized by small stress-generation effects. No child-to-parent effects were found. These findings shed new light on the intergenerational transmission of vulnerability to distress associated with both personality dimensions, with self-criticism having greater negative effects than dependency on vulnerability to distress in offspring.