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Our systematic review on parenting practices in childhood and adolescent internalizing symptoms is now out! It was a long haul, so thanks to @APEAL_Lab @MilaKingsbury @LindyRexie and team for their help and patience. Read it here (a brief summary follows): https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00127-020-01956-z
What do we know? Well, parenting has a huge impact on children's mental health and wellbeing, but the strength and quality of research that specifically looks at relationships between parenting in childhood and risk of depression and anxiety symptoms in adolescence is unclear.
After screening 4,558 studies, 19 were included in our review. Few of these studies demonstrated associations between parenting in childhood, and internalizing/depression/anxiety in adolescence. Our conclusion? Research in this area is inconsistent, and this topic is understudied
Major limitations of the included articles: half did not adjust for or examine important variables including parental psychopathology, baseline internalizing symptoms, SES, and child sex or gender; methods for examining parenting and adolescent outcomes also varied substantially.
Despite limitations in the existing evidence base, we do know that parenting remains an important area for both prevention and intervention efforts. This may be more relevant now than ever before, as parents navigate the COVID-19 pandemic and massive changes to their daily lives.
So... we need more research! And conveniently, @APEAL_Lab @MilaKingsbury and team did just that - in a recent paper, they found that parenting behaviours were predictive of a number of adolescent mental health and behavior problems. Read it here: https://doi.org/10.1177%2F0706743719889551
